They had also been longing for love when they were young girls—their ideal of love was a smart, straight lad with a secure position, who could take them away from the monotonous work in office or shop and settle them in a little home, where the three rooms would hold all their belongings, and they could spread out all the pieces of needlework with embroidered roses and bluebells which they had made while dreaming their girlish day-dreams about love. They smiled at those dreams now with a superior air, and to those who still dreamed they had the satisfaction of stating that the reality was quite different. They were pleased to be among the initiated who knew what it really meant—and they were perhaps content.
But there was happiness all the same in not being content, in refusing to put up with things and be thankful when life offered things of little worth; far better to say: I believe in my dreams; I will call nothing happiness but that which I claim, and I believe it exists. If it is not to be mine, it is my own fault; it is because I have been one of the foolish virgins who did not watch and wait for the bridegroom, but the wise will see him and will enter in with rejoicing.
When Jenny came home she saw there was a light in her mother’s room, so she went in to tell her about the party at Ahlström’s studio, and how Heggen was. Ingeborg and Bodil slept farther down in the room, with their black plaits across the pillows. Jenny felt no compunction at standing there telling falsehoods to her mother. She had always done it from the time she was a schoolgirl and used to tell merry tales about the children’s parties, where she had in reality been sitting alone, watching the others dance—an unhappy and lonely little girl who could not dance or talk of anything that the boys cared for.
When Ingeborg and Bodil came home from a dance their mother sat up in bed listening and smiling and asking questions, young and rosy in the lamplight, and they could always tell the truth, because it was full of merriment and laughter. There may have been a thing or two so nice that they wanted to keep it to themselves, but it did not matter, for their smiles were true.
Jenny kissed her mother good-night. Passing through the sitting-room, she happened to pull down a photograph; she picked it up, knowing in the dark that it was a brother of her own father, with his wife and little girls. He had lived in America, and she had never seen him; he was dead, and his picture stood in its place without anybody ever thinking of it. She herself dusted it every day, yet never looked at it.
She went into her own room and began to take down her hair.
She had always lied to her mother—could she ever have been truthful to her without making her suffer, and to what purpose? Mother would never have understood. She had had happiness and sorrow since she was quite young; she had been happy with Jenny’s father and had bemoaned his death, but she had her child to live for, and learnt to be content. Then she met Nils Berner, who filled her life with fresh happiness and fresh sorrow—and again the children consoled her, inasmuch as they filled the emptiness of her life. The joy of motherhood is bought with too much suffering; it is too actual, when held living in one’s arms, for one ever to doubt its existence. To love one’s child is so natural that there is no cause for reflection. A mother never doubts that she loves her child, or that she wants it to be happy—that she does her best for it, or that it returns her love. The grace of nature is so great to mothers that children instinctively shrink from confiding their sorrows and disappointments to her; illness and money troubles are almost the only sorrows she ever gets to know. Never the irreparable, the shame, the failures in life, and were she told of them ever so emphatically by her own children, she would never believe they were irreparable.
Her mother was not to know anything about her sorrow—nature itself had raised a wall between them. Rebecca Gram would never know a tenth part of the sufferings her children had endured for her sake. And a friend of her mother’s was still mourning her handsome boy, who had been killed by an accident, and dreaming of the future that would have been his; she was the only person who did not know that he had shot himself as the only way of escape from insanity.
Love of one’s children did not exclude any other love; one or two mothers among her acquaintances had lovers, and believed that the children did not know. Some were divorced, and found happiness in new ties; only if the new love brought disappointment did they ever complain or regret. Her own mother had idolized her—yet there was room for Berner in her heart too, and she had been happy with him. Gert had been fond of his children—and a father’s affection is more understanding, more a matter of reflection and less instinctive than a mother’s—yet he had scarcely thought of Helge all last winter.