XIII
The house was slowly turning in for the night. Heavy trucks rattled on the street. Boys whistled piercingly. The outer door was closed thunderously. The walls shook with the tread of a hundred feet. In the yard some one was driving nails into a box. Somewhere a discordant voice was singing. Tumult arose from the public houses at the corners. A bestial laugh sounded from above.
Christian opened the window. It was warm. Groups of workingmen came from Malmöer Street and scattered. At one corner there was a green-grocer’s shop. In front of it stood an old woman with a lidless basket, in which there were dirty vegetables and a dead chicken with a bloody neck. Christian could see these things, because the light of the street lamp fell on them.
“She’ll take the child for four thousand,” said Karen.
Surreptitiously Christian glanced at the cradle. The infant both repelled and attracted him. “You had better keep it,” he said.
Hollow tones could be heard from the adjoining flat. Hofmann had come home. He was talking, and a clear boyish treble answered him.
The clock ticked. Gradually the confused noises of the house blended into a hum.
Karen sat down at the table and strung glass beads. Her hair had recently become even yellower and more touselled; but her features had a firmer modelling. Her face, no longer swollen and puffed from drinking, was slimmer and showed purer tints.
She looked at Christian, and, for a moment, she had an almost mad feeling; she yearned to know some yearning. It was like the glowing of a last spark in an extinguished charcoal stove.
The spark crimsoned and died.
“You were going to tell me about Hilde Karstens and your foster-father, Karen,” Christian said persuasively. “You made a promise.”
“For God’s sake, leave me alone! It’s so long ago I can’t remember about it!” She almost whined the words. She held her head between her hands and rested her elbows on her knees. Her sitting posture always had a boastful lasciviousness. Thus women sit in low public houses.
Minutes passed. Christian sat down at the table facing her. “I want to give the brat away,” she said defiantly. “I can’t stand looking at it. Come across with the four thousand—do! I can’t, I just can’t bear looking at it!”
“But strangers will let the child sicken and perhaps die,” said Christian.
A grin, half coarse and half sombre, flitted across her face. Then she grew pale. Again she saw that mirrored image of herself: it came from afar, from the very end of the shaft. She shivered, and Christian thought she was cold. He went for a shawl and covered her shoulders. His gestures, as he did so, had something exquisitely chivalrous about them. Karen asked for a cigarette. She smoked as one accustomed to it, and the way she held the cigarette and let the smoke roll out of her mouth or curl out from between pointed lips was also subtly lascivious.
Again some minutes passed. She was evidently struggling against the confession. Her nervous fingers crushed one of the glass beads.
Then suddenly she spoke: “There’s many that isn’t born at all. Maybe we’d love them. Maybe only the bad ones are born because we’re too low to deserve the good ones. When I was a little girl I saw a boy carry seven kittens in a sack to the pool to drown ’em. I was right there when he spilled them into the water. They struggled like anything and came up again and tried to get to land. But as soon as one of the little heads came up, the boy whacked at it with a stick. Six of ’em drowned, and only the ugliest of ’em managed to get into a bush and get away. The others that was drowned—they was pretty and dainty.”
“You’re bleeding,” said Christian. The broken bead had cut her hand. Christian wiped the blood with his handkerchief. She let him do it quietly, while her gaze was fixed on old visions that approached and receded. The tension was such that Christian dared scarcely breathe. Upon his lips hovered that strange, equivocal smile that always deceived men concerning his sympathies.
He said softly: “You have something definite in mind now, Karen.”
“Yes, I have,” she said, and she turned terribly pale. “You wanted to know how it was with Hilde Karstens and with the cabinet-maker. He was the man with whom my mother was living at that time. Hilde was fifteen and I was thirteen. She and I was good friends, together all the time, even on the dunes one night when the spring-tide came. The men were wild after her. Lord, she was pretty and sweet. But she laughed at ’em. She said: ‘When I’m eighteen I’m going to marry a man—a real man that can do things; till then, just don’t bother me.’ I didn’t go to the dance at the ‘Jug of Hösing’; I had to stay home and help mother pickle fish. That’s when it all happened. I could never find out how Hilde Karstens got to the mounds on the heath alone. Maybe she went willingly with the pilot’s mate. It was a pilot’s mate; that’s all we ever knew about him. He was at the ‘Jug’ for the first time that night, and, of course, he wasn’t never seen again. It was by the mounds that he must have attacked her and done her the mischief, ’cause otherwise she wouldn’t have walked out into the sea. I knew Hilde Karstens; she was desperate. That evening the waves washed her body ashore. I was there. I threw myself down and grasped her wet, dead hair. They separated me from her, but I threw myself down again. It took three men to get me back home. Mother locked me up and told me to sift lentils, but I jumped out of the window and ran to Hilde’s house. They said she’d been buried. I ran to the church yard and looked for her grave. The grave-digger showed it to me far off in a corner. They looked for me all night and found me by the grave and dragged me home. Half the village turned out to see. Because I’d run away from the lentils my mother beat me with a spade handle so that my skin peeled from my flesh. And while I lay there and couldn’t stir, she went to the schoolmaster, and they wrote a letter to the squire asking if he wouldn’t take me to work on the estate. The house was empty, and the cabinet-maker came into the kitchen where I was lying. He was drunk as a lord. He saw me stretched out there by the hearth, and stared and stared. Then he picked me up and carried me into the bedroom.”
She stopped and looked about as though she were in a strange place and as though Christian were a menacing stranger.
“He tore off my clothes, my skirts and my bodice and my shirt and everything, and his hands shook. In his eyes there was a sparkling like burning alcohol. And when I lay naked before him he stroked me with his trembling hands over and over again. I felt as if I’d have to scratch the brain out of his skull; but I couldn’t do nothing. I just felt paralyzed, and my head as heavy as iron. If I get to be as old as a tree, I’ll never forget that man’s face over me that time. A person can’t forget things like that—never in this world. And as soon as ever I could stir again, he reeled in a corner and fell down flat, and it was all dark in the room.” She gave a deep sigh. “That was the way of it. That’s how it started.”
Christian did not turn his eyes from her for the shadow of a moment.
“After that,” she went on, “people began to say, ‘Lass, your eyes are too bold.’ Well, they was. I couldn’t tell everybody why. The vicar drivelled about some secret shame and turning my soul to God. He made me laugh. When I went into service on the estate, they grudged me the food I ate. I had to wait on the children, fetch water, polish boots, clean rooms, run errands for the Madame. There was an overseer that was after me—a fellow with rheumy eyes and a hare-lip. Once at night when I got to my little room, there he was and grabbed me. I took a stone jug and broke it across his head. He roared like a steer, and everybody came hurrying in—the servants and the master and the mistress. They all screamed and howled, and the overseer tells them a whacking lie about me, and the master says: ‘Out with you, you baggage!’ Well, why not, I thought. And that very night I tied up my few rags, and off I was. But next night I slunk back, ’cause I’d found no shelter anywhere. I crept all around the house, not because I was tired or hungry, but to pay them out for what they’d done to me. I wanted to set the house on fire and burn it down and have my revenge. But I didn’t dare, and I wandered about the countryside for three days, and always at night came back to the house. I just couldn’t sleep and I’d keep seeing the fire that I ought to have lit, and the house and stables flaring up and the cattle burning and the hay flying and the beams smoking and the singed dogs tugging at their chains. And I could almost hear them whine—the dogs and the children who’d tormented me so, and the mistress who’d stood under the Christmas tree in a silk dress and given presents to everybody except to me. Oh, yes, I did get three apples and a handful o’ nuts, and then she told me to hurry and wash the stockings for Anne-Marie. But at last my strength gave out, wandering about that way and looking for a chance. The rural policeman picked me up and wanted to question me. But I fainted, and he couldn’t find out nothing. If only I’d set fire to that house, everything would have been different, and I wouldn’t have had to go with the captain when my mother got me in her claws again. I let him talk me into going for a blue velvet dress and a pair of cheap patent leather shoes. And I never heard till later about the bargain that mother’d struck with him.”
With her whole weight she shoved the chair she sat on farther from the table, and bent over and rested her forehead on the table’s edge. “O gee,” she said, absorbed by the horror of her fate, “O gee, if I’d set fire to that house, I wouldn’t have had to let everybody wipe their boots on me. If only I’d done it! It would have been a good thing!”
Silently Christian looked down upon her. He covered his eyes with his hand, and the pallor of his face and hand was one.