“Today I need some air,” she said, “but I don’t mind walking if you want the chauffeur!”
“May I not come with you?” whispered Percy from his pillows. He looked so small in the big carved bed resembling a catafalque. “Could we not take a long run into the country to look at the autumn.”
That day Percy no longer spoke of his pictures, nor during the following days either. Hedvig did not see him even glance at the new gallery. He seemed to have grown afraid of his plans for farewell, his pyramid, the urn for his ashes and all the rest of it.
All Percy’s feelings had been transfused into a new, passionate love. Day and night he wanted to be with Hedvig. Protected by her white limbs he huddled together in the growing shadows and intoxicated himself in the warmth of her presence. But it was a fatal intoxication. Love made everything, even death, greater, more real, more terrible—. It seemed as if strong hands had torn to pieces the bright artistically woven veil that dilettantism had suspended between him and reality. He felt for perhaps the first time in his life a deep fear. But then he only drank the deeper from Hedvig’s unbroken life as if by doing so he might save his own. And when he noticed that the intoxication consumed his strength instead of increasing it then he drank deeper still in order to benumb himself.
But now it was Hedvig’s turn to steal into Percy’s picture galleries. Yes, the rôles were strangely reversed. She positively felt attracted to her former chamber of horror. She would stay there for a long time staring around her. It was not that any artistic instincts had awakened in her. It was not that she had begun to understand any of these new paradoxes. No, but she imbibed courage from their impudent recklessness. She deafened her conscience with their excesses. “Everything is permitted,” that was what Percy’s pictures whispered into the ear of a Selamb.
Life and death soar strangely near each other in love. You give and take with the same recklessness. Sacrifice and selfishness disport themselves side by side. And just at the moment when the human egoism is nearest to its dissolution it is sometimes most blindly cruel.
During these weeks Hedvig loved Percy and killed him. There came a moment when she began to be afraid to look into his face. But all the same she could not find the strength to spare him. During the day she invented many a cunning trick to escape seeing the truth. There was something round his mouth and eyes which now and then filled her with a cold terror, almost with hatred. It was the disease in him she hated. She would feel fits of cruel invincible hunger for the moment when death would at last strike its blow and no longer creep stealthily around them. And all the same she loved him, loved for the first time in her life with a kind of dim, wild abandon. So strange is the human heart. In the midst of these fits she longed for the night, the darkness, the great, teeming, blind darkness when she could once more draw him to her, kiss him, drink up his fever.
Sometimes Hedvig was seized by a kind of dark frenzy. Their love had resembled a silent bitter struggle with death. Percy sank back with perspiring temples. Convulsively, like, a drowning man, he would seize her black hair and stare into her eyes, which he saw in spite of the darkness and which seemed to him surrounded by pale little dancing flames:
“My beautiful angel of death,” he whispered. “My beautiful angel of death.” And in his voice was a strange mixture of love, hopelessness and, to the very last, playful irony.
One such night there came a fresh hæmorrhage of the lungs. It was the third, and Percy knew at once that it was the last. For several days he lay there white and thin and faded away without any serious pain. The winter had come early. The light from the snow on the pines lit up the room just as in the sanatorium in Switzerland. The doctors had that all-wise and important expression which always means that they are completely powerless. Percy had recovered his little, wan, ironical, submissive smile. He did not complain and did not seem to regret anything. He smiled also to his wife without wondering at her metamorphosis.