Mogens, and Other Stories

by J. P. Jacobsen

“And those are your intentions, Tage?” asked Mrs. Fonss.

“I don’t think you need doubt that; imagine the life. Ida and I are sitting out there on the terrace on a moonlit evening, and behind the laurel-bushes some one is whispering. Ida asks who is whispering, and I reply that it is my mother and her new husband.—No, no, I shouldn’t have said that; but you see the effect of it already, the pain it causes me, and you may be sure that it won’t help Elinor’s health either.”

Mrs. Fonss let the children go while she remained sitting here.

No, Tage was right, it had not been good for them. How far from her they had already gone in that short hour! How they looked at her, not like her children, but like their father’s! How quick they were to desert her as soon as they saw that not every motion of her heart was theirs! But she was not only Tage’s and Elinor’s mother alone; she was also a human being on her own account, with a life of her own and hopes of her own, quite apart from them. But she was, perhaps, not quite as young as she had believed herself to be. This had come to her in the conversation with her children. Had she not sat there, timid, in spite of her words; had she not almost felt like one who was trespassing upon the rights of youth? Were not all the exorbitant demands of youth and all its naive tyranny in everything they had said?—It is for us to love, life belongs to us, and your life it is but to exist for us.

She began to understand that there might be a satisfaction in being quite old; not that she wished it, but yet old age smiled faintly at her like a far-distant peace, coming after all the agitation of recent times, and now when the prospect of so much discord was so near. For she did not believe that her children would ever change their mind, and yet she had to discuss it with them over and over again before she gave up hope. The best thing would be for Thorbrogger to leave immediately. With his presence no longer here the children might be less irritable, and she could try to show them how eager she was to be as considerate as possible to them. In time the first bitterness would disappear, and everything... no, she did not believe, that everything would turn out well.

They agreed that Thorbrogger should leave for Denmark to arrange their affairs. For the time being they would remain here. It seemed, however, that nothing was gained by this. The children avoided her. Tage spent all his time with Ida or her father, and Elinor stayed all the time with the invalid, Mrs. Kastager. And when they happened to be actually together, the old intimacy, the old feeling of comfort, was gone. Where were the thousand subjects for conversation, and, when finally they found one, where was the interest in it? They sat there keeping up a conversation like people who for a while have enjoyed each other’s company, and now must part. All the thoughts of those who are about to leave are fixed on the journey’s end, and those who remain think only of settling hack into the daily life and daily routine, as soon as the strangers have left.

There was no longer any common interest in their life; all the feeling of belonging together had disappeared. They were able to talk about what they were going to do next week, next month, or even the month following, but it did not interest them as though it had to do with days out of their own lives. It was merely a time of waiting, which somehow or other had to be endured, for all three mentally asked themselves: And what then? They felt no solid foundation in their lives; there was no ground to build upon before this, which had separated them, was settled.

Every day that passed the children forgot more and more what their mother had meant to them, in the fashion in which children who believe themselves wronged will forget a thousand benefactions for the sake of one injustice.

Tage was the most sensitive of them, but also the one who was hurt most deeply, because he had loved most. He had wept through long nights because of his mother whom he could not retain in the way in which he wanted. There were times when the memory of her love almost deafened all other feelings in his heart. One day he even went to her and beseeched and implored her that she might belong to them, to them alone, and not to any other one, and the answer had been a “no.” And this “no” had made him hard and cold. At first he had been afraid of this coldness, because it was accompanied by a frightful emptiness.

The case with Elinor was different. In a strange way she had felt that it was an injustice toward her father, and she began to worship him like a fetish. Even though she but dimly remembered him, she recreated him for herself in most vivid fashion by becoming absorbed in everything she had ever heard about him. She asked Kastager about him and Tage, and every morning and night she kissed a medallion-portrait of his which belonged to her. She longed with a somewhat hysterical desire for some letters from him which she had left at home, and for things which had once belonged to him.