hedvig’s and percy’s marriage had for long been unconsummated. at first in the swiss mountain sanatorium hedvig was not allowed to live in the same house as her husband. later on when he was better she still remained his nurse.
“think of your fever,” she said, and withdrew gently from his delicate approaches. “it is your duty to get well, percy dear.”
percy was all too far away from the thousandfold stimulant of art from which in his longing and his imagination he had otherwise derived vitality. his natural submissiveness was still further fortified by the strict discipline of the sanatorium. so he yielded and always acquiesced in her cold sisterly behaviour to him. but only to approach her again at the next opportunity with the same persistent, childlike, half-embarrassed supplication for love. and if he had not done so hedvig would certainly have felt secretly hurt and worried. after having wandered about the whole day in the pure cold air and in the light of the white snow-capped peaks, among the brotherhood of suffering and among the recaptured convalescents high up in the seclusion of the alpine world it was pleasant in the evening to whisper a soft “no” to the adoring husband. there was rehabilitation in it. it healed old wounds. it was an innocent triumph. she lived through happy days. there was nothing that tempted or scorched or tore at the heart. there was just life enough for hedvig hill.
243“no, percy dear. for your own sake. your temperature would rise....”
and she uttered her “no” in the same tone as others would whisper their “yes.” “see how i sacrifice everything for you,” she seemed to say, “my best years, my womanhood, my beauty, i sacrifice all for you, darling percy.” even to herself she made a sacrifice of her half-heartedness and her fear—though she probably suspected in her inmost heart this unsatisfied longing of percy’s was in the long run more dangerous to him than ordinary life together as husband and wife. the truth was that hedvig hill sipped at what she did not dare to drink at one draft. she hugged to herself the glimpse of pain she saw in percy’s glance after her refusal. she cherished the mist of pulsing blood in his blue eyes, so like those of a precocious boy. and she warmed her lonely bed with it.
then one day came when percy was—not cured, because a complete cure seemed almost out of question—but anyhow, so much better that he could think of moving about in the world once again.
the doctors spoke of the south.
hedvig felt a nervous dread of all that was to come. it was as if they were being turned out of a safe refuge, she thought. she would have preferred to remain amongst the brotherhood of the doomed, bewitched by the mountain spirits up there into a half-life in the big white monastery.
“but percy, would it not be safer to spend one more winter in the sanatorium?” she whispered.
percy shook his head and smiled. he had been very mysterious these last days; he had sent off and received a number of telegrams.
“where are we going? wouldn’t it be best to go home?” wondered hedvig.
“you are going to have a magnificent present,” cried percy, who glowed with the pleasure of planning, acting and moving about after years of supervision and inactivity.
244so they went down into the valley when the first september days had already sprayed the woods with gold. there the train stood ready. the smoke, the noise, the jolting about soon tired percy, who was so spoilt with fresh air and quiet. then hedvig turned nurse again, and wrapped him up in their reserved compartment. but that evening the train rushed into a town by the sea under the mountains. it was genoa and they at once went aboard a steamer which seemed to have waited only for them in order to depart.
“but where is this boat going to? where are we going?” wondered hedvig.
she positively knew nothing. percy only smiled mysteriously.
one brilliantly fine morning they went ashore at white cadiz.
“here is my present,” said percy. “it is the country that suits your hair and your eyes.”
at the sanatorium hedvig had forgotten to be spanish. she felt terribly nervous and cast out into the unknown.
“now we will choose towns for you, just as one chooses frocks,” continued percy. “we shall begin with seville, though i suspect that toledo would be the most suitable.”
so they arrived at seville.
“i can’t offer you an auto-da-fé,” he whispered. “you will have to be satisfied with a ‘corrida’.”
above the entrance to the plaza de toros there stood in big letters “press bull-fight in commemoration of the immaculate conception of the virgin mary.”
with eyes that still smarted and burnt from all the pitiless light on the yellow sand of the arena hedvig saw within a fraction of a second a little grey bull, with the picador’s dart in his neck, bury his horns into the stomach of the rearing horse. the horse beat the air helplessly with his forefeet and lifted his slender neck and his head with a gesture of wild, maddening pain, and then fell 245heavily on one side with the picador beneath him, but only to rush up again and to gallop, pursued by the bull, round the arena with bleeding sides and trailing entrails.
hedvig stared fixedly down. she was very pale.
“this is horrible,” she muttered. “i want to go.”
but she did not go.
more picadors, more bleeding horses. then banderilleros who, dancing nimbly, buried their flag-adorned darts in the bleeding neck of the bull with subtle, playful cruelty. meanwhile the sunlight lay like fire on the yellow sand, the red blood stains, and the bright shawls of the women on the rails of the boxes. even the rising metallic sound of thousands of voices seemed to be burnt through by the heat of the sun.
then the espada entered. with his knee breeches, slippers and pouched hair he seemed to have stepped straight out of a mozart opera.
swinging his red cloth he dances an elegant death dance before he draws his weapon. now everything gleams bright, the sun, eyes, the thin fire-shaft of the sword. his posture, as with his weapon raised to the level of his eyes he calmly awaits the onslaught of the bull, is extremely graceful. now the fire of the fine tongue of steel is suddenly extinguished in the bull’s neck, the colossus staggers and falls heavily.
hedvig sat mute and pale with devouring eyes. she was staring at the gate from which the next bull would rush in....
when they drove home in the first yellow twilight percy’s arm stole round her waist.
“i believe all the same toledo has amused itself in seville,” he smiled. “wasn’t that a fine way of getting the sanatorium out of the system?”
hedvig pushed away his arm almost unkindly:
“don’t laugh at everything,” she muttered.
and suddenly she felt a secret bitterness that the man 246by her side was not stronger, more robust, more dangerous, that he had allowed her to say “no” so often.
darkness requires more heat than light. the sun, the sight of blood, the inborn cruelty of the south had all at once burnt through her shyness, her fear and her brooding. hunger for life buried its claws deep in this strange virgin soul that had lain so anxious and so self-absorbed. she was not the first barbarian from a twilight-land to whom the south has given a bold desire to live.
that night sister hedvig became her husband’s lover.
they remained the whole autumn in seville and saw many bull fights. hedvig was very beautiful at this time. hers was a dark passionate unfolding. percy overwhelmed her with costly clothes and jewels. he dressed her up as a spaniard with combs and shawls and mantillas. he did not touch his paint brush, but he let her pose to his love. and hedvig enjoyed his admiration, enjoyed her own beauty. for the first time in her life she was at peace with her own body. it was no longer the cause of restlessness and heavy care and danger. it took pride in this man’s caresses. beneath her silk and her jewels she felt the glow of her nakedness. a solemn thrill would pass through her at the thought of her own shoulders and breast. and she enjoyed the feeling of satisfaction, which was both hot and cold. oh, what a relief not to feel any longer that anxious longing in her inmost soul.
hedvig hill was happily in love with herself. for percy also these were happy days. their late union gave his mind a bright coolness. perhaps he sometimes suspected the gulf which nevertheless existed between them. but that did not frighten a dilettante, it only now and then liberated a certain light self-irony. he enjoyed his own extravagant gifts, he enjoyed seeing her bloom in her own way under his hands. he felt something of the cool intoxication of the artist before his work when it has achieved independent life.
247“you are my most beautiful picture,” he would whisper. “i sometimes imagine i have done it myself.”
the time was far away when he had lain in the shadow of death looking at her with a beggar’s eyes. percy hill forgot things easily.
it was the evening of a clear and brilliant october day. the whitewashed walls no longer dazzled. down in the patio of the small hotel two spanish matrons in black were sitting talking with phlegmatic fire. their talk flowed as musically and as monotonously as the little spraying fountain in the marble basin. hedvig and percy had just returned from a long drive towards the vega. the coolness of the approaching autumn suited him wonderfully well. he stood leaning against the window frame with his hands behind his head:
“today i feel quite aggressively alive,” he said. “fancy if we should have a child, hedvig. a little girl. i would much rather have a girl than a boy.”
there was a slight touch of annoyance in his voice.
hedvig sat at her dressing table doing her hair. she felt a sudden unpleasant shock. strange as it may sound, she had up till that moment not thought of the consequences of their life together, and not for a moment had she thought of herself as a mother. she let slip the knot and her black hair flowed again over her naked white shoulders. she sprang up from the dressing table with a hard expression and frightened eyes:
“i don’t want a child!” she cried. “never, never!”
percy wondered at her vehemence. his smile grew hesitating:
“dear child, forget my nonsense. it is bad taste to foretell nature in that way. i only meant that i should certainly find your condition beautiful.”
hedvig had now calmed down again. she came up to him and stroked his hair:
248“you must never talk like that, percy,” she muttered. “you ... we have no right to children ... they are for those who are healthy...”
and her face had suddenly resumed the old expression of sisterly resignation and self-sacrifice.
percy grew a shade paler. it seemed as if the climate had suddenly grown more chilly. it seemed as if the light reflected by the white walls had been reflected by snow. the sanatorium had followed even to seville.
“forgive me, i forgot for a moment that i was an invalid,” he said.
from that day hedvig suffered constant anxiety lest she should have a child.
woman’s egoism is more negative than that of a man—it is a real minus quantity. for she reveals her sacrifice and her devotion in the very lines of her body. her whole body is a manifestation of generosity, a splendid promise. from the day that her breasts fill out, invisible childish lips grope round them. within the sweet swelling lines of her body and lips slumber the forces of regeneration. her egoism is a barrenness, a cowardly self-betrayal, for she betrays her own body and she betrays the future...
of course hedvig was convinced she had the noblest motives. of course it was the curse of heredity that frightened her. she did not admit even to herself that she would have been still more frightened had he been a healthy man, that it was her own body she was beginning to fear again and this time not with a vague and indefinite fear as before. no, now she knew what was at stake. at any moment there might begin to grow within her a strange being that would feed on her blood, would tear her body, would perhaps bring death to her. she grew cold with fear at the least disquieting sign. she had moments of hatred of her husband. and she began to behave with a meanness and nervous caution that deprived their life of all its charm.
249percy yielded. probably it was criminal of him to hope for children.
he did not see through his wife, or at least only half saw through her. there were perhaps dark moments when he suspected the cowardly poverty of her character, but people of his type do not pursue disagreeable thoughts to the end. all the same percy relapsed into a restless state. he felt as if he had been exiled from the kingdom of peace and health of which he had only had a glimpse. he left seville and began to lead a roving life in spain and the south of france. galleries, ruins, mountains, waterfalls. it was the same old hunt for beauty! several times he tried to stay in one place and take up his paint brush again. but these were only good intentions, interrupted by crises of discouragement. towards spring they reached paris, for which he had all the time been longing. percy settled in montparnasse amongst the scandinavian painters and talked art with feverish and excited interest. here he suddenly fell victim to the modern extremists, to futurism, cubism, na?vism and ultra-expressionism, on which he had formerly only bestowed an ironic curiosity. it seemed as if his very refinement and submissiveness had rendered him defenceless against the latest brutalities. he began to buy the crudest objects. the strangest things were sent to their studio on the boulevard raspail. there was a “portrait of a lady,” consisting of four straight, black-green lines on a pink ground. there was a picture called “motion” which consisted of four triangular fields containing parts of a woman’s leg and a locomotive.
percy looked stealthily at hedvig when with eager explanations and cold enthusiasm he showed her these acquisitions. “i am not happy,” his look said. “this kind of art is not for happy people. it is for those who have something to avenge.”
they were, as a matter of fact, so many reproaches flung 250in the face of life because he was weak, enervated, sorely tried and without a future.
hedvig had suffered all the time from his new associates, among whom she felt helpless and embarrassed. she was jealous of all the strange, poisonous indecency that they called modern art. she stared silently at the new monstrosities. very well—he prefers all this to me, she thought. it did not merely hurt her. she had also a strange, suppressed feeling, never admitted, but nevertheless real, of becoming free, of slipping out of his hands; a throbbing, secret, insolent feeling that anything was possible. but with all this there immediately blended an anxious care, an old frightened care as old as the selambshof days, which stirred within her every time he gave her expensive flowers, bought first-class tickets or threw a big silver coin to a beggar.
“what have you given for those pictures?” she asked defiantly.
he mentioned a large sum, several thousand francs. and she went into her own room with a pale face.
from this time hedvig began to insist on their going home.
but percy continued to buy modern art. everything was not so provocative as those first pictures. there were also pearls of bold but still exquisitely tasteful expressionism. after running about all the day at exhibitions and art dealers he sat down to drink his apéritif. he looked out over the murmuring streams of humanity on the big boulevards, which always make you feel that you are a poor little drop in the ocean and may be washed away at any moment. but all the same there came into his eyes a little look of anger. and he did not turn to hedvig, who sat there dressed in black looking stiff and disapproving, but to the young painters round the table. it was strange how the air of paris made him free and independent:
“it’s a pity it’s so damned banal to make a donation,” 251he exclaimed. “but a poor wretch like me has no other way out. i have no children. i won’t live very much longer. i am an end and not a beginning like you boys. my money has no personal future. but if i add a wing to my little art gallery and fill it with first-class explosive matter and then present the whole splendour to the nation or rather to the city, yes, to stockholm, then i shall at any rate have sown the seeds of a little healthy restlessness in their minds. and a little help to you fellows. and i shall have erected a little monument to myself in the usual dishonest but generally approved way. the hill collection! what do you think of that idea?”
they grew excited round the table:
“we must thank you, of course! but why don’t you do something yourself? you can, percy! you are no bourgeois! why don’t you stick it out?”
hedvig had been sitting all the time silent and forbidding. at percy’s unexpected mention of an endowment she suddenly felt a cold shiver of anger. she rose quickly:
“you all seem to forget that percy is ill,” she said. “he must not be rushed. he is much too excited here in paris. shan’t we go back home now, percy?”
the young painters felt a little nervous of mrs. hill, of her aristocratic air, her dark nun-like beauty. silence fell around the table. percy rose with his little, absent-minded, apologetic smile:
“yes, there you see, gentlemen,” he said.
and then they left.
at last hedvig succeeded in making her husband leave paris, where it was already beginning to be hot and dusty. there is always an element of danger in the journey home for consumptives who have been living in the south. in stockholm there had been an unfortunate relapse in the late spring, with storm and icy rain. percy had to go to bed at once and hedvig was again his nurse. he did not want the doctor. he had a real horror of doctors and hedvig 252did not insist on calling one in. she took great care that he should not be exposed to tiring visits of old artist friends and she nursed him with quite, inexhaustible energy. there was no more talk of the great donation and hedvig began to feel a certain deep calm.
but one fine day percy got up in spite of all her protest and in spite of his not having quite a normal temperature. and the following morning an architect arrived. the two men walked round the house, drew, measured and made a lot of calculations.
“i want the drawings as quickly as possible,” percy said at lunch. “i am in a great hurry.”
his eyes glowed and he had little red patches in his cheeks.
the architect promised to do his best.
immediately afterwards the pictures began to arrive from paris. not only those that hedvig had already seen, but a whole lot of new ones. percy evidently had somebody down there buying for his account.
hedvig said nothing. she kept to herself, locked herself in, brooded and scarcely answered when spoken to.
still more new pictures arrived, and percy was busy with them the whole day, studying them, and moving them from one crowded room to another.
then the plans were ready and the workmen arrived, a whole swarm of them. they dug and blasted, laid foundations and built the walls. percy sat in an easy chair out in the sunshine and looked on. he was so eager that he scarcely allowed himself time to eat. “this is my protest against oblivion,” he thought. “i am building a house for my ashes. i am building my own little pyramid....”
he really imagined his ashes standing in a beautiful japanese urn in a corner of the hill gallery.
towards autumn the roof was already on the new wing. percy began to hang the pictures at once. he could not even wait till the walls had dried. he himself was not 253strong enough to move anything, but he sat in his chair and gave orders to ohlesson, the coachman, who had now become a chauffeur. you could see even from ohlesson’s back how he disapproved of these awful novelties. percy did not worry. whenever he looked in at the rooms containing examples of the older art, everything there seemed to him strangely quiet and as it were covered over with a fine dust. his taste was already brutalised by these strident colours and paradoxical forms. he really needed strong food now, poor percy. fatigue sometimes descended like a grey mist over his feverish zeal. he used these new excesses as weapons against the deepening shadows.
hedvig walked about devoured by a silent consuming bitterness. her feelings were a strange compound of jealousy of his overpowering interest in art and brooding anxiety at his wicked extravagance. this donation seemed to her like a challenge, like a theft from one who had sacrificed herself for him. percy had allowed himself to be seduced, she thought. he has no power of resistance. but she dared not speak openly to him. she had a vague feeling that there was something within her that she must not betray. that is why she never went beyond her increasingly bitter reproaches that he overtired himself, and neglected himself. she wore an expression as if the crêpe were already floating round her. yes, percy thought sometimes that she assumed her widowhood in advance. there was something sharp and nervous in his answer:
“why do you insist on wearing black?” he said. “i should understand you much better in sealing wax red or sulphur green.”
her old method of holding him was no longer effective. hedvig again began to feel his lack of respect for illness as a personal insult. by and by they almost quarrelled about ohlesson, the chauffeur. hedvig began to drive into town every day in the car. then percy would have no one to help him, she thought. then he would be forced to rest. 254this made her a little easier. one day she did something she had been tempted to do for a long time. she ordered ohlesson to drive to selambshof.
the avenue was full of yellow leaves. several of the old trees had blown down and there were ugly gaps as in a broken set of teeth.
peter sat in the office puffing at an unlit cigar and looking at his papers. he had aged. he was bent, his face was flabby and yellow. hedvig stood before him as laura had done once upon a time. she could not help having been spoilt by so many beautiful and expensive things. for a moment she shivered at the ugliness of her brother. but in her inmost heart she tolerated him, had even a feeling of security in the presence of something intimate and familiar.
“good-morning, peter!”
“good-morning, hedvig. so the elegant mrs. hill visits this remote spot. why this honour?”
hedvig did not answer but looked out through the window with an expression of resignation.
peter wore a look of injured innocence which suited him perfectly:
“is it perhaps for the last dividends? because levy has long ago cashed them.”
hedvig had, on laura’s recommendation, appointed the lawyer levy to look after her personal estate, including her shares in selambshof. and peter did not at all like the insolent supervision of the jew.
hedvig shook her head.
“i am anxious about percy,” she mumbled. it sounded as if this confession had been forced out of her by a thumbscrew.
“really, how—how is your lord and master, anyhow?”
on peter’s face there appeared a well-meaning grin of sympathy. he summoned up all that was left of his former sentimentality, but it did not reach beyond his expression. his eyes penetrated swiftly into her very soul with a cold, 255familiar, insolently searching glance. “aha, my dear,” they seemed to say, “this business did not turn out so well as you thought.” hedvig, of course, stood in silent, dignified protest against his every low thought. but all the same she enjoyed his glance—something that groped blindly and stealthily in her vitals.
“percy is very bad,” she exclaimed in a kind of exaltation, “much worse than he thinks himself. and he has quite lost his balance. he does nothing but buy picture after picture, mad things that unscrupulous people palm off on him. he is positively throwing away all he has! it is such a dreadful shame!”
peter was playing with his pencil. he had never heard hedvig say so much at once before.
“you mean that percy ought to be under restraint,” he interrupted calmly. “i am afraid that would be rather difficult.”
“i shall have remorse all my life if i do nothing to help and protect him.”
peter wanted to damp what he thought was unbusiness-like vehemence.
“pictures, you said ... but pictures can be good, almost as good as shares. they give no dividend but they can rise a damned lot in value.”
“no, not the pictures that percy buys. he is being robbed by real swindlers. and then he wants to give it all away to the state. but they will never accept such rubbish. people will only laugh at us.”
peter was startled. a donation! this was damned serious. he rose panting, walked up to hedvig and poked his thumb into her arm:
“you ... you ought to occupy percy’s time a little more,” he leered. “so that he won’t have any left for this nonsense. why the devil are you so black and white and beautiful as sin?... and have expensive pretty frocks and all that sort of thing.... the chief thing is that 256percy does not commit any folly while he is still ... well, i mean that one can always protest against a will....”
there was a certain satisfaction in peter’s grunts. he enjoyed saying this kind of thing to an elegant lady in diamond rings and black silk. there was a sort of luxurious revenge at last in being able to speak straight out to hedvig, the hypocritical hedvig.
his sister did not push him away. she smelled his breath, and the smell of stale tobacco and of cheese on his old clothes. all the time she had the same feeling in the pit of her stomach as one has when one sinks rapidly in a lift. now she had reached the bottom. she did not push him away. she stood there with closed eyes without a trace of colour in her face. she felt his shamelessness groping with coarse, hairy hands about her reserve, her shyness, and her stealthy and lying fear.
“how dare you!” she whispered in a low, hoarse voice, “how dare you say anything so vile?”
but his words stuck all the same. they crawled about, teemed and multiplied within her. they stimulated her to action and emboldened her gloomy heart.
hedvig staggered out of peter’s hovel. she stood beneath the naked, shivering maples on the soil of her bitter youth and of her long humiliation. a dull consuming autumn restlessness ran through her blood. the darkness of the main building attracted her suddenly as by some secret hardening of her heart. the door stood ajar above the bank of withering leaves on the steps. she entered. everything was dim, dusty, cold, stuffy. she wandered about the empty echoing corridors, turned the creaking locks, stole through swarms of moths between the covered mirrors and chairs and the windows which were specked with innumerable dead flies. in her own room she sank with a groan on to the edge of the old narrow bed of her girlhood. memories of her poor, lonely, miserable childhood rushed 257over her with renewed strength. she felt a wild self pity, a kind of fury clawing her breast. but she liked to feel that claw. that was why she was here. she drained the cup of pain to the last drop with voluptuous bitterness. it gave her a right to revenge.
when, as if under the pressure of a dangerous burden, hedvig slowly staggered out again it was only to pursue the past still further. she strolled through the neglected, overgrown garden where the benches and the paths were covered with dead stalks and the trees were already robbed of their fruit. here in the old pear tree beside the well there was a big hole in which she used to hide her secrets—as a dog hides a bone. there had lain for a long time a broken seal out of the smoking room and a little ring with a green heart that she had taken from laura. in her thoughts she still obstinately defended this theft: “had not laura broken her fine comb? and not given her anything in place of it!” how quiet and self-possessed she had been as she sat there and laura searched for the ring, cried and stamped....
hedvig cast a shy and searching glance around her. then she quickly pulled off her glove and pushed her hand down into the hole. her arm had grown plumper and it was a little difficult to reach the bottom. with the tips of her fingers she felt something hard and managed to pull it up. it was a little bottle with a death’s head and cross bones on it. there was still something thick and brown at the bottom. it was a souvenir of her confirmation. she had taken the bottle from the family medicine chest after that affair with brundin. in the darkness she often ran down to feel it. it was death she fingered ... death ...
hedvig stared at the sluggish brown drops. “it was that struggle that made a nurse of me,” she thought with sudden clear vision. “i had to finger—death. i was a fool.” and seized by a wild mortification she flung the bottle on the ground so that it was shattered into a thousand pieces.
258now hedvig stepped through a broken-down hanging gate into a road, from the rustling, leafy carpet of which there was reflected a strange, sulphur yellow light which seemed like the very shimmer of putrefaction. not a human soul was visible. it seemed as if peter had devoured the whole population. next she stood on the cliff by the rookery where she used to spy on laura’s and herman’s kisses. oh, she could still feel her burning mortification and her envy of her sister. overhead the autumn breeze soughed heavily in the dark pine tops. out on the lake sudden black gusts perturbed the surface as if in irresolute fury. but the waves beat against the shiny green stones on the shore with short, sharp onslaughts, already troubled by the thought of the moment when everything would be frozen up. hedvig suddenly lifted her hands as if to ward off a blow. the thought that percy would soon die, that she would soon be alone again, rushed over her with a vehemence as never before. alas! to know a thing is one thing; to feel it in your heart and bones is another thing. she felt a shivering fear of the old loneliness of selambshof. the autumn day, the decay all round her, the icy cold shadow of death, suddenly awakened all the hunger in her blood. the memories from seville rose up before her flame-clear on this chilly northern autumn day. once more they swept away her cautious fears and her anxious reserve. she had a savage pleasure in standing there in the cold wind and letting loose all the black hot gusts....
and deep, deep down in her soul there was during all this seething turmoil the consciousness that peter had given his approval, that she had the sanction of the selamb family spirit for whatever might happen. without that she might never, never have undertaken this stimulating and fateful excursion into the past....
they had late dinner at the hills’. hedvig came down in her black spanish dress, with her hair parted in the middle and a high comb under the mantilla. she was as 259stiff as an image of a saint. but she had a burning pallor, and there was fire in her alluring black eyes.
the saint drank several glasses of wine.
percy sat mute. he did not take his eyes off her and trembled as if before some overpowering phenomenon of nature. we are to begin again, he thought. it was not dead. from the first moment he saw her there was no thought of resistance in his mind.
when they were sitting over coffee in the yellow twilight of the intimate little anteroom she suddenly threw her arms round his neck and kissed him. he no longer wondered how it had happened, or why it had happened just then. he only revelled in his intoxication of joy, at once awful and glorious. he had a strange feeling of starting on a journey from which he would never return.
during a long, silent, dark autumn night she drank his fever like a fiery wine. she was the intoxicated nun officiating at the dark mass of love. never had percy found her lips so greedy, so glorious and unashamed.
in the morning hedvig played with percy, as the cat plays with the mouse. she stood there wonderfully naked in the pale sunlight from the window. never before had she been able to show herself to him thus. there was in the very lines of her body something wild and virginal, a shyness which made the sight of her nakedness a sort of breathless sacrilege. percy had the sensation of beholding a martyred girl who, with her clothes torn from her body, awaits the fierce and hungry beasts on the yellow sands of the arena.
“today i need some air,” she said, “but i don’t mind walking if you want the chauffeur!”
“may i not come with you?” whispered percy from his pillows. he looked so small in the big carved bed resembling a catafalque. “could we not take a long run into the country to look at the autumn.”
that day percy no longer spoke of his pictures, nor 260during the following days either. hedvig did not see him even glance at the new gallery. he seemed to have grown afraid of his plans for farewell, his pyramid, the urn for his ashes and all the rest of it.
all percy’s feelings had been transfused into a new, passionate love. day and night he wanted to be with hedvig. protected by her white limbs he huddled together in the growing shadows and intoxicated himself in the warmth of her presence. but it was a fatal intoxication. love made everything, even death, greater, more real, more terrible—. it seemed as if strong hands had torn to pieces the bright artistically woven veil that dilettantism had suspended between him and reality. he felt for perhaps the first time in his life a deep fear. but then he only drank the deeper from hedvig’s unbroken life as if by doing so he might save his own. and when he noticed that the intoxication consumed his strength instead of increasing it then he drank deeper still in order to benumb himself.
but now it was hedvig’s turn to steal into percy’s picture galleries. yes, the r?les were strangely reversed. she positively felt attracted to her former chamber of horror. she would stay there for a long time staring around her. it was not that any artistic instincts had awakened in her. it was not that she had begun to understand any of these new paradoxes. no, but she imbibed courage from their impudent recklessness. she deafened her conscience with their excesses. “everything is permitted,” that was what percy’s pictures whispered into the ear of a selamb.
life and death soar strangely near each other in love. you give and take with the same recklessness. sacrifice and selfishness disport themselves side by side. and just at the moment when the human egoism is nearest to its dissolution it is sometimes most blindly cruel.
during these weeks hedvig loved percy and killed him. there came a moment when she began to be afraid to look into his face. but all the same she could not find the 261strength to spare him. during the day she invented many a cunning trick to escape seeing the truth. there was something round his mouth and eyes which now and then filled her with a cold terror, almost with hatred. it was the disease in him she hated. she would feel fits of cruel invincible hunger for the moment when death would at last strike its blow and no longer creep stealthily around them. and all the same she loved him, loved for the first time in her life with a kind of dim, wild abandon. so strange is the human heart. in the midst of these fits she longed for the night, the darkness, the great, teeming, blind darkness when she could once more draw him to her, kiss him, drink up his fever.
sometimes hedvig was seized by a kind of dark frenzy. their love had resembled a silent bitter struggle with death. percy sank back with perspiring temples. convulsively, like, a drowning man, he would seize her black hair and stare into her eyes, which he saw in spite of the darkness and which seemed to him surrounded by pale little dancing flames:
“my beautiful angel of death,” he whispered. “my beautiful angel of death.” and in his voice was a strange mixture of love, hopelessness and, to the very last, playful irony.
one such night there came a fresh h?morrhage of the lungs. it was the third, and percy knew at once that it was the last. for several days he lay there white and thin and faded away without any serious pain. the winter had come early. the light from the snow on the pines lit up the room just as in the sanatorium in switzerland. the doctors had that all-wise and important expression which always means that they are completely powerless. percy had recovered his little, wan, ironical, submissive smile. he did not complain and did not seem to regret anything. he smiled also to his wife without wondering at her metamorphosis.
262hedvig had turned nurse again. silent, indefatigable, with the expression of painfully heroic resignation of her profession she moved silently about his bed. not a word did they speak of what had passed between them. they were like people who have become sober and who scarcely suspect what they have done during their intoxication.
until one day percy wanted to be carried out into the new gallery.
at first hedvig objected vehemently. he was not to be moved. he could not bear the least movement. only after persistent prayers did she give in to his whim, but with an injured, worried expression. and she did not leave him alone. erect and rigid she stood on guard by his pillow in the hall.
here the dying percy lay amongst all his new art. a look of bitterness and weariness fell across his face. he shivered a little. the walls looked around him indescribably cold and unsubstantial. they seemed to radiate cold and meaninglessness. the stiffness and perverse spasms of the latest fashion in art gave him a terrible feeling of a blighted life frozen in death.
“they can never have had a fire here,” he mumbled, and crept right down under the bedclothes.
hedvig was already prepared to have him carried back to the bedroom. but then percy caught a glimpse through his half-closed eyelids of a little spring landscape, a hill with apple trees in bloom against white walls. in the midst of all the frostiness he received a lovely impression of a pure motive, of a simplicity that was full of meaning and of quiet appealing beauty. and he remembered again his promises in paris. they again seemed to him important and binding. he took the picture with him and had it placed at the foot of the bed when he was carried back into his “crypt,” as he called his bedroom alcove. tomorrow, he thought. tomorrow i will send for a lawyer and will arrange the matter.
263but the lawyer was not sent for. percy had other things to dream about. in the twilight hedvig came and sat down on the edge of his bed. she had been into town for a while, for the first time for weeks. she looked as solemn as a priestess. and after a moment’s silence she told him that she expected a child.
percy did not say much. he whispered thanks. then he kissed her hand and put it on his chest. and then he lay there trying to imagine that new life that he would never raise up in his arms. but it was difficult to feel that it was true. he could scarcely imagine hedvig as a mother. he had remorse because he did not feel this more deeply. he kissed her hand again.
percy lived one week longer. he had several troublesome attacks of suffocation after which he was seized by a death-like weakness. but as soon as he had a clear moment hedvig spoke to him of the child. it grew, it developed, it lived in her consciousness. it was a boy and he was called percy. he was a little delicate, but handsome, with dark hair like his mother’s, blue eyes like his father’s. hedvig was no longer so quiet. she spoke quickly, nervously, in short breathless sentences. it seemed as if she had tried to put her own fear to sleep. she made a convulsive and touching effort to keep death away with the last resources of her womanhood.
and still the whole thing was a lie.
one winter morning when the snow lay thick on the ground percy hill died in his wife’s arms. something seemed to make him restless during his last moments. it was not the child. no, he muttered something over and over again about the lawyer ... the donation.... it sounded almost as if he had wanted to force a promise from hedvig.
truly pitiful was this hopeless appeal to her.
percy hill died a dilettante. he had succeeded in completing nothing in all his life. not even a new will had 264he been able to draw up. there was only the one that he had written the day they were married and in which he left hedvig everything.
and there was no child born to him after his death. hedvig had cheated him. it was a lie of love. yes, no doubt she believed that she lied to console him, to sweeten his last moments and to make death easier. she was perhaps quite unconscious of the terrible selamb logic in the fact that it was just on the very day that percy began to be interested in his donation again that her fiction about an heir escaped her.
exhausted by vigils and anxiety hedvig collapsed after percy’s death. for several days she lay unconscious. not one of those who arranged for the funeral knew any of percy’s old artist friends. so the strange thing happened that he was driven out to liding? cemetery together with peter, stellan and an old gouty sea-captain from gothenburg, whom he had never seen in his life.
hedvig mourned him sincerely. as soon as she could stand up she hurried out to his grave. for months not a day passed without her paying it a visit. a rigid figure in black, she stood there under the snowcovered trees staring at his grave. did she ask his pardon for her lie, for not laying his ashes in an urn in the hill gallery? did she fall back upon memories of their love, sensuous memories? did she only try to fill an aching void with the foolish illusion of physical proximity? i don’t know, but it is a fact that the tears often came to her eyes. hedvig cried, the tearless hedvig....
then she returned home to conferences with levy, who was making the inventory. percy had an old-established, solid fortune. he had only been obliged to sell an insignificant part of it in order to realize his dreams of a gallery. there was a cold, numb pleasure in hearing the clever jew descant on funds, interest, dividend warrants and investments. 265it seemed as if the very soul of gold had spoken to her with glib tongue and beautiful though ironically curled lips. after a time she began to understand with a feeling of secret, refreshing joy how rich she really was.
