Jenny/Part 3, 9
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.
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."
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 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 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 bloodstained heap."
"Jenny," he cried, white in the face, "I cannot bear to hear you speak like this!"
"I am hysterical," she said soothingly, but she went to the corner where her canvases stood and almost flung them against the wall, with the painting turned out:
"Is it worth living to go about making things like those? Smearing oil paint on canvas? You can see for yourself that it is nothing now but a mess of paint. Yet you saw how I worked the first months—like a slave. Good God! I cannot even paint any more."
Heggen looked at the pictures. He felt he had a firm ground to stand upon again.
"I should really like to have your frank opinion on—that piggish stuff," she said provokingly.
"I must admit that they are not particularly good." He stood with his hands in his trouser pockets looking at them. "But that happens to every one of us—I mean that there are certain times when you cannot produce anything, and you ought to know that it is only for a time. I don't think one can lose one's talent even if one has been ever so unhappy. You have left off painting for such a long time, besides; you will have to work it up again—to master the means of action, so to say. Take life study, for instance—I am sure it is three years since you drew a live model. One cannot neglect those things without being punished for it. I know from my own experience."
He went to a shelf and searched among Jenny's sketch-books:
"You ought to remember how much you improved in Paris—let me show you."
"No, no, not that one," said Jenny, reaching her hand for it.
Heggen stood with the book in his hand, looking amazed at her. She turned her face away:
"I don't mind if you look at it—I tried to draw the boy one day."
Heggen turned the leaves slowly. Jenny was sitting in the sofa again. He looked at the pencil sketches of the sleeping infant for a moment, then put the book carefully away.
"It was a great pity that you lost your little boy," he said gently.
"Yes. If he had lived, all the rest would not have mattered. You speak about will, but when one's will cannot keep one's child alive, what is the good of it? I don't care to try to make anything of my life now, because it seemed to me the only thing I was good for and cared about was to be a mother to my little boy. Oh, I could have loved him! I suppose I am an egoist at heart, for whenever I tried to love the others, my own self rose like a wall between us. But the boy was mine alone. I could have worked if he had been spared to me. I could have worked hard.
"I had made so many plans. On the way down here they all came back to my mind. I had decided to live in Bavaria with him in the summer, because I was afraid the sea air would be too strong for him. He was going to lie in his pram under the apple trees while I painted. There is not a place in the world I could go to where I have not been in my dreams with the boy. There is nothing good or beautiful in all the world that I did not think, while I had him, he should learn and see. I have not a thing that was not his too. I used to wrap him up in the red rug I have. The black dress you are painting me in was made in Warnemünde when I was out of bed again, and I had it cut so that it would be easy to nurse him.
"I cannot work because I am so full of him—the longing for him paralyses me. In the night I cuddle the pillow in my arms and sob for my baby-boy. I call him and talk to him when I am alone. I should have painted him, to have a picture of him at every age. He would have been a year old now, would have had teeth and been able to take hold of things, to stand up, and perhaps to walk a little. Every month, every day I think of him—how he would have grown and what he would be like. When I see a woman with a bambino on her arm, or the children in the street, I always think of him and how he would look at their age."
She stopped talking for a moment.
"I did not think you felt it like that, Jenny," said Heggen gently. "It was sad for you, of course—I quite understood that—but I thought, on the whole, it was better he was taken. If I had known you were so distressed about it, I should have come to see you."
She did not answer, but went on in the same strain: "And he died—such a tiny, tiny little thing. It is only selfishness on my part to grudge him death before he had begun to feel and to understand. He could only look at the light and cry when he was hungry or wanted to be changed; he did not know me even—not really, anyhow. Some vague glimpses of reason had possibly begun to awaken in his little head, but, think of it, he never knew that I was his mother.
"Never a name had he, poor darling, only mother's baby-boy, and I have nothing to remember him by, except just material things."
She lifted her hands as if holding the child to her heart, then let them fall empty and lifeless on the table.
"I remember so distinctly my impression when I first touched him, felt his skin against mine. It was so soft, a little damp—the air had scarcely touched it yet, you see. People think a newborn child is not nice to feel, and perhaps it is so when it is not your own flesh and blood. And his eyes—they were no special colour, only dark, but I think they would have been grey-blue. A baby's eyes are so strange—almost mysterious. And his tiny head was so pretty, when he was feeding and pressing his little nose against me. I could see the pulse beating and the thin, downy hair; he had quite a lot of it—and dark—when he was born.
"Oh, that little body of his! I can never think of anything else—I can feel it lying in my hands. He was so round and fat, and every bit of him was so pretty—my own sweet little boy!
"But he died! I was looking forward so much to all that was going to happen that it seems to me now I did not pay enough attention to things when I had him, or kissed him or looked at him enough, though I did nothing else in those weeks.
"When he was gone there was nothing left but the yearning for him. You cannot understand what I felt. My whole body ached with it. I fell ill, and the fever and the pain seemed to be my longing materialized. I missed him from my arms, between my hands, and at my cheek. Once or twice in the last week of his life he clutched my finger when I put it in his hand. Once he had somehow got hold of a little of my hair—oh, the sweet, sweet little hands.…"
She lay prostrate over the table, sobbing violently, her whole form shivering.
Gunnar had got up and stood hesitating, emotion rising in his throat. Then he went to her and, bending down over her head, he touched her hair lightly with a shy, gentle kiss.
She continued crying, in the same position, for a little while. At last she got up and went to the washstand to bathe her face.
"Oh, how I miss him," she repeated, and he could not find anything to say but "Jenny, if I had known that you felt it so much."
She came back to where he was and, putting her hands on his shoulders, said:
"Gunnar, you must not pay any attention to what I said a while ago. Sometimes I am not quite myself, but you will understand that, for the sake of the boy, if for no other reason, I am not going to throw myself entirely into a life of dissipation. At heart I really want to make the best I can of my life—you know that. I mean to try and work again, even if the result is poor in the beginning. I have always the comfort of knowing that one need not live longer than one cares to."
She put on her hat again, finding a veil for her tear-stained face:
"Let us go and have something to eat—you must be starving by this time—it is very late."
Gunnar Heggen blushed all over his face. Now she mentioned it, he felt awfully hungry, and was ashamed of himself for admitting it at such a moment as this. He dried the tears from his wet, hot cheeks and took his hat from the table.