She had smiled indifferently at their sneering and teasing, but a quiet, implacable hatred grew in her towards the other children, who to her mind formed one compact mass, a many-headed savage beast. The consuming rage which filled her when they tormented her was always hidden behind a scornful, indifferent smile. Once she had nearly cried her eyes out with rage and misery, and when on one or two occasions she had lost control of herself, she had seen their triumph. Only by putting on an air of placid, irritating indifference could she hold her own against them.
In the upper form she made friends with one or two girls; she was then at an age when no child can bear to be unlike others, and she tried to copy them. These friendships, however, did not give her much joy. She remembered how they made fun of her when they discovered that she played with dolls. She disowned her beloved children and said they belonged to her little sisters.
There was a time when she wanted to go on the stage. She and her friends were stage-struck; they sold their school books and their confirmation brooches to buy tickets, and night after night they went to the gallery of the theatre. One day she told her friends how she would act a certain part that interested them. They burst out laughing; they had always known she was conceited, but not that she was a megalomaniac. Did she really believe that she could become an artist, she, who could not even dance? It would be a pretty sight indeed to see her walk up and down the stage with that tall, stiff skeleton of hers.
No, she could not dance. When she was quite a child her mother used to play to her, and she twisted and turned, tripped and curtseyed as she liked, and her mother called her a little linnet. She thought of her first party, how she had arrived full of anticipation, happy in a new white dress which her mother had made after an old English picture. She remembered how she stiffened all over when she began to dance. That stiffness never quite left her; when she tried to learn dancing by herself her soft, slim body became stiff as a poker. She was no good at it. She was very anxious to go to a dancing class, but it never came to anything.
She laughed at the recollection of her school friends. She had met two of them at the exhibition at home, the first time she had got one of her pictures hung and a few lines of praise in the papers. She was with some other artists—Heggen was one of them—when they came up to congratulate her: “Didn’t we always say you’d be an artist? We were all sure that some day we should hear more of you.”
She had smiled: “Yes, Ella; so was I.”
Lonely! She had been lonely ever since her mother met Mr. Berner, who worked with her in the same office. She was about ten at that time, but she understood at once that her dead father had departed from their home. His picture was still hanging there, but he was gone, and it dawned upon her what death really meant. The dead existed only in the memory of others, who had the power conditionally to end their poor shadow life—and they were gone for ever.
She understood why her mother became young and pretty and happy again; she noticed the expression on her face when Berner rang the bell. She was allowed to stay in the room and listen to their talk; it was never about things the child could not hear, and they did not send her out of the room when they were together in her home. In spite of the jealousy in her little heart, she understood that there were many things a grown-up mother could not speak about with a little girl, and a strong feeling of justice developed in her. She did not wish to be angry with her mother, but it hurt very much all the same.
She was too proud to show it, and when her mother in moments of self-reproach suddenly overwhelmed her child with tenderness and care, she remained cold and passive. She said not a word when her mother wanted her to call Berner father and said how fond he was of her. In the night she tried to speak to her own father, with a passionate longing to keep him alive, but she felt she could not do it alone; she knew him only through her mother. By and by Jens Winge became dead to her too, and since he had been the centre of her conception of God, and heaven, and eternal life, all these faded away with his picture. She remembered quite distinctly how, at thirteen, she had listened to the Scriptures at school without believing anything, and because the others in her form believed in God and were afraid of the devil, and yet were cowardly and cruel, and mean and common—in her opinion at least—religion became to her something despicable, cowardly, something associated with them.
She got to like Nils Berner against her will; she preferred him almost to her mother in the first period of their married life. He claimed no authority over his step-daughter, but by his wise and kind, frank ways he won her over. She was the child of the woman he loved—that was reason enough for him to be fond of Jenny.