V
Ten years afterwards Fru Edgren returned to the same problem in “Love and Womanhood,” and this time she treated it with greater delicacy and more depth of feeling.
The heroine is no longer the traditional elf, but the modern girl,—nervous, sensitive, with a sharp intellect and still sharper tongue; she is very critical, very reserved, full of secret aspirations, and very warm-hearted; her heart is capable of becoming a world to the man she loves, but it needs a man’s love to develop its power of loving. She loves an elegant, self-satisfied Swedish lieutenant, who has served as a volunteer in Algiers, and has written a book on military science; he is just an ordinary smart young man, and he takes it for granted that she will accept him the instant he proposes. But she refuses him. He is indignant and hurt; he cannot understand it at all, unless she loves some one else. But no, she does not love any one else. Then what is the reason? She is sure that he does not care enough for her; there is such an indescribable difference between her love for him, or rather the love that she knows herself capable of feeling, and the affection that he has to offer her, that she will not have him on any account, and looks upon his proposal almost in the light of an insult. He goes away, and returns, soon afterwards, engaged to a little goose.
Fru Edgren develops an elaborate theory, to which she returns again and again. According to her, it is only the commonplace little girls of eighteen, innocence in a white pinafore, with whom men fall in love. I myself do not think that there is much in it: a dozen men who are nonentities fall in love with a dozen young women who are likewise nonentities. On the other hand, we have that numerous type, which includes the modern girl, full of soul, originality, and depth of character, clever and modest, possessed of a keen divination with regard to her own feelings and that of others, mingled with a chaste pride that is founded upon the consciousness of her own importance,—a pride that will not accept less than it gives. And these girls are confined to the narrow circle to which all women are reduced, to two or three possibilities in the whole course of their long youth, possibilities which chance throws in their way, and which are perhaps no possibilities at all to them. A few years pass by, and these girls have become stern judges upon the rights of love, and they have developed a bitter expression about the mouth, and a secret gnawing in the soul. A few years more, and this unappreciated womanly instinct will have brought them to hate men.
Fru Edgren went the same way. In her “Sketches from Life” we find some traces of this feeling in the stories where she displays the comparative worth of men and women; take, for instance, the tale called “At War with Society.” But before she had quite joined the army of stern judges, she weighed the problem of love once more, in the second of her five completed novels, called, “Aurora Bunge.”
For the last ten years Aurora Bunge has been chief among the ball beauties of Stockholm. Everything in her life is arranged and settled beforehand. In the winter she goes to balls, night after night, to parties and plays; in the summer she is occupied in much the same way in a fashionable watering-place. For the last ten years she has known exactly with whom she is going to dance, what compliments will be paid her, what offers she will receive, and whom she is eventually going to marry. The marriage can be put off until she is thirty—and now she is nearly thirty, and the time has come. She is one of those girls who have danced and danced until everything has grown equally indifferent and wearisome to them; and yet she is without experience, and is likely to remain so to the end. She allows herself perfect freedom of speech, but she will never allow herself a single free action. A couple of intrigues in the dim future are not entirely excluded from her plans, but what difference will that make? She has something of Strindberg’s “Julie,” but without the latter’s perversity; she is also some years in advance of her. She would have no objection to eloping with a circus rider, or doing something de très mauvais goût, but she knows that she will never do it. The summer previous to the announcement of her engagement she is seized with a fit of liking the country, and she accompanies her mother to one of her properties, which is situated on a desolate part of the coast. It is the first of her thirty summer visits that is not quite comme il faut. In a sudden outburst of enthusiasm for nature, she spends days and weeks wandering about in the woods and fields, with torn dress and down-trodden shoes, and goes out sailing with the fishermen. She becomes stronger and more beautiful, and is more than ever imbued with an indescribable longing. This vague longing leads her on towards that which she is going to experience—which is to be her life’s only experience. She feels her pulses beat and her heart burn within her, and not till then does the matured woman of thirty tear aside the bandage that binds her eyes; and looking out, she cries: Where art thou, who givest me life’s fulness? On one of her boating expeditions, she goes to the nearest lighthouse. The lighthouse-keeper, a strong, quiet young man, comes out. She looks, and she knows that it is he!
Up to this point Fru Edgren has copied the secret writing in her own soul, and every touch is true. But her experience went no further. The part that follows is psychological and logical too, but it has the greatest fault that a romance can have; i.e., it is word for word imagined, not experienced, and for this reason it is overdrawn. Aurora has scarcely landed before a storm sets in. She flutters like an exhausted bird, in and out of the narrow lighthouse. The lighthouse-keeper sees the danger, and hurries down. She wants to throw herself into the water. He climbs down the rocks and seizes hold of her. Already before, this son of the people had found time to give her a love poem to read. The storm lasts three days, and for three days she remains there. On the fourth day the fishermen return to fetch her, and the lighthouse-keeper is furious. By this time she is no better than a very ordinary fisher girl. She is deathly pale, but insists on leaving him. He threatens her with his fists, and she proposes that they should drown themselves together; but his mother had already drowned herself, and he does not wish to have two suicides in the family. Aurora goes home, and they never meet again. A few months afterwards she marries an officer who is in debt.
Fru Edgren’s men may be divided into two types,—the one she cannot endure, but she describes him admirably; the other she cannot describe at all, but she likes him very much indeed. The first is the fashionable man of Stockholm society, who has tasted life’s pleasures, and is wearied of them; the second is the simple, unsophisticated son of the people.