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 some............