Marie Grubbe, a Lady of the Seventeenth Century

by J. P. Jacobsen

The next morning Marie awoke long before Ulrik Frederik. She looked almost with hatred on the sleeping figure at her side. Her wrist was swollen and ached from his violent greeting of the night before. He lay with muscular arms thrown back under his powerful, hairy neck. His broad chest rose and fell, breathing, it seemed to her, a careless defiance, and there was a vacant smile of satiety on his dull, moist lips.

She paled with anger and reddened with shame as she looked at him. Almost a stranger to her after their long parting, he had forced himself upon her, demanding her love as his right, cocksure that all the devotion and passion of her soul were his, just as he would be sure of finding his furniture standing where he left it when he went out. Confident of being missed, he had supposed that all her longings had taken wing from her trembling lips to him in the distance, and that the goal of all her desire was his own broad breast.

When Ulrik Frederik came out he found her half sitting, half reclining on a couch in the blue room. She was pale, her features relaxed, her eyes downcast, and the injured hand lay listlessly in her lap wrapped in a lace handkerchief. He would have taken it, but she languidly held out her left hand to him and leaned her head back with a pained smile.

Ulrik Frederik kissed the hand she gave him and made a joking excuse for his condition the night before, saying that he had never been decently drunk all the time he had been in Spain, for the Spaniards knew nothing about drinking. Besides, if the truth were told, he liked the homemade alicant and malaga wine from Johan Lehn’s dram-shop and Bryhans’ cellar better than the genuine sweet devilry they served down there.

Marie made no reply.

The breakfast table was set, and Ulrik Frederik asked if they should not fall to, but she begged him to pardon her letting him eat alone. She wanted nothing, and her hand hurt; he had quite bruised it. When his guilt was thus brought home to him he was bound to look at the injured hand and kiss it, but Marie quickly hid it in a fold of her dress, with a glance—he said—like a tigress defending her helpless cub. He begged long, but it was of no use, and at last he sat down to the table laughing, and ate with an appetite that roused a lively displeasure in Marie. Yet he could not sit still. Every few minutes he would jump up and run to the window to look out; for the familiar street scenes seemed to him new and curious. With all this running, his breakfast was soon scattered about the room, his beer in one window, the bread-knife in another, his napkin slung over the vase of the gilded Gueridon, and a bun on the little table in the corner.

At last he had done eating and settled down at the window. As he looked out, he kept talking to Marie, who from her couch made brief answers or none at all. This went on for a little while, until she came over to the window where he sat, sighed, and gazed out drearily.

Ulrik Frederik smiled and assiduously turned his signet ring round on his finger. “Shall I breathe on the sick hand?” he asked in a plaintive, pitying tone.

Marie tore the handkerchief from her hand and continued to look out without a word.

“’Twill take cold, the poor darling,” he said, glancing up.