The Pilot and His Wife

by Jonas Lie

An hour or so after, she came down again into the room with a light in her hand. Her expression was cold, and she did not look at him as she set about putting the room to rights for the night as usual. He tried to pacify her, begged her not to take what he had said so much to heart, and was going to put his arm affectionately round her waist, but was stopped on finding himself suddenly confronted by the deadly pale face and flashing eyes of an infuriated woman.

The time had come to speak out, and she did speak out; and Lieutenant Beck heard what he would have been very sorry to repeat to his best friend. For he felt in his heart that it was nothing but the truth, however soon he might forget it again.

She called him a pitiful wretch, who would sell her and everything they jointly prized to the first comer for a little miserable flattery. He had distributed himself to that extent among his giddy acquaintance, she went on, with a movement as if she thrust from her something she utterly despised, that there was nothing left of him for a woman with a vestige of truth or honour to pick up.

When her husband threw himself upon the sofa, and exclaimed in a sentimental tone that he was a miserable man, she repeated the last word twice in an inexpressibly contemptuous tone—

"A man!—a man!—if you had been a man, you would still have had my love—at all events a remnant of it; but now, like this light here,"—and she puffed it out,—"all is extinguished between us."

With that she left the room.

Beck sat where he was, overwhelmed and stupefied at this sudden blow which had fallen upon his domestic happiness, and with a horrible apprehension that she might have meant what she said in real earnest.

She sat in the room with her child the whole night, and he knew that he dared not disturb her.

Notwithstanding the struggle which it cost his pride, he was almost humble in his manner towards her for some days after, and warmly and cordially acknowledged that he had been in the wrong. He even tried to show her that he was in earnest by assuming for a while an altered attitude towards the ladies, and actually succeeded so far that she appeared to have forgotten that anything had occurred between them, and was just the same in her intercourse with him as before—quietly friendly that is to say, as she had been of recent years.

It never came to any real reconciliation on her side. She had seen too clearly that his nature was only that of a drifting cloud, glowing for the moment just as it was played upon by popular applause; and he was too profoundly selfish for any real earnest love to find a root in his composition, much less to give promise of a common life-growth. With his feeling and good-nature he would have treated any wife well, even if she had not made herself so necessary to him as she was; her social talent, she felt, was her great safety—it made him look up to her; and his vain nature required that she should be something to be proud of: but she was forced to acknowledge in her own heart with despair that she had been blinded by her love for him, that his nature was absolutely deficient in constancy and truth, and in every quality which she had once persuaded herself to see in him. She knew the secret about this man, so brilliant before the eyes of the world—that he was not a man. He lived and moved before her now like a defaced ideal, to which she was tied—to the end of her life. The bitterness of disappointment rankled in her mind, and was all the more poignant that she had to keep it shut up within herself and had no one to confide in. Her life had become a desert, and at the very moment when her husband would be making a brilliant little speech that called forth applause all round the table, she would seem to hear nothing but a rattle of emptiness. She always protested to her parents, when they could not understand why she looked so pale, that she was perfectly happy; and they had no reason to think otherwise, for she seemed to be well cared for in every respect. The only real interest which she possessed now in life was her son Frederick; but she brought him up with the utmost possible strictness, for she fancied she detected his father's nature over again in him.