He sprang violently to his feet, and started talking about Göteborg. The canals, where the women did their washing, the park, Trädgården, and Masthugget, where he had been out one Sunday. He talked Swedish, and gave a long account of a funeral—Anna had lost one child in Göteborg—the first.
Meanwhile, Vang was quietly getting to the bottom of the bottle, and when at last Egholm, weary of his desperate fluttering on empty words, flung himself down, Vang felt that it was his turn to speak.
“Ahem!—seeing no other gentleman has risen Henrik Vang now begs to propose: ‘The Ladies.’ My friend, my old and faithful friend, wake up and listen to my words. You have honoured me. You have invited me to share your board. The supper was good—rather tough, that fowl, but, after all, that’s neither here nor there. In a word, you have done me a great honour, and I propose then to honour you in return. My friend, my old and faithful friend, you are a man. You can assert yourself, and get your own way. But Henrik Vang, he can’t. And I ask you now: How shall we gain the mastery over woman? There! That, my friend, is the problem—the problem of the future.”
“But is it true that she knocks you about?” asked Egholm, grasping eagerly at anything to turn the current of his own thoughts.
“Sh! Wait. Let me. I’ll tell you the whole story, from the time when she was parlourmaid at the house. I was only a boy, really—it was just after Mother had died. No—I won’t begin there, though. Nothing happened, really, till four or five years after, when I came home after I’d been out in the world a bit. Therese had got to be housekeeper, then. And Father, he said I was to leave her alone. Well, that of course put me on to her at once. There were enough of them about I could have got if I’d cared—what do you think? Ah, you don’t know the sort of man Henrik Vang was to look at in those days! But she was nearest to hand, of course. Ever so near.... Oh! And handsome, that she was. In two layers, as you might say, one outside the other. Father, he was after us whenever he got a chance. He offered me his gold watch to leave her alone, but I wasn’t such a fool. I’d have that anyway when he was gone, and I told him so. But then one day comes Therese and shows me where he’d been pinching her—arms black and blue. Well, I wasn’t going to stand that, you know, so we got a special licence, and went off and got married in Fredericia. Father, he didn’t know about it, of course, and when he sees us coming up the steps arm in arm, he says: ‘Henrik, do you know I’ve kept that girl ever since your mother died?’ ‘That’s as may be,’ says I. ‘Anyhow, she’s mine now.’ And then I up and showed him our wedding ring—cost me ten kroner, it did. Then says he: ‘Out you get—out of my house. A thousand kroner a year, that’s all you’ll get. The hotel here I’ll keep, as long as I’ve strength to lift a glass!’”
The tears flowed down over Vang’s puffy purple cheeks. Egholm sniffed once or twice in sympathy, and forgot his own troubles for a moment.
Vang licked a last drop from the neck of the bottle, and went on:
“Well, you see, Therese had never expected that—nor had I. But don’t let’s talk about me. What was I to expect? Drunken fool, that’s all. Perhaps it was that made her turn religious. I don’t know. I never can think things out. It tires me. Well, she said to me: ‘Look here, you get me a place at the Postmaster’s or the Stationmaster’s, or one of those you’re always drinking with.’ Well, they simply laughed at me. But the religious lot, they didn’t mind. Only the worst of it was, from the time she set her thoughts on heaven, it’s been simply hell for me! Now, how d’you explain that?”
Egholm saw him off, going out to the gate with him, and at the same moment Hedvig opened the kitchen door. Yes, the dish was empty. A good thing they had helped themselves before it went in.
They lit the lamp, and began making things ready for the night. There was a jumble of things in every corner. Empty bottles by the dozen, and in one place she found a parcel, carefully wrapped in newspaper, containing the skins and skeleton remains of smoked herrings. Father, no doubt, thought that was the easiest way of clearing up after him.