“Hymns!” said Madam Hermansen scornfully.
“Ah, but it’s just hymns and such that lift us up nearer to God.”
“Oh, God’s all right, of course, but it doesn’t do in this world to leave too much to God.”
“It’s all we poor sinful mortals have. Where do you suppose I should ever find comfort and solace if I hadn’t God to turn to? Why, He’s almighty. He’s even done things with Egholm at times. When I think of it, I feel ashamed of myself that I ever can sit and complain. Now, just by way of example.... It was the day we came over here from Odense, me and the children. I’d no sooner got out of the train than he puts his arms round me and kisses me right on the cheek. And what’s the most marvellous thing about it all—I can’t understand it to this day—he did it right in front of three or four girls standing staring at us all the time. Ah, Madam Hermansen, take my word for it, a little thing like that gives you strength to live on for a long time after. And then Egholm’s been good to me in other ways. He knows—Lord forgive me that I should say it—that I’m more of a God-fearing sort than he is himself. And—I don’t know how to put it—that my God’s—well, more genuine, as you might say, than his. I’ll tell you how I found that out, Madam Hermansen. You know it was said the end of the world was to come a few years back. It was in all the papers, and Egholm, he took it all in for gospel truth, because he said it agreed with the signs in the Revelations, you know....”
“And did it come?”
“Why, of course it didn’t—or we shouldn’t be sitting here now, should we? But Egholm, he was as sure as could be it was going to happen, on the thirteenth of November, and when it was only the eighth, he came and told me to make up a bed for one of us on the floor. We’d always been used to sleep together in one bed.”
“But what did he want to change for?” asked Madam Hermansen, with increasing interest.
“Why,” explained Fru Egholm eagerly, “you see—he confessed himself why it was; he was wonderfully gentle those days. He wouldn’t have us sleeping together—not because of anything indecent or that sort, but because it says in the Bible that on the Day of Judgment there may be two people sleeping in the same bed, ‘and the one shall be taken and the other left.’”
“So, you see. Madam Hermansen, I soon reckoned out what he thought, how I might get to heaven after all.”