Next day she sat to him after lunch until it grew dark; in the rests, they exchanged some insignificant words while he went on painting the background or washed his brushes.
“There,” he said, putting down the palette and tidying up his paint-box. “That will do for today.”
She came to look at the picture.
“The black is good, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think it is very effective.”
He looked at his watch:
“It is almost time to go out and get something to eat—shall we dine together?”
“All right. Will you wait for me while I put on my things?”
A moment later when he knocked at her door she was ready, standing before the glass to fasten her hat.
[263]
How good looking she was, he thought, when she turned round. Slim and fair in her tight-fitting steel-grey dress, she looked very ladylike—discreet, cold, and stylish. What he had thought of her yesterday seemed quite impossible today.
“Did you not promise to go to Miss Schulin this afternoon to see her paintings?”
“Yes, but I am not going.” She blushed. “Honestly I don’t care to encourage an acquaintance with her, and I suppose there is not much in her paintings either.”
“I should not think so. I cannot understand your putting up with her advances last night. Personally, I would rather do anything—eat a plateful of live worms.”
Jenny smiled, and said seriously:
“Poor thing, I daresay she is not happy at all.”
“Pooh! not happy. I met her in Paris in 1905. I don’t think she is perverse by nature—only stupid and full of vanity. It was all put on. If it were the fashion now to be virtuous she would sit up darning children’s stockings, and would have been the best of housewives. Possibly painting roses with dewdrops on as a recreation. But once she got away from her moorings she wanted to see life—free as an artist, she thought she ought to get herself a lover for the sake of her self-respect. But unfortunately she got hold of a duffer who was old-fashioned enough to want her to marry him in the old non-modern way when things had gone wrong, and expected her to look after the child and the house.”
“It may be Paulsen’s fault that she ran away—you never know.”
“Of course it was his fault. He was of the old school, wanting happiness in his home, and he gave her probably too little love and still less cudgelling.”
Jenny smiled sadly:
“I know, Gunnar, that you believe life’s difficulties are easily solved.”
[264]
Heggen sat down astride on a chair with his arms on the back.
“There is so much of life that we don’t know anything about, that what we know is easy enough to manage. Have to make your aims and dreams accordingly, and tackle the unexpected as best you can.”
Jenny sat down in the sofa, resting her head in her hands:
“I can no longer feel that there is anything in life I am so sure about that I could make it a foundation for my judgment or the aim of my exertions,” she said placidly.
“I don’t think you mean it.”
She only smiled.
“Not always,” said Gunnar.
“I suppose there is nobody who means the same thing always.”
“Yes, always when one is sober. You were right last night in saying that sometimes one isn’t sober even if one hasn’t been drinking.”
“At present—when I am sober once in a while, I——” She broke off and remained silent.
“You know what I think about life, and I know you have always thought the same. What happens to you is, on the whole, the result of your own will. As a rule, you are the maker of your own fate. Now and then there are circumstances which you cannot master, but it is a colossal exaggeration to say it happens often.”
“God knows I did not will my fate, Gunnar. Yet I have willed for many years and lived accordingly, too.”
Both were quiet a moment.
“One day,” she said slowly, “I changed my course an instant. I found it so severe and hard to live the life I considered the most worthy—so lonely, you see. I left the road for a bit, wanting to be young and to play, and thus came into a current that carried me away, ending in something I[265] never for a second had thought could possibly happen to me.”
After a moment’s silence Heggen said:
“Rossetti says—and you know he is a much better poet than painter:
“‘Was that the landmark? What—the foolish well
Whose wave, low down, I did not stoop to drink
But sat and flung the pebbles from its brink
In sport to send its imaged skies pell-mell.
(And mine own image, had I noted well!)—
Was that my point of turning?—I had thought
The stations of my course should raise unsought,
As altarstone or ensigned citadel.
But lo! The path is missed, I must go back,
And thirst to drink when next I reach the spring
Which once I stained, which since may have grown black.
Yet though no light be left nor bird now sing
As here I turn, I’ll thank God, hastening,
That the same goal is still on the same track.’”
Jenny said nothing—and Gunnar repeated: “That the same goal is still on the same track.”
“Do you think it is easy to find the track to the goal again?” asked Jenny.
“No, but ought one not to try?” he said, almost in a childish way.
“But what goal did I have at all?” she said, with sudden vehemence. “I wanted to live in such a way that I need never be ashamed of myself either as a woman or as an artist. Never to do a thing I did not think right myself. I wanted to be upright, firm, and good, and never to have any one else’s sorrow on my conscience. And what was the origin of the wrong—the cause of it all? It was that I yearned for love without there being any particular man whose love I wanted. Was there anything strange in it, or that I wanted to believe that Helge, when he came, was the one I had been longing for—wanting[266] it so much that at last I really believed it? That was the beginning of what led to the rest. Gunnar, I did believe that I could make them happy—and yet I did only harm.”
She had risen and was pacing up and down the floor.
“Do you believe that the well you speak of will ever be pure and clear again to one who knows she has muddied it herself? Do you think it is easier for me to resign now? I longed for the same that all girls long for, and I long for it now, but I know that I have now a past which makes it impossible for me to accept the only happiness I care for. Pure, unspoilt, and sound it should be—but none of these conditions can I ever fulfil—not now. My experiences of these two last years are what I must be satisfied to call my life—and for the rest of it I shall just have to go on longing for the impossible.”
“Jenny,” said Gunnar, “I am sure I am right in saying again that it depends on yourself if these memories are going to spoil your life, or if you will consider them a lesson, however hard it may be, and still believe that the aim you once set for yourself is the only right one for you.”
“But can you not see it is impossible? It has sunk too deep; it has eaten into me like a corrosive acid, and I feel that what was once my inmost self is crumbling to pieces. Yet I don’t want it—I don’t want it. Sometimes I am inclined to—I don’t know really what—to stop all the thoughts at once. Either to die—or to live a mad, awful life—drown in a misery still greater than the present one. To go down in the mud so deep and so thoroughly that nothing but the end will come of it. Or”—she spoke low, with a wild, stifled voice—“to throw myself under a train—to know in the last second that now—just now—my whole body, nerves, heart, and brain will be made into one single shivering blood-st............