I
One Sunday morning, after service, the bailiff’s son announced to the gathering at the meeting-stone outside the church that Miss Irene Holm, dancer from the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, would open a course for dancing and deportment, for children, ladies, and gentlemen, if a sufficient number of subscribers could be found. The lessons would begin the first of November, in the inn, and the price would be five crowns for each child, with a discount for several in the same family.
Seven names were signed. Jens Larsens put up his three on the discount.
Miss Irene Holm considered the number sufficient. She arrived toward the end of October, and stopped in at the Inn with her only baggage, an old champagne basket tied up with a cord. She was little and wearily meagre in form, had a childish face with the lines of forty years in it under her fur cap, and she wore old handkerchiefs wrapped about her wrists, because of the gout. She pronounced all the consonants most carefully, and said, “Oh, thank you, I can do it myself,” for everything, looking very helpless the while. She wanted nothing but a cup of tea, and then crept into her bed in the tiny room, trembling in fear of ghosts.
Next morning she appeared with a head full of curls, her figure encased in a tight-fitting, fur-trimmed coat, much the worse for wear. She was going to call upon the parents of her pupils. She inquired the way timidly. Madam Henriksen came out to the door with her, and pointed over the fields. At every step Miss Holm bowed once in her gratitude. “Such a looking creature!” thought Madam Henriksen, and stood in the doorway looking out after her. Miss Holm walked toward Jens Larsens’, choosing the dike path to save her shoes. Miss Holm was wearing leather shoes and fancy knit stockings.
When she had visited all the parents—Jens Larsens gave nine crowns for his three children—Miss Holm looked about for a place to live. She hired a tiny whitewashed room at the smith’s, the window looking out over the level fields. The entire furnishing consisted of a bed, a bureau, and a chair. The champagne basket was placed between the bureau and the window.
Miss Holm moved into her new quarters. Her mornings were given up to busy handling of curling tongs and pins, and much drinking of cold tea. When her hair was dressed she tidied up her room, and then she knitted all the afternoon. She sat on her basket in the corner, trying to catch the last rays of light. The smith’s wife would drop in, sit down on the chair and talk, Miss Holm listening with a pleasant smile and a graceful nod of her curly head.
The hostess spun out her stories until it was time for supper. But Miss Holm seldom knew what she had been talking about. With the exception of dance, and positions, and the calculation for one’s daily bread—a tiresome, never-ending calculation—the things of this world seldom filtered into Miss Holm’s brain. When left alone she sat silent on her basket, her hands in her lap, gazing at the narrow strip of light that came in under the door.
She never went out. The level, dreary fields made her homesick, and she was afraid of wild horses.
When evening came, she cooked her simple supper, and then busied herself with her curl papers. When she had divested herself of her skirts she practised her “pas” beside the bedpost, stretching her legs energetically. The smith and his wife clung to the keyhole during this proceeding. They could just see the high kicks from behind, and the curl papers standing up on the dancer’s head like quills on a porcupine. She danced so eagerly that she began to hum gently as she hopped up and down in the little room, the whole family outside hugging the keyhole closely.
When Miss Holm had practised her accustomed time, she crept into bed. While she practised her thoughts would wander back to the time “when she was at dancing school.” And she would suddenly laugh, a gentle, girlish laugh, as she lay still in the darkness. She fell asleep thinking of that time—that happy, merry time—the rehearsals, when they pricked each other in the calves with pins—and screamed so merrily—And then the evenings in the dressing-rooms, with the whir and tumult of voices, and the silence as the stage-manager’s bell shrilled out—Miss Holm would wake up in a fright, dreaming that she had missed her entrance.