Jenny: A Novel

by Sigrid Undset

She had much to thank her stepfather for; how much, she had not understood till now. He had fought and conquered much that was distorted and morbid in her. When she lived alone with her mother in the hothouse air of tenderness, care, and dreams, she had been a nervous child, afraid of dogs, of trams, of matches—afraid of everything—and she was sensitive to bodily pain. Her mother dared scarcely let her go alone to school.

The first thing Berner did was to take the girl with him to the woods; Sunday after Sunday they went to Nordmarken, in broiling sunshine or pouring rain, in the thaws of spring, and in winter on ski. Jenny, who was used to conceal her feelings, tried not to show how tired and nervous she was, and after a time she did not feel it.

Berner taught her to use map and compass, he talked to her as to a friend, and he taught her to observe the signs of wind and clouds, which brought about a change in the weather, and to reckon time and distance by the sun. He made her familiar with animals and plants—root and stalk, leaf and bud, blossom and fruit. Her sketch-book and his camera were always in their knapsack.

All the kindness and devotion her stepfather had put into this work of education she appreciated now for the first time—for he was a well-known ski-runner and mountaineer in the Jotunheim and Nordlandstinderne.

He had promised to take her there too. The summer when she was fifteen, she went with him grouse-shooting. Her mother could not go with them: she was expecting the little brother by that time.

They stayed in a solitary mountain saeter below Rondane. She had never been so happy in all her life as when she awoke in her tiny bunk. She hurried out to make coffee for her stepfather, and he took her to the Ronde peaks, into the Styg mountains, and on fishing tours; and they went down together to the valley for provisions. When he was out shooting, she bathed in the cold mountain brooks and went for endless walks on the moors; or sat in the porch knitting and dreaming, weaving romances about a fair saeter maiden and a huntsman, who was very like Berner, but young and handsome, and who could tell about hunting and mountaineering like Berner used to do in the evening by the fire. And he should promise to give her a gun and take her up to unknown mountain-tops.

She remembered how tormented, ashamed, and unhappy she was when she knew that her mother was going to have a baby. She tried to hide her thoughts from her mother, but she knew she only partly succeeded. Berner’s anxiety about his wife as the time drew near brought a change in her feelings. He spoke to her about it: “I am so afraid, Jenny, because I love your mother so dearly,” and he told her that when she herself was born her mother was very ill. The belief that her mother’s condition was unclean and unnatural left her when he spoke, but with it went also the feeling that the bond between her mother and herself was mysterious, supernatural. It became everyday, commonplace; she had been born and her mother had suffered; she had been small and needed her mother, and because of that her mother had loved her. Another little child was soon coming, who needed her mother more. Jenny felt she had grown up all at once; she sympathized with her mother as well as with Berner, and comforted him in a precocious way: “It will pass off quite well; it always does, you know. They scarcely ever die of it.”

When she saw her mother with the new child, who took all her time and care, Jenny felt very forlorn, and she cried, but by and by she became very fond of the baby, especially when little Ingeborg was over a year old and was the sweetest, darkest little gipsy doll you could imagine—and her mother had another tiny infant.

She had never considered the Berner children as her sisters; they were exactly like their father. Her relationship to them was more that of an aunt—she felt herself almost as an elderly, sensible aunt to her mother as well as to the children.

When the accident happened her mother was younger and weaker than she. Mrs. Winge had become young again in her second happy marriage, and she was a little tired and worn after her three confinements in the comparatively short time. Nils was only five months old when his father died.