Gunnar walked along the narrow road, overgrown with grass, between the high, whitewashed garden walls. On the one side lay the barracks, probably with a terrace, as high up over his head some soldiers were laughing and talking. A tuft of yellow flowers, growing in a cleft of the wall, hung swaying. On the other side of the road the huge old poplars by the Cestius pyramid and the cypress grove in the new part of the cemetery stretched their tops towards the blue and silver clouded sky. Outside the grated gate a girl sat crocheting. She opened to him, curtseying to thank him for the coin he gave her.
The spring air was mild and damp; in the closed green shade of the churchyard it became wet and warm as in a hothouse, and the narcissus along the border of the path gave out a hot, sickly scent.
The old cypresses stood round the graves that lay, green and dark with creepers and violets, set in terraces from the ivy-clad[295] wall of the town. Above the flowers rose the monuments of the dead, little marble temples, white figures of angels, and big, heavy slabs of stone. Moss grew on them and on the trunks of the cypresses. Here and there a white or red flower still clung to the camelia trees, but most of them lay brown and faded on the black earth, exhaling raw, damp fumes. He remembered something he had read: the Japanese did not like camelias because they fell off whole and fresh like heads chopped off.
Jenny Winge lay buried at the farthest end of the cemetery near the chapel on a grassy slope, covered with daisies. There were only a few graves. On the border of the slope cypresses had been planted, but they were still very small, like toy trees with their pointed green tops on straight brown trunks, reminding one of the pillars in a cloister arcade. Her grave was a little way from the others; it was only a pale grey mound of earth, the grass round it having been trodden down when it was being dug. The sun shone on it and the dark cypresses formed a wall behind it.
Covering his face with his hands, Gunnar bent on his knees until his head rested on the faded wreaths.
The weariness of spring weighted his limbs, the blood flowed aching with sorrow and regret at every beat of his heavy heart.
Jenny—Jenny—Jenny—he heard her pretty name in every trill of the birds—and she was dead.
Lying far down in the dark. He had cut off a curl from her fair hair and carried it in his pocket-book. He took it out and held it in the sunshine—those poor little filmy threads were the only part of her luxurious, glossy hair the sun could reach and warm.
She was dead and gone. There were some pictures of hers ... there had been a short notice about her in the papers. And the mother and sisters mourned her at home, but the real Jenny they had never known, and they knew nothing about her[296] life or her death. The others—those who had known—stared in despair after her, not understanding what they knew.
She who lay there was his Jenny; she belonged to him alone.
Helge Gram had come to him; he had asked and told, wailed and begged:
“I don’t understand anything. If you do, Heggen, I beg you to tell me. You know—will you not tell me what you know?”
He had not answered.
“There was another; she told me so. Who was it? Was it you?”
“No.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“Yes, but I am not going to tell you. It is no good your asking, Gram.”
“But I shall go mad if you don’t explain.”
“You have no right to know Jenny’s secrets.”
“But why did she do it? Was it because of me—of him—or of you?”
“No; she did it because of herself.”
He had asked Gram to leave him and had not seen him since; he had left Rome. It was in the Borghese garden, two days after the funeral, that Gram had come across him sitting in the sunshine. He was so tired; he had had to see to everything—give satisfactory explanations at the inquest, arrange for the interment, and write to Mrs. Berner that her daughter had died suddenly from heart failure. And all the time he had a kind of satisfaction in the thought that nobody knew of his own sorrow, that the real cause of her death was known only by him and for ever hidden with him. The sorrow had sunk so deep into him that it would for ever be the inmost essence of his soul, and he would never speak of it to any living being.
It would govern his whole life—and be governed by it; the[297] colour and form of it would change, but it would never be effaced. Every hour of the day it was different, but it was always there, and always would be. On the morning when he had run for the doctor, leaving the other man alone with her, he had wanted to tell Helge Gram all he knew, and in such a way that his heart would turn to ashes like his own had done; but in the days that followed all he knew became a secret between him and the dead woman—the secret of their love. All that had happened had happened because of her being what she was, and as such he had loved her. Helge Gram was a casual, indifferent stranger to him and to her, and he had no more wish to avenge himself on him than he had pity for his sorrow and dread at the mystery.
And he understood that what had happened was natural because she was made as she was. Her mind swayed and bent for a gust of wind, because it had grown so upright and slender; he had thought she could grow as a tree grows, and had not understood that she was only a flower, a rich, fragile stem, springing up to be kissed by the sun and to let all the heavy, longing buds break into bloom. She had only been a little girl after all, and to his eternal sorrow he had not understood it until too late.
For she could not right herself again when once she had been bent; she was like a lily, that does not grow from the root again if the first stalk has been broken. There was nothing supple or luxuriant about her mind—but he loved her such as she was. And she was his only, for he alone knew how fair and delicate she had been—so strong in her desire to grow straight, and yet so frail and brittle, and with delicate honour, from which a spot never could be washed away because it made so deep a mark. She was dead. He had been alone with his love many nights and days, and he would be alone with it all the days and nights of his life.
He had stifled his cries of despair many a night in his pillows.[298] She was dead, and she had never been his. He was the one she should have loved and belonged to, for she was the only one he had ever loved. He had never touched or seen her beautiful, slim, white body that enclosed her soul like a velvet sheath about a thin, feeble blade. Others had possessed it, and had not understood what a strange and rare treasure had happened to fall into their hands. It lay buried in the grave, a prey to ugly change until it was consumed and reduced to a handful of dust in the earth.
Gunnar was shaking with sobs.
Others had loved her, soiled, and destroyed her, not knowing what they did—and she had never been his.
As long as he lived there would be moments when he would feel the same agony about it as now.
Yet he was the only one who owned her at the last; in his hand only would her golden hair sparkle, and she herself was living in him now; her soul and her image were reflected in him clear and firm as in still water. She was dead; she had no more sorrow—it stayed with him instead, to go on living, not to die until he died himself, and because it was living it would grow and change. What it would be like in ten years, he did not know, but it might grow to something great and beautiful.
As long as he lived there would be moments when he would feel the same strange, deep joy that it was so, as he felt now.
He remembered dimly what he had been thinking in the early morning hour when he was walking on the terrace overhead while she was ending her life. He had been enraged with her. How could she do it? He had begged and implored to be allowed to help her, to carry her away from the abyss she was nearing, but she had pushed him away and thrown herself down before his eyes—exactly in the way a woman would—an obstinate, irresponsible, foolish way.
[299]
When he saw her lying lifeless he had been in despair and rage again, because he would not have let her go. Whatever she had done he would have exonerated her, helped her, offered her his love and trust.
As long as he lived there would be moments when he would reproach her for choosing to die—Jenny, you should not have done it. Yet there would be moments when he would understand that she did so, because it was in keeping with her character, and he would love her for it as long as he lived. And never would he wish that he had not loved her.
But he would cry desperately, as he had already done, because he had not loved her long before; he would cry for the lost years when she had lived beside him as his friend and comrade and he had not understood that she was the woman who should have been his wife. And never would the day dawn when he would wish he had not understood, even if only to see that it was too late.
Gunnar rose from his knees. He took a small box from his pocket and opened it. One of Jenny’s pink crystal beads was in it. He had found it in the drawer of her dressing-table when he packed up her belongings; the string had broken and he kept one of the beads. He took some earth from the grave and put it in the box. The bead rolled about in it and was covered with grey dust, but the clear rose colour showed through and the fine rents in the crystal glittered in the sun.
He had sent all her possessions to her mother, except the letters, which he had burnt. The child’s clothes were in a sealed cardboard box. He sent it to Francesca, remembering that Jenny had said one day she would give them to her.
He had looked through all her sketch-............