I.
HOW MARIE LARSEN EXORCISED A DEMON.
There has been a mighty storm; it has been raging for two days,—a storm in which the demon of drink has reigned like a sinister god in the big white house, and the frightened women have cowered away, driven before the hot blast of the breath upon which curses danced, and the blaze of ire in the lurid eyes of the master. Only the pale little mistress has stood unmoved through the whirlwind of his passion. Who knows? Maybe that roused him to higher, madder paroxysms of impotent rage; for he abuses her most when he loves her most,—a way man has, he being a creature of higher understanding.
All yesterday the bells jangled, until one by one a violent jerk snapped the connecting wire, and hurled them with a last echoing crash on the hall floor. The serving-men kept out of it, as men do. The horses cowered to the sides of their boxes, and set their hind legs hard, and pointed their ears when they heard his halting step. The great hounds shrank shiveringly into their boxes, and refused to come forth at his threatening call; and when he lashed their houses in his rage they winced at each blow, and showed their fangs when he turned away.
Night brought little rest, for lamps and candles were lit in every room. Champagne replaced brandy; then brandy, champagne; and then both mingled in one glass. And in measure as the liquid fire was tossed down the poor parched throat, the brain grew clearer; the intellect, with its Rabelaisque fertility of diseased imagining, keener; the sting the tongue carried more adder-like, and the ingenuity of its blasphemies more devilish. The tired women crept to bed at midnight, to start in their sleep at the hoot of every night-owl, the flitter of every bat, and the whistle of every passing steamer,—all save the little mistress of the great house, with its stores of linen and silver, its flower-filled garden, its farmyard with lowing sleek kine, its meadows in prime heart heavy with the sweetness of red clover, its line of brown nets pegged down to catch the incoming eager salmon at the mouth of the fjord, and the wood with its peaceful nooks of cool green and its winding paths, with their brown carpet of last year's pine-needles and fir-cones. She sits wearily in her low chair, with her thin hands clasped on her sharp knees and her shawl drawn round her shoulders, for in spite of the fire the first hour of the morning sends its chill breath into the room. He is lying on the sofa talking to himself, emphasizing his words with his heavy stick. A table with decanters and glasses stands next him.
"Women! ay, women! man's curse. At the end of the race they beat us always. We get one soft spot with our mother's milk, and well they know it, well they know it. What a man I would have been And curse follows curse, and worse than that; as from the lips of the stepdaughter in the fairy tale, the words that drop from his lips are the toads and vipers of filth. "If one could forget! There was one, one long ago,—I might have spared her; she pleaded hard against me. Why do I think of her to-night? It is years, years ago. Ah, but I was big and beautiful in those days! She, she was an innocent little thing. I fascinated her like a snake, and I can see her eyes. They were blue, with long lashes. I can see them now, curse them! She and the child, gibbering idiots both! Oh [groan], curses on you for a devil, to plague me thus! Keep away! I say, keep away! How the ghosts dance about the room! There is another one I had forgotten. Light more candles, more! Mutter, mutter,—a sourdine epic of Hades. She closes her eyes. The stick whirls past her, striking a vase off a table near her; she gets up, hands it to him without a word. He hiccoughs and laughs; and then he heaves one sob, and cries bitterly, with the great tears gushing forth in jets. She picks up his handkerchief and puts it into his hand, and he looks at her with a piteous softening of his wild eyes; and he says quietly, hiccoughing all the while like a child tired after a fit of passion,—for man in all his passions has a little of the inconsequent child; it is only woman who sins with clear seeing,— "I am a brute, I know it; but you don't know what it is to see the ghosts of sins stirring in a man's soul like maggots in a dead rat. And the children, that is the worst of all. Oh, God! my poor little girls! What will become of them? Oh, oh!" "But you settled for them!" soothing with her weary voice. "But you settled for them all right!" "Oh, yes, the money's all right; oh, Lord, yes! I settled, I settled," with the reiteration of drunken gravity, "I settled that. But the mother was a brute, a heartless brute; and she was a lady too, ay, in her own right. And she never asked a word about them, not one word; it was I, I, poor disreputable brute, that put them to nurse, and I loathed her for it. Ah, if you women knew what a hold simple goodness has on us! I met her once, I had one at each hand; I used to go to see them. Oh, they don't know, they don't know, God forbid! and she lay back in her victoria and looked at us, curse her! She has children now, legitimate ones, and my little girls don't know I'm alive. Oh, my poor little girls! They are so pretty! Mind you bury that locket with me; don't open it! Yes, yes, I know; don't think I don't trust you,—only woman I ever trusted in the world. But I'm afraid for them: curse this water in my eyes [sob]; don't you imagine I'm crying, I'm not! It's whiskey, pure, unadulterated [hiccough] whiskey; but I can't help thinking of them. The others, ay, Lord! how many others? I don't care about them, I settled for them; they weren't ladies, they'll get on well enough; but these my pretty little ones, I'm afraid for them, afraid for them! I, who spared no man's daughter, how can I tell if some brute won't hurt mine? Oh, God! oh, God! how can they be good with such a father and such a mother?" He drinks as he speaks, and pours out in grief and rage a wild torrent of prayers and curses. "Ay, verily, it's reaping the whirlwind! How the faces crowd round! they always come with the gray morning light,—women's faces, girls' faces, child-girls' faces—oh, damn you! hide me from them! hold me tight and keep them away! put your arms right round me! you are clean, a clean little thing,—they can't come through you." And she holds the throbbing head in her arms, and hides the wild eyes in her breast, and she feels as if there is a rustle of trailing skirts about her, and waving hair and a feel of women; and then he tears himself out of her clasp, and she falls, bruising herself sorely; and he throws over the table, with a shatter of falling glass, and bounds up the stairs, snatching a riding-whip out of the hall; and he beats its gold head into jagged shreds of glitter on the maids' door, and shouts to them to rise and come down. He'll show them he is master in his own house! He has eaten nothing all day,—no, nor for many days! down at once, or he'll know why, and cook, cook his dinner and light fires,—yes, fires everywhere! What does he pay them for, lazy sluts! what does he keep house for? And so, man, the master mind of creation, asserts his authority, and the maids troop down, heavy-eyed and stupid with sleep; and bake and roast, and giggle hysterically under their breaths, and tell stories of other masters they have served, and goings on, and grind fresh coffee-beans, and have white bread and lump sugar and cold fowl, for there is no one to say them nay, and the larders are full of good things; and only the pale little mistress knows how near the grand place is drawing to bankruptcy. Morning came, and the table was decked and the dinner served, and taken out again untasted; and another storm simmered all through the sunny forenoon, to burst like a hurricane over the house at noon. The kitchen is empty and the fire has gone out; a wreck of crockery shows where the storm raged worst. The girls flew before the thunder of voice and flash of whip; the Swedish gardener left his birthright of song untouched, and followed them: he is skylarking with them now up in the great loft; they have pulled up the ladder, and are pelting one another with last year's hay. The cow-girl, a wench from Hittedal, lured the cattle and goats and long-legged heifer calves deeper into the woods with her quaint Lokke song, calling,— "Come, sweet breath, come cowslip, come rich milk, Aa lukelei aa lura, lura, luralai!" Only the housemaid, who is consumptive, and who stays for the little mistress's sake, her own days in the land being numbered, has taken her Bible up to the lookout in the wood, and laid it open on the stone table. She is crushing the Linnae, as she kneels, into a fragrant incense, rocking to and fro to the somber rhythm of the last book of Ecclesiastes. And the master of them all is sitting exhausted in his big chair, and Marie Larsen and he are doing battle. She came on the scene just as the grand retreat was sounded, and took the enemy by stratagem. She lifted the little mistress bodily up, and carried her upstairs, leaving him, as she puts it, "to ramp like a bull of Basan below." She lays her on her bed, takes off her shoes, pulls down the blind, and pours out some drops out of a little blue bottle she carries in her pocket, talking as she might to a child: "There, Tulla, take naptha drops, very good drops; you go sleep, good sleep; Marie mind him, Marie not afraid," and with a final pat she goes down. He is laughing between his oaths at the stampede of petticoats, and he holds out his arms when she comes in. She is a little square woman, between fifty and sixty, with a ruby button of a nose, hair, that oil and age has robbed of its brilliant red, drawn smoothly back into a tight screw at the back of her broad head. Her eyes are a fishy green gray, the left eyelid droops; when she thinks you are not looking, a sly elusive gleam brightens them, her pursed lips loosen, and if you happen to see it, you think that there may be something after all in the stories the gossips whisper of Marie Larsen. Her dress is exquisitely neat, her apron snowy. No one in the district can make such a suprême of fish as Marie; no one can beat her at roasting a capercailzie and serving it with sour cream sauce, or brew such caudles and possets for a lying-in, or bake such meats for a funeral feast. And what if there be an old-time tale of a brat accidentally smothered? And what if the Amtmanden (superior magistrate), he who had the sickly wife, did send Marie to Germany to learn cooking? Well, he had money to spare, and was always freehanded. And if Nils Pettersen did write home and say that he saw her in Hamburg at a trade—well, other than cooking, sure Nils Pettersen was a bit of a liar anyhow, and good cooking covers a multitude of frailties. And if her nose was red and her breath smelt of cloves, who could say they ever saw her buy a bottle of akavit,—and that was more than could be said of all the other temperance leaguers. She had a nice cottage, with marigolds and curly-mint and none-so-prettys nodding down the garden paths; and if you went inside it was very respectable, and you could not fail to notice the large brass-bound Bible on a crochet-square on top of the mahogany chest of drawers, with a sprig of palm marking the gospel of the previous Sunday. And no one answered the responses more loudly, or confessed more openly at revival times, or quoted Scripture more aptly to the confusion of a neighbor than Jomfru Marie Larsen. And then she had seen life too, and told them round the oven in winter over a cup of good coffee "tales that were human," just to warn them what risks they might run if they should be tempted to stray to the ungodly cities of the wicked world outside. She stands and smiles at him. "Arcades ambo! Blackguards both!" quotes he, pointing to a glass. She pours him out a measure and blinks, and fills a wine-glass with raw spirit for herself, and clinks glasses and sips like a connoisseur; and then she takes out her knitting and sets the needles flying. So they sit awhile; his last grand charge has taxed him, but the quiet maddens him. "Where's the Frue?" he asks, "the Frue?" She lays her head sideways on her hand and closes her eyes, saying in English: "No can have Fruen; she sick, no can have her; be good, Marie tell you a tale." She gets up and shuts the doors; he roars at her and tries to rise, but his knees fail him; he sinks back into the chair and begins to swear. She knits away, and commences in Norwegian a sing-song recitative like the drowsy buzz of a fly on a pane. "Yesterday we had a bazaar, a bazaar in the school-house,—a bazaar for the poor black heathens in Africa, for the poor black heathens lost in the darkness of unbelief, and ignorant of the saving of the Lamb. Oh, it was a blessed work!" A savage roar from him; but she goes on unheeding with her narrative:— "And there were tables, with lots of things to be sold; and there were tables with refreshments; and there were wreaths and flags upon the walls, and godly texts and paper roses, yellow and red." She draws out each word to spin the yarn longer, and he curses her for a Jezebel and foams with rage, and she sips her cognac with a deeper droop of eyelid and slower click of needle, and proceeds with her tale:— "And we had hymns, and the kapelan [curate] played the harmonium; and then he held a little edifying discourse, and the school children sang, and Marie had to hand round refreshments, and oh it was a rousing day! And there was Frue[1] Magistrate Holmsen, and Frue Assessor Schwartz, and Frue Custom-House Chief's lady and her sister Fröken Dase, she of the long nose and pinched waist, and her engaged the Candidat. And there was Frue Doctor Barthelsen, and Frue General-Dealer Steen and daughter, with a high frill to hide the evils in her neck, and Frue Insurance Agent—" She dodges a glass adroitly, and raises her voice to drown his shriek of what the merry devil she means. "Insurance Agent Hansen, and the Kaptein of the 'Sea Gull'—S-s-s, you be quiet, Marie tell you tale. There was M'am Sörensen and fat M'am Larsen,—she's going to have her twelfth, and Larsen only third mate,—and M'am Johnsen and all the young gentlemen and ladies, and oh it was a glorious sight!" She starts a key higher, for he is purple with fury and exertion,— "And, and we had coffee two-pence a cup, and chocolade [with a long-drawn stress on the 'lade'] and Brus-selzers and lemonade and fruit juice and temperance beer—No, no! you be quiet, Marie tell tale!" He is struggling till the veins stand in cords to get out of his chair, but in vain; he points to his glass in desperation. She refills it and her own. "Yes, temperance beer, a penny a glass; and we had white bread and brown bread and currant buns and Berlin kringels and ginger-nuts and little cakes with hundreds and thousands on top! And oh it was grand!" She is yelling louder and louder, and he is swearing deeper, and the battle shows no signs of ceasing. "And then we sold all sorts of things, and drew numbers, and had a lucky bag; and Hans Jacobsen played on the melodeon; and missionary Hansen told us about the poor blacks and all his blessed work, and how the Lord guided his footsteps through the sandy wastes, and how he baptized a chief and all his wives in the waters of faith. And Nils Pettersen says they took out more raw alcohol and spent gun-powder and spoilt cotton goods than the fear of God; and that the 'Bird o' Faith' cleared one hundred per cent on her freight. But Nils Pettersen was always a liar; and oh it was a blessed thing to do all that for the heathen blacks! And then the kapelan spoke again, a touching discourse!" And she refills her glass, dodging his stick and watching him out of the tail of her eye as she turns the heel of her stocking, and repeats the whole of the sermon. His vocabulary is exhausted, and he is inventing the weirdest oaths, hurling them forth, a deep accompaniment to her shriller sermon, with its sanctimonious sing-song tune and unctuous phrasing; for she is, perhaps unwittingly, mimicking the kapelan to the life. He is getting tired and drowsy, the cognac is rising to her head, and even a kapelan's sermon must draw to a close; and as a mother will change her lullaby into a quick hushoo, and pat mechanically with a drowsy nod as the child drops to sleep, so Marie puts her knitting tidily into her apron pocket, and folding her withered old hands breaks into a hymn. He opens his eyes languidly, and protests feebly with a last damn; but Marie has exorcised the devil this time. His jaw drops, and muttering softly, he falls into heavy sleep; and she sings on, till her head too droops on her breast, and her quavering old woman's voice dies away in an abortive allelujah! And the motes dance in the golden bar of a waning sun-ray that pierces the room and crosses the motionless figures; and above stairs the little mistress is wrapped in rare, delicious, dreamless slumber. And I like to think that the recording angel registered that sleep to the credit of Jomfru Marie Larsen!