one day during christmas week gram went into a trattoria. heggen and jenny were sitting at a table, but they did not see him. as he was taking off his overcoat, he heard heggen say:
“i don’t like that man.”
“no; he is disgusting,” said jenny, sighing.
“it is not good for her either—with this sirocco blowing. she will be a rag tomorrow. i suppose she does not work at all—only walks about with that fellow?”
“work, no! but i can do nothing. she walks from here to viterbo with him in those thin slippers of hers, in spite of the cold and the sirocco—only because the man can tell her about hans hermann.”
gram greeted them as he passed. they made a movement as if inviting him to sit at their table, but he pretended not to see, and sat down farther up the room with his back to them. he understood that they were speaking about francesca.
[76]
he was almost a daily visitor now at the via vantaggio; he could not help it. miss winge was always alone, reading or sewing, and seemed pleased to see him. he thought she had changed a little of late; she was not so determined or so ready with her opinions as she used to be; not so inclined to argue and to lay down the law. she seemed almost a little sad. he asked her once if she were not quite well.
“yes, i am very well, thank you. why do you ask?”
“i don’t know—you seem so quiet nowadays.”
she had lighted the lamp meanwhile, and he noticed that she blushed.
“i may have to go home soon. my sister is ill with pneumonia, and my mother is so upset about it. i am very sorry to go,” she added after a pause. “i should have liked to stay for the spring at least.”
she sat down to her needlework. he wondered in his mind if it was heggen—he had never been able to find out if there was an understanding between them. for the present, heggen, who was said to be rather impressionable generally, was very much attached to a young danish nurse staying in rome with an elderly lady. it seemed so strange that she should blush; it was not like her.
francesca came in that evening before he left. he had not seen her much since christmas eve, but enough to understand that he was quite indifferent to her. she was never in a temper, or childishly impetuous; she went about as if she did not see anybody, her mind completely absorbed by something or other. at times she seemed almost to walk in a trance.
he saw a great deal of jenny; he went to the trattoria where she used to have her meals, and also to her rooms. he scarcely knew why, but he felt he wanted to see her.
one afternoon jenny went into francesca’s room to look for some turpentine. francesca always took whatever she needed from jenny’s belongings, but she never put the things back.[77] cesca was lying on the bed sobbing, with her head deep in the pillow. jenny had not heard her come in.
“my dear, what is the matter? are you ill?”
“no, but please go away, jenny, do! i won’t tell you; you’ll only say it’s my own fault.”
jenny understood it was no good talking to her when she was in that state, but at tea-time she knocked at her door. cesca thanked her, but did not want any tea.
that night, when jenny was reading in bed, cesca suddenly came into the room in her nightdress. her eyes were red and swollen with crying.
“may i sleep with you tonight? i don’t want to be alone.”
jenny made room for her. she did not like the idea of sharing her bed, but cesca used to come when she was very unhappy and ask to be allowed to sleep with her.
“go on reading, jenny; i won’t disturb you. i shall lie very still here by the wall.”
jenny pretended to read for some time. now and then a sigh like a sob was heard from francesca.
“shall i put out the lamp, or would you like it burning?” jenny asked.
“no, put it out, please.”
in the dark she put her arm round jenny and told her, sobbing, that she had been to the campagna again with hjerrild, and he had kissed her. at first she had just scolded him a little, thinking it was only fun, but he soon became so disgusting that she got angry. “and he wanted me to go and stay at an hotel with him tonight. he said it exactly as he would have asked me to go to a confectioner’s with him. i was furious, and he got very angry and said some nasty, horrid things.” she shivered as in a fever. “he spoke about hans—he said that hans, when he showed him my picture, had spoken to him about me in such a way as to make hjerrild believe—you know what i mean?” she nestled close to[78] jenny. “can you understand it—for i don’t—that i still care for that cad of a man? hans had not mentioned my name, though, and he did not imagine, of course, that hjerrild would meet me or know me from the photograph; it was taken when i was eighteen.”
jenny’s birthday was on the seventeenth of january. she and francesca were having a dinner-party in the campagna, in a small osteria in the via appia nuova. ahlin, heggen, gram, and miss palm, the danish nurse, made up the party.
from the tram terminus they walked two and two along the sunny, white road. spring was in the air, the brown campagna had a greyish-green tinge; the daisies, which had been blossoming more or less all the winter, began to spread all over in silvery spots, and the impatient clusters of tender green shoots on the elder bushes along the fences had grown.
the larks hung trembling high up in the blue-white sky, and there was a haze over the city and the ugly, red blocks of houses it had sprinkled over the plain. beyond the massive arches of the canal, the alban mountains, with small white villages, showed faintly through the mist.
jenny walked in front with gram, who carried her grey dust-coat. she was radiantly beautiful in a black silk dress; he had never seen her in anything but her grey dress or coat and skirt. it seemed to him almost as if he walked with a new and strange woman. her waist was so small in the shiny black material that her form above it seemed round and supple; the bodice was cut open in a deep square in front, and her hair and skin were dazzlingly fair. she wore a big black hat, in which he had seen her before, but without specially noticing it. even her pink beads looked quite different with the black dress.
they ate out of doors in the sunshine under the vine, which threw a shadow in the form of a fine bluish net over the tablecloth. miss palm and heggen wanted to decorate[79] the table with daisies; the macaroni was quite ready, but the others had to wait until they came back with the decorations. the food was good and the wine was excellent; cesca had brought fruit, and coffee, which she was going to make herself, to make sure it should be good. after dinner miss palm and heggen investigated marble reliefs and inscriptions that had been found on the site and fitted into the masonry of the house. after a while they disappeared round a corner. ahlin remained sitting at the table smoking, his eyes half shut against the glare.
the osteria lay at the foot of a small hill. gram and jenny walked up the slope at random. she picked small wild flowers that grew in the yellow earth.
“there are masses of these at monte testaccio. have you been there, mr. gram?”
“yes, several times. i went there yesterday to have a look at the protestant cemetery. the camelia trees are covered with blossoms, and in the old part i found anemones in the grass.”
“yes, they are out now. somewhere at via cassia, beyond ponte molle, there are lots of them. gunnar gave me some almond blossoms this morning; they have them already at the spanish stairs, but i daresay they are forced.”
they reached the top and began strolling about. jenny walked with her eyes on the ground; the short grass was springing up everywhere, and variegated thistle-leaves and some big, silver-grey ones were basking in the sun. they walked towards a solitary wall, which rose out of a mound of gravel; the campagna extended around them in every direction, grey-green below the light spring skies and the warbling larks. its boundaries were lost in the haze of the sun. the city beyond them seemed a mirage only, the mountains and the clouds melted together, and the yellow arches of the canal appeared, only to vanish again in the mist. the countless ruins were reduced[80] to small, glistening pieces of walls, strewn about on the green, and pines and eucalyptus trees by the red or ochre houses stood solitary and dark on this fine day of early spring.
“do you remember the first morning i was here, miss winge? i imagined i was disappointed, and i believed it to be because i had longed so much and dreamt so much that everything i was going to see would be colourless and poor, compared to my dreams. have you noticed how on a summer day, when you lie in the sun with your eyes closed, all colours seem grey and faded when you first open them? it is because the eyes are weakened by not being used and cannot at once grasp the complexity of the colours as they really are; the first impression is incomplete and poor. do you understand what i mean?”
jenny nodded.
“it was my case in the beginning here. i was overwhelmed by rome. then i saw you passing by, tall and fair and a stranger. i did not pay any attention to francesca then—not till we were in the tavern. when i sat there with you, who were all strange to me—it was really the first time such a thing happened to me. up till then my association with strangers had been only an occasional meeting on my way between school and home. i was confused; it seemed impossible to speak to people. i almost longed for home and all it meant—and i longed for rome as i knew it from hearsay and from pictures. i thought i could not settle down to anything but look at pictures made by others—read books other men had written—made the best use of the work of others and live in a world of fiction. i felt desperately lonely among you. you once said something about being lonely; i understand now what you meant.
“do you see that tower over there? i went there yesterday. it is the remnant of a fortress from the middle ages, from feudal times. there are a good many of them in the city and round about. you see sometimes an almost windowless wall[81] built in between the houses in a street. it is a bit of the rome of the robber barons. we know comparatively little about that time, but i am very interested in it at present. i find in the records names of dead people, of whom sometimes nothing is known but their names, and i long to know more about them. i dream of rome in the middle ages, when they fought in the street with fierce cries, and the town was full of robber-castles, where their womenfolk were shut up—daughters of those wild beasts and with their blood in their veins. sometimes they broke away from their prison and mixed in the life, such as it was, inside the red-black walls. we know so little about those times, and the german professors do not take great interest in them, because they cannot be remade so as to convey abstract ideas; they are simply naked facts.
“what a mighty current of life has washed over this country!—breaking into billows round every spot with town and castle on it. and yet the mountains rise above it bare and desolate. think of the endless number of ruins here in the campagna only; of the stacks of books written on the history of italy—and on the history of the whole world for that matter—and think of the hosts of dead people we know. yet the result of all these waves of life, rolling one after the other, is very, very small. it is all so wonderful!
“i have talked to you so often and you have talked to me; yet i don’t really know you. you are just as much a mystery to me as that tower.—i wish you could see how your hair shines where you are standing now. it is glorious.
“has it ever struck you that you have never seen your face? only the reflection of it in the glass. we can never see what our face looks like when we sleep or shut our eyes—isn’t it odd? it was my birthday the day i met you; today it is yours. are you glad to be twenty-eight, you who think that every year completed is a gain?”
“i did not say that. i said that you may have had so much[82] to go through the first twenty-five years of your life that you are glad they are over.”
“and now?”
“now....”
“yes; do you know exactly what you want to attain during the next year—what use you are going to make of it? life seems to me so overwhelmingly rich in possibilities that even you, with all your strength, cannot avail yourself of them. does it ever occur to you, and does it make you sad, jenny?”
she only smiled in answer, and looked down. she threw the end of her cigarette on the ground and put her foot on it; her white ankle showed through the thin black stocking. she followed with her eyes a pack of sheep running down the opposite slope.
“we are forgetting the coffee, mr. gram—i am sure they are waiting for us.”
they returned to the osteria in silence; on the slope, which stretched right down to where they had been lunching, they noticed that ahlin was lying forward over the table, his head on his arms. francesca in her bright green gown bent over him, her arms round his neck, trying to lift his head.
“oh, don’t, lennart! don’t cry. i will love you. i will marry you—do you hear?—but you must not cry like that. i will marry you, and i think i can be fond of you, only don’t be so miserable.”
ahlin sobbed: “no, no—not if you don’t love me, cesca; i don’t want you to....”
jenny turned and went back along the slope. gram noticed that she flushed a deep red down to her neck. a path took them down by the other side of the house into the orchard. heggen and miss palm were chasing each other round the little fountain, splashing each other with water. miss palm shrieked with laughter. helge saw the colour again mount to jenny’s[83] face and neck as he walked behind her between the vegetable beds. heggen and miss palm had made peace.
“the same old round,” said helge; “take your partners.”
jenny nodded, with the shadow of a smile.
the atmosphere at the coffee-table was somewhat strained. miss palm alone was in good spirits. francesca tried to make conversation while they were sipping their liqueurs, and, as soon as she decently could, proposed that they should go for a walk.
the three couples made for the campagna, the distance between them increasing, until they lost sight of one another altogether among the hills. jenny walked with gram.
“where are we going really?” she said.
“we might go to the egeria grotto, for instance.”
the grotto lay in quite an opposite direction to the one chosen by the others. they started to walk across the scorched slopes to the bosco sacro, where the ancient cork trees stretched their dark foliage to the burning sun.
“i ought to have put on my hat,” said jenny, passing a hand over her hair. the ground of the sacred grove was covered with bits of paper and other litter; on the stump of a tree near the edge two ladies were seated, doing crochet work, and some little english boys played hide-and-seek behind the massive trunks. jenny and gram turned out of the grove and walked down the slope towards the ruin.
“is it worth while going down?” said jenny, and without waiting for an answer, sat down on the slope.
“no; let us stay here,” and helge lay down at her feet on the short, dry grass, took off his hat, and, steadying himself on his elbow, looked up at her in silence.
“how old is she?” he asked suddenly. “i mean cesca.”
“twenty-six.” she sat looking at the view in front of her.
“i am not sorry,” he said quietly. “you have noticed it, i[84] daresay. a month ago i might have.... she was so sweet to me once, so kind and confidential, and i was not used to that kind of thing. i took it as—well, as l’invitation à la valse, you see, but now ... i still think she is sweet, but i don’t mind in the least if she dances with somebody else.”
he was lying looking at her: “i believe it is you, jenny, i am in love with,” he said suddenly.
she turned half-way towards him, with a faint smile, and shook her head.
“yes,” said helge firmly; “i think so. i don’t know for certain, for i have never been in love before—i know that now—although i have been engaged once.” he smiled to himself. “it was one of my blunders in the old foolish days.
“this, i am sure, is love. it was you, jenny, i saw that evening—not her. i noticed you already in the afternoon when you crossed the corso. i stood there thinking that life was new, full of adventure, and just then you passed me, fair and slender, and stranger. later, when i had wandered about in this foreign town, i met you again. i also noticed cesca, of course, and no wonder i was a little flustered for a moment, but it was you i saw first. and now we are sitting here together—we two.”
her hand was close to him as she sat leaning on it; suddenly he stroked it—and she drew it away.
“you are not cross with me, are you? it is really nothing to be cross about. why should i not tell you that i believe i am in love with you? i could not resist touching your hand—i wanted to feel that it was real, for it seems to me so wonderful that you are sitting here. i do not really know you, though we have talked about many things. i know that you are clever, level-headed, and energetic—and good and truthful, but i knew that the moment i saw you and heard your voice. i don’t know any more about you now, but there is of course a great deal more to learn—and perhaps i shall never learn it.[85] but i can see for myself, for instance, that your silk skirt is glowing hot, and that if i laid my face in your lap i should burn myself.”
she made an involuntary movement with her hand across her lap.
“it attracts the sun; there are sparks in your hair, and the sunrays filter through your eyes. your mouth is quite transparent; it looks like a raspberry in the sun.”
she smiled, looking a little embarrassed.
“will you give me a kiss?” he said suddenly.
“‘l’invitation à la valse?’” she smiled lightly.
“i don’t know—but you cannot be cross with me because i ask you for one single little kiss—on a day like this. i am only telling you what i am longing for, and, after all, why could you not do it?”
she did not move.
“is there any reason why not?—i shall not try to kiss you, but i cannot see why you should not bend down for a second and give me a tiny little kiss as you sit there with the sun right on your lips. it is no more to you than when you pat a bambino on the head and give him a soldo. it is nothing to you, jenny, and to me it is all i wish for—just this moment i long for it so much,” he said, smiling.
she bent suddenly down and kissed him. only for a second did he feel her hair and lips brush his cheek, and he saw the movement of her body under the black silk as she bent down and rose again. her face, he noticed, which was smiling serenely as she kissed him, now looked embarrassed, almost frightened. he did not move, but lay still, musing contentedly in the sunshine. she became herself again.
“there, you see,” he said at last laughingly, “your mouth is exactly as before; the sun is shining on your lips, right into the blood. it was nothing to you—and i am so happy. you must not believe that i want you to think of me—i only want[86] you to let me think of you, while you may sit and think of anything in the world. others may dance—to me this is much better—if only i may look at you.”
they were both silent. jenny sat with her face turned away, looking at the campagna bathing in the sun.
as they walked back to the osteria, helge chatted merrily about all sorts of things, telling her about the learned germans he had met in the course of his work. jenny stole a glance at him now and again; he used not to be like that, so free and easy. he was really handsome as he walked, looking straight ahead, and his light brown eyes were radiant like amber in the sun.
