Magna visits me every time that she has anything to do in the town. When the window is open I can hear the crack of her whip above all the rest. And will you believe it, Jeanne, my heart begins to beat at the sound, for it means that the boys are with her, or that Magna is coming to tell me about them. You should just see her sitting rosy and upright in the dog-cart, her head hidden in a hood, with an old sealskin on, all rubbed the wrong way, the same that twenty years ago formed a topic of conversation the whole winter through, because it had cost her poor, struggling husband goodness knows how many thousands.
Magna is now getting on for sixty. But no one would think it. She beams as if the whole world were at her feet. I look at least ten years older, although, God knows, I take a lot of trouble over my hair, and touch up my cheeks a little, as I always did. She makes a fuss about getting out of the cart as if the coachman could not look after the butter and eggs.
Just think, she gets up at four in summer and at six in winter, and works for two. There is no work that she considers is too menial.
Lately she and Kelly painted all the four buildings for Whitsun. And they did it like the wind, so that one could hardly believe one’s own eyes. I sat out on the verandah and watched, and was nearly sick with delight.
Then we had roast ribs and oxeyes for dinner. How Kelly eats! You can have no conception of his appetite. It’s not elegant, but oh, so splendid! And after they have been slaughtering Kelly brings me lambs’ fry, black puddings, and liver sausages. What I once couldn’t tolerate now tastes to me better than the finest Astrakhan caviare.
How I chat on all about my own affairs. But I don’t forget my little fellow-traveller on that account, and her troubles are mine. Still, I am not going to make them such a serious matter as you do, for they are not worth it. You have arrived at a stage when everything looks to you black, and must look so. I should be deeply pained if I had not long ago seen what the cause of it is. You are now just about the age I was when we first met each other; that age which for women is so difficult and dangerous. And the inexplicable happiness is not granted to every woman to come through the time unscathed and triumphant as I did.
I have thought about it, and wondered what the reason could be why I, contrary to every one else, should remain during those years much the same as always; and I have come to the conclusion that it was because I lived so superficially at that time, and without any deep feeling for other people.
But you, little Jeanne, since you linked your fate so fortunately with Malthe’s, have been a sheer compost of love-worship and self-sacrifice. I could have foretold long ago that your transition age would be a hard time. But now try yourself to make it easier. Review the circumstances, sift, and explain them to yourself.
You have something to be thankful for that does not fall to the lot of one woman in ten thousand. Your husband continues to love you as much to-day as when you first became his. Does that not counter-balance everything? Are the little cosmopolitan godless angels of children really so hard to bring up as you think? They have, of course, the artistic temperament, and you attempt to model them into normal human beings. You will never succeed.
And is Malthe’s depression of spirits of any great significance? There is cause for it. He has of late, with justice or injustice, been overlooked, and younger powers have been preferred before him; his name has no longer the cachet it once had, and even his talent seems to have taken a back seat. But, dear Jeanne, you are greatly to blame for this. You have loved your husband so blindly and fondly that you have not set him on a pedestal, but you have built a castle of air far up in the highest clouds, and there you have placed him like a golden ball on the most inaccessible pinnacle, with no one above him and no one near him.... You have fed his ambition and stifled your own natural, critical faculty, instead of standing at his side and being helpful to him in deciding between good and mediocre, and now you complain that you cannot console, and that he spurns you. You are ashamed to say so, but I read between the lines that you are very, very unhappy.... And it is all because you are not well, dear Jeanne, and your despondency is likely to last some years.