One fine day in September Stellan Selamb, lieutenant of the G?ta Guards, was out at field man?uvres at Liding?n with his platoon. They had already during the cool and clear morning hours practised advancing in open formation through the broken brushwood to the right of the main road, when he gave over the command to the sergeant and, consulting his map, began to climb a steep hill path to make an attack on his own. After some searching he found another new cross road which brought him to a large, new and somewhat strange looking house, which lay alone in the midst of the dense pine wood. Stellan did not associate with architects and did not usually pay much attention to houses. But he was accustomed to safe old manor-houses which seemed to have grown out of the ground where they were stood. This house on the contrary looked as if it had fallen down from the sky with its dazzling white walls broken up in a fantastic way and its bright green roof! It was positively difficult to tell whether it was meant for a temple, a sanatorium, a museum or perhaps even an ordinary house. Anyhow Stellan hammered the antique knocker against a huge black church door densely studded with coarse nails.
A groom opened the door.
“The master is in bed, but I am to announce visitors all the same.”
He disappeared but returned at once with the message that if the lieutenant would look at the pictures for a moment 139his master would receive him. Stellan walked through several large rooms full of pictures, like picture galleries.
Some of them he knew from Percy’s old flat in town, but most of them had probably been bought during his last long journey abroad. There was both ancient and modern art, Spanish and Dutch masters and some of the most modern impressionists, but he could discover no trace of Percy’s own canvases.
“Just like him,” Stellan thought, “they are of course relegated to some old boxroom.”
At last the door into the bedroom was opened. There lay “The China Doll.” It was the same thin, refined face as before. And the same little smile, amiable, gentle and slightly reserved. Only the blue of the eyes was not as cool as before.
“Good-morning, Percy, old man, I happened to have field exercises in the neighbourhood and thought I would have a peep at your new Tusculum.”
“O, I am so pleased when somebody is kind enough to look in.”
Percy’s voice sounded strangely fragile. But Stellan did not notice it. He was so accustomed to see Percy ill. Having looked closely at the bedroom he suddenly burst out laughing. It was black and white with a vaulted ceiling and heavy carved oak furniture. The chairs seemed completely taken up with their own ornament and would no doubt have looked upon the back of anyone sitting down on them as a desecration. Percy’s bed resembled most nearly a catafalque and it was standing in an alcove which looked like a chapel in the church of “The Third Kingdom.”
“I say, this looks rather as if it was prepared for the eternal sleep,” Stellan exclaimed. “For a marble statue.”
Percy’s smile was a shade more wan.
“Yes, perhaps you are right....”
Stellan opened the door of a W. C. which the uninitiated 140would have taken for some kind of confession box. He suddenly grew furious and felt a desire to say something indecent; he wisely kept it back however.
“Excuse me, Percy, old chap, but do you really feel at home here?”
“No, I can’t say I do.”
“Well, then, why the devil do you have it in this style, then?”
Percy looked at the ceiling of the alcove which was painted all over with pentagrams and spirals.
“Well, my architect did it,” he muttered resignedly. “He wanted it like this. And I dared not oppose him. It is so difficult when you are not able to say that you cannot afford it. It brings so many responsibilities. Do you know, Stellan, I don’t think it is possible really to will something, really to be something for your own sake if you have lots of money.”
Stellan thought that if that was the difficulty he was ready to ease him of his burden.
“Poor Percy,” he laughed sarcastically. “The prisoner of wealth, for life.”
But then he remembered the refined little boy dressed in white behind the gates at Stonehill. And it struck him that there might perhaps be a bitter blighting truth in his exclamation. And that Percy perhaps was a shade more serious this time than usual. Stellan drummed, a little embarrassed, on the rough carved block of black oak that constituted the foot of the bed.
“I say, Percy, how are you really?”
Percy smiled an apologetic smile:
“Well, to be frank, I had a rather serious h?morrhage of the lungs a week and a half ago ... my chest has always been weak, you know.”
For various reasons Stellan was horrified:
“But your footman did not tell me so. I had not the slightest idea that....”
141“Well, I don’t want to advertise my illness.”
“What does the medicine man say?”
“He shakes his head and says that I must lie quiet in bed for the present, only lie quiet.... But dash it all, Stellan, don’t take it so seriously. I myself am rather pleased. I have never been anything but a dilettante. But this will perhaps be my opportunity. A real danger! An honest compulsion! Sometimes I feel as if I would really be able to do something after all. Oh, there is a curious excitement in the fever and the imminence of death.”
Stellan was just pondering how best in these circumstances he might decorously prepare Percy for the comparative relief to be derived from backing a bill for five thousand. Then a head with fair straggling hair and broad good-natured features peeped in through the door and disappeared again with a smile of apology at the sight of Stellan. It was the nurse. There were red spots in Percy’s cheeks and his voice sounded worried and nervous:
“If you knew how I suffer from that woman,” he whispered. “She is not at all unkind to me. On the contrary. But I can’t stand people with that sort of stolid face. I shiver when she touches me.”
“Why don’t you send her away?”
“No, it is so difficult. I can’t bring myself to do it. Once she is here she has certain claims on me.”
Percy was silent for a moment, then he stretched out his hand entreatingly:
“Perhaps you could help me, Stellan? Hasn’t the Army some connection with the Red Cross? Oh, if you could find me in some way a more bearable face!”
Stellan suddenly had an idea, a strange half-impossible idea which, however, at bottom seemed to him to be curiously charged with infinite possibilities. “Hedvig!” he thought. “Hedvig!” He had to make an effort to recover his normal, smooth and kindly tone.
“I could speak to my sister Hedvig,” he said. “She is a 142nurse. But I tell you beforehand that she has a sombre and strange temper. But her face is really something for an artist to look upon.”
Percy became quite excited and was filled with touching gratitude:
“A face, a temperament, a human being! Oh, how grateful I should be to you!”
“Good, I’ll speak to her if she can get free. Anyhow this grinning monster must be got rid of!”
With this Stellan took a warm good-bye. But at the door he turned round with his most charming and unconcerned expression.
“By the way, Percy, I am going about with a damned little bill in my hip pocket. You would not like by any chance to put your scrawl across it?”
“With pleasure, old boy, with pleasure.”
Stellan stepped whistling out of Hill’s villa and, in excellent temper, resumed his command over his dusty and perspiring platoon.
The same evening Stellan went to see Laura. He had got into the habit of running up to her to talk things over before he settled anything important.
Laura was dressing to go to the theatre. He helped her to fasten her frock behind.
“Percy has had a h?morrhage of the lungs and is dissatisfied with his nurse. I offered to get Hedvig for him. What do you think about it?”
“Poor Percy!”
“But how shall I persuade Hedvig?”
“You must talk about sacrifice, and give her an opportunity to look long-suffering.”
Stellan rang up the Red Cross at once. There he was given another telephone number and rang again. A weak tremulous voice replied:
“Sister Hedvig? Yes, I’ll tell her.”
143Hedvig came to the telephone. Stellan presented his case. He made Percy as ill as possible and begged her to sacrifice herself for their old friend. Hedvig’s distant voice assumed a peculiarly hard resigned note.
“I don’t think I can.”
“But why?”
“Well, at least not at once.”
“Why?”
She lowered her voice:
“No, it won’t be ... all over here for another few days....”
“All over!” Then a human being lay dying at the other end of the wire! Stellan felt a cold shiver. He looked at Laura, who sat there in low-cut evening frock polishing her nails. He looked around him in the coquettish little room. All over in a few days. All over! How curiously Hedvig had said that. It was as if she had wanted to force the thought of death on him like a tablespoonful of medicine.
“Well, ... I may tell poor Percy that you will come when you ... you are free?”
“Yes, I suppose I must give up my idea of resting a little.”
Then she rang off.
Stellan hung up the receiver.
“Yes, she will go to Percy as soon as her present patient has had time to die. And it is Hedvig who is leading such a life! Really I can’t understand it....”
Laura pursed up her lips whilst she pulled on her glove. She looked unusually free from any sentimentality at that moment.
“Hedvig is frightened,” she said.
Stellan felt nervous.
“Frightened? Damned funny way of being frightened. What do you really mean?”
144Laura’s answer came short, sharp and pleased. One could see how she had worried about this matter and at last found a satisfactory explanation:
“Who is it that runs about in the cemeteries at midnight?” she said. “Precisely those who are afraid of ghosts. Others have no business there.”
And then Mrs. Laura went to the theatre.
It was a fact that for a year and a half past Hedvig had been a trained Red Cross nurse and that she was already one of those who was sent to the more difficult cases and that she herself desired it so.
To her fellow nurses she was an enigma. They felt at once that she was not one of those simple good women whose hearts call them to serve, care for, and struggle against suffering and death. As they knew that she had gone straight from her sister’s wedding to the hospital the younger nurses at once concluded that Hedvig’s secret was unrequited love, but the older and more experienced nurses shook their heads.
The doctors also discussed Sister Hedvig. Men will always discuss women such as Sister Hedvig. After long discussions which were not free from criticism, though they were supposed to be scientific, they too, turned to love as explanation. And they of course protested against such childish nonsense as women’s talk of an unhappy love. A young psychiatrist had the word last. He said nothing cynical. He would perhaps have done so ten years earlier. But now cynicism was no longer the fashion—at least among the psychiatrists—that was left to the surgeons and other humbler craftsmen.
“Sister Hedvig,” the young doctor said, “is a very interesting case. As a matter of fact she cannot look a healthy man full in the eyes. But all the same she at once chose the male division in the hospital. She simply had to go there, she was really incapable of doing her duty to the women patients. What else is that but a case of 145timid, wounded, sickly eroticism slinking away to sick people. She feels a secret relief in seeing men suffer and die. She sacrifices them to Eros—probably by a religious perversion of her feelings.”
Thus spoke the young doctor and did not observe his own involuntary confession of having looked very deep into Sister Hedvig’s eyes.
Perhaps there was something in what he said after all. Though Laura had probably said the truest word. The fundamental fact in Sister Hedvig’s nature was still fear. And this fear had not, as in Peter’s case, spread over the surface in the shape of pretended good nature and a magnificent tissue of lies. No, in Hedvig it grew inwards in the dark. And this growth she felt as an ever-present gnawing ache in her inmost being. In the end this dark groping fear had become so much a part of her that every glimpse of happiness, liberty, spaciousness only seemed to her a mockery. But her suffering was terrible just because of its indefiniteness, its formlessness and its teeming darkness. Under these circumstances she must have felt every really definite cause for fear as a sort of relief, a release. He who sees, need not brood. That was why the sick bed and the death bed held such a strange attraction for her. That was why her expression would sometimes reveal such curious relief in the presence of the most awful struggles. That was why she closed the eyes of the dead with such pale and still solemnity. She herself interpreted it as the brief precious peace of heart before God after service and sacrifice. During her training as a nurse Sister Hedvig had turned more and more away from the world and relapsed into religious gloom. She walked about like a living protest against every form of levity and vanity.
And now she stood on a cold and clear September day by Percy’s bed at Hill Villa.
Percy stared at her dark eyes and pale cheeks. It was 146really an unusual pallor. One did not know whether she burned or froze.
“And so you are Stellan’s sister,” he muttered. “We must have met, as children at least, when I was still living at Stonehill. Strange that I did not notice your looks, then.”
“I have always kept apart,” she answered coldly.
Percy smiled a little apologetic smile.
“But now ... now Sister Hedvig comes here and wants to help me, poor wretch....”
“I will try to do my duty,” answered Sister Hedvig.
Percy sank back with half-closed eyes on his pillow. It suddenly seemed to him inconceivable that a woman with such a face should witness his frailty, help him to change his shirt and reach him the basin. “I shall have a high temperature this evening,” he thought. “But that doesn’t matter. I shan’t be bored anyhow.”
Hedvig left the sick room on some errand. When she came back Percy had already managed to allot a place to the newcomer in his world.
“Now I have got it,” he said contentedly. “Sister Hedvig is a Spanish saint. Yes? I have seen Sister Hedvig hanging on a church wall in Toledo.... Or perhaps it is something Byzantine,” he added thoughtfully. “Yes, you would look well in a mosaic ... on a ground of gold ... or perhaps a cold greenish blue....”
Sister Hedvig received this speech, which was to her partly incomprehensible, partly offensive, in silence. She had never before met a dilettante patron of art of Percy’s type. She was highly distressed and confused by the whole atmosphere of Hill’s villa. She walked with lowered eyes and frightened steps through these rooms in which the walls were covered with impudently brilliant coloured pictures. I won’t even mention all the nudes that met her gaze everywhere without trace of shame, in strange and challenging forms. To her the nude was now exclusively 147associated with sickness and death. She could not and would not think of it except under fever cooling bandages or under the surgeon’s knife. And here it insolently glowed with health or made a pretence of harmony and peace which could be nothing but a delusion and abomination. It was incredible. But that was not all. Even from the landscapes it seemed to her that there emanated something of sin and danger. The mixture of French impressionism and national lyricism of that time, which nowadays appears to us so harmless and innocent, still seemed then alarmingly modern, and Hedvig also found in these pictures a defiant worldliness quite different from that of the old brown-gravy landscapes which hung on the walls at Selambshof. Art with its flavour of sin and damnation pursued her even into the sickroom. Opposite the bed there hung a picture of a handsome naked youth who smiled an ecstatic smile though his breast was pierced with cruel arrows.
“Isn’t he beautiful, Saint Sebastian?” said Percy proudly. “I discovered him in Naples in an old Jew’s shop. The painter is unknown, but you can see at once that he must have been a contemporary of Bernini. The typical mixture of sensualism and ecstasy of the baroque style cannot be mistaken. My Sebastian is a male cousin of Saint Teresa of the Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. His breast is full of the arrows with which the beautiful angel threatens her. One does not quite know if it is the arrows of love or of martyrdom.”
Sister Hedvig looked at the floor and shook her head:
“I don’t understand anything of all this. And I don’t want to understand it either. I am not here to look at pictures.”
In this strange world she had come into, Percy Hill’s illness was somehow the only thing she had to hold on to and she felt hurt that he did not take it seriously enough.
Percy looked quite frightened.
148“Dear, dear, surely I have not hurt you, Sister, in any way. I didn’t mean to at all.” Then he added with a pale, little smile: “I must talk about art, you see, otherwise my temperature will rise....”
She did not give an answering smile.
She continued all along to be stiff, silent and suspicious. In his weakness and helplessness he suffered at first from this lack of sympathy. If he had been an artist he would perhaps have felt a genuine hatred for her. But he was only a dilettante and an amateur, so he not only suffered it, but even began to be attracted by the gloomy and rigid creature as he might have been by some old sombre family treasure which had been hidden from the world in some dusty and sunless corner. Yes, exactly like some gloomy treasure which dumbly reminds us of the dreams and passions of a bygone age. And which is not for sale amongst the rubbish of today.
Thus far had Percy come after a week’s dilettante analysis of Hedvig’s personality. By this time he had entirely ceased to speak about art. But one evening when she stood by the window staring out on the hard and wind-swept autumn sky the expression on her face suddenly brought an idea into his head:
“Sister Hedvig,” he exclaimed, “won’t you read to me a little out of the Old Testament?”
And he rang for a footman and sent him for a new illustrated edition de luxe bible from the library.
But Hedvig refused at first. She was afraid of the echo from the luxurious rooms with their works of art just outside. She was afraid of his vain and scoffing secret thoughts. But Percy was persistent. He told her about his childhood when his mother would sometimes read aloud to him out of the school bible in the evenings. It sounded almost as if in his strange way he took the scriptures seriously. And at last to her own surprise Hedvig gave in. His face lit up:
149“Take Deborah’s song,” he begged, as keen as any child to hear its favourite story.
And Hedvig read in a low voice of Deborah who led the chiefs of Israel, whose soul went forth in strength. But there was something too mournful and cold in her voice. Percy’s sensitive ear suspected old Kristin’s influence, the deep-rooted fatalism of the people. He was however afraid of hurting her and let her finish the chapter.
“That is too hard and bright,” he muttered. “There is too much victory for us two, Sister Hedvig. Take something more difficult and more gloomy.”
And Hedvig read on. She did not know why herself. Perhaps she had a feeling in her inmost heart that he in some way seemed to understand her. But this no longer alarmed her shyness. He was so weak and helpless. He lay there in the shadow of death. He would never rise up and boldly cast her secrets into her face. So she read on. She read of how Jehu annihilated the whole house of Ahab and of how the dogs ate Jezebel on the fields of Jezreel. And she read in the book of Job how man, born of woman, lives a short time full of care, how his illness rises up and bears witness against him and over his eyes rests the shadow of death. To the grave he must say: “Thou art my father,” and to the worms of putrefaction: “my mother, my sister.” And she read in Isaiah about the earth which was consumed by the curse, how the sap of the vine sorrowed and the vine languished. Plaintive cries are heard over the wine and all joy is like a sun that has set—all joy of the earth has disappeared. Dangers and pitfalls and snares lie in wait for you, inhabitants of earth! Earth is utterly broken down, and shall reel like a drunkard, it shall be clean dissolved.
Percy lay quite silent and looked at Hedvig. He followed unconsciously the movements of her lips. This is absolutely sincere, he thought. She is a being from the past. She belongs to an age when fear formed a great part of human 150life. It is strange to hear the Jewish cast of thought from her lips, persistent as the groans of a sufferer, bitter as the knowledge which is hammered into you by blow upon blow. Only the pressure of the world and sad experience....
And he felt a great joy as if he had succeeded at last in finding a really precious antique for his collection.
It was getting dusk and Hedvig did not see the print any longer. She put down the heavy book. She had a sudden feeling of relief as after confession. Though faint and transient it was nevertheless something unique in her life.
But already the next morning Hedvig felt a dull anxiety at having given herself up. And she was more curt and silent and reserved than usual.
In November Percy grew somewhat worse. He was often troubled by coughs and his temperature curve showed a tendency to rise. The doctor shook his head when his patient spoke of going to Switzerland.
“Not before the spring,” he said. “Now we must be good and keep quiet and drink milk.”
Percy did not like the doctor very much. He represented the prose side of his illness. But Hedvig looked meaningly at her patient when the doctor had gone. She looked at him as if he had been a child who had wanted to run away from school but who had been brought to reason. She had grown with his weakness. She nursed him diligently and carefully but with an expression of solemn superiority. “There, you see,” she seemed to say, “after all, your vanity won’t help you. Of what use now is your art and your worl............