Egholm and his God

“They might have died!” Hedvig’s eyes were almost white to look at as she spoke.

At the same moment Egholm came in again, and now nothing was heard but the rattle of the iron bedsteads and flapping of sheets and bedclothes patted down. They shared for better or worse. Hedvig was given one iron bedstead in the little room to herself, but had to be content with a woollen blanket and her father’s old railway cloak for covering. Fru Egholm had to spread her mattress on the floor till they could get the settee screwed together; then she had a real down coverlet over.

Egholm began undressing without a word. His wife turned down the lamp – there were no curtains to the windows. They heard him drop his waistcoat over by the coal-scuttle, and his trousers by the door; then he threw himself on his bed, breathing heavily.

Fru Egholm stole into the little room, where Emanuel’s cradle was set against Hedvig’s bed, lest the master of the house should be disturbed.

Sleeping soundly, the little angel.

“Hedvig dear, you’ve kept your stockings on, haven’t you?”

“Oh, I’m warm enough – just feel here.” She found her mother’s hand and drew it down over some thick woollen stuff, that felt strange to the fingers.

“What – what is it?”

“Look and see!”

Fru Egholm closed the door and struck a match. There lay Hedvig, covered over with a curious black rug with a silver fringe round the edges and a cross in the centre.

For a moment she was dazed, then, calling up some distant memory, she exclaimed in horror:

“Heavens, child! Why, it’s the pall they use for the hearse! Wherever did you get it?”

“It was hanging on the stairs outside,” said Hedvig, with a grin.

“But you mustn’t. However could you, Hedvig! That you could ever dare… Come! We must put it back at once.”

Hedvig made as if to obey, and drew the thing down, but the moment her legs were free, she turned a back-somersault and commenced a wild topsy-turvy dance in the air, waving her feet about like a catherine-wheel. Then suddenly she disappeared again under the pall, showing not so much as the tip of her nose.

The match went out. Fru Egholm shook her head anxiously, with a faint smile, and stole out of the room. Hedvig – what a child!

All was quiet in the parlour now. Egholm was apparently asleep. Pray God he might wake in a better mood!

Anyhow, they had got that fellow Vang out of the house at last – and if she could manage it, he should not be in a hurry to come again. He’d a bad influence. The way he spoke about his wife – Egholm would never have talked like that himself! A nice sort of fellow, indeed – and his father owned a hotel!

Her breast heaved as she undressed and laid her things neatly on a chair, as her father had taught her when a child. She listened breathlessly – was Egholm asleep?

Should she?.. He didn’t deserve it – but why think of that now?

Softly she dragged the mattress from under the window, a little way over the floor, stopped, listened, and dragged it a little farther. Then she started at a sound, and felt ashamed, as if she had been a thief trying to steal her own bed.

Little by little she edged her way along, and finally crept under the clothes with a sigh of resignation.

When he awoke, he should find her humble couch on the floor beside his bed.

XII

But Egholm was not asleep; only lying quite still, with wide-open eyes.

His trouble was that going to bed only made him wakeful, however sleepy he might have been while undressing. It generally took him a couple of hours to get to sleep, and during that time his eyes seemed to acquire a power of inward vision. The experiences of the day lifted their coffin lid and swarmed out from his brain-cells as terrifying apparitions in the dark.

True, it might happen at times, as now to-day, that they also appeared in the daytime, but then he could ward them off as long as he kept on talking and talking incessantly.

But at night! They laughed at him in horrid wise, lifted the wrappings from their skulls, and blinked at him with empty eye-sockets. He was theirs.

Nevertheless, he had developed a certain method in his madness; they could not take him by surprise now, as they had done at first.

To-day, he had struck Anna three times in the face – no light blows either, for he could feel his knuckles slightly tender still – well and good, then to-night the result would be that he found Anna exchanged for Clara Steen, the child with the deep eyes, the splendid Clara of youth, the beloved little maiden in the gold frame.

In a gold frame – yes, an oval gold frame.

Here again was one of those ridiculous things that could, given the opportunity and a suitable mood, make a man laugh himself crooked.

Egholm turned over on the other side, and set himself to think through the whole affair from the beginning, how it had started when he had first gone as a boy to work in Konsul Steen’s business in Helsingør.

The memory here was sweet as a breath from gardens of lilac, and was intended solely to form a nice, crude background of contrast to that which was to come. Yes, Egholm knew the system of these things.

He saw himself as a slender, brown-eyed, curly-haired lad running about upstairs and down in the big store, hauling at casks and pulling out drawers, followed everywhere by the sharp eyes of Jespersen, the assistant.

Now down into the cellar for rum, now to the warehouse for dried fish, then up to the huge loft for tobacco. Up there was the place he liked best; not only were the finest goods kept there, breathing essences of the whole world towards him from cases of spice, but he loved the view from the slip-door, out over the Sound and the fortress of Kronborg, and the red roofs of the town.

From north and south came ships with proudly upright masts and rigging, heaving to while the Customs officers went on board. And each of them utilised the opportunity to lay in provisions. Kasper Egholm was rowed out to them with heavy boat-loads of wares, and was soon at home on vessels of all nations – Dutch, English, French, and Russian. He even began to feel himself familiar with the languages.

It was from here he had first caught sight of Clara, Konsul Steen’s daughter.

Possibly it was as much for her sake as for anything else that he loved to throw open the slip-door, or climb up to a window in the roof.

One little episode he remembered as distinctly as if it had happened yesterday.

He had been set to counting Swedish nails, a hundred to each packet, but, seeing his chance, used the scales instead. It was ever so much easier to weigh them out, than with all that everlasting counting; also, he could finish in no time, and be free to loiter by the window and dream.

The wind blows freshly about his ears, he looks over toward the grey-green slopes of the Swedish coast, and feels himself as free as if his glance could carry him over the Sound, high over the roofs, and green trees, and the top-masts of the ships.

Suddenly he cranes his neck forward, and a flood of warmth surges from his heart to his cheeks, swelling the veins of his neck; there, on the gravel path just below, in his master’s garden, walks Clara.

White stockings and little low shoes; her footsteps shoot forward like the narrow-leaved bine of some swiftly growing plant, and she hums in time to her walk. Kasper is so fascinated that involuntarily he hums as well, but wakes with a start of fright at hearing his own rough voice. He fancies he can see the delicate skin of her neck gleaming through the lace edge of her dress, the blue pulse in her temples, and the play of the sunlight in her dark-brown hair.

She walks round the lawn, and turns into a patch that would take her along under the wall, where Kasper cannot follow. He realises this, and works his way right out on to the roof, with only his legs dangling down inside.

“Clara, dear little Jomfru Clara,” whispers his mouth, “do not go away!”

At the same moment his legs are gripped by powerful claws, and he is hauled down with such force and suddenness that he has not time even to put out his hands. Down he comes anyhow on the floor, and lies there, bruised and shaken, looking up into Jespersen’s green eyes.

“Ho! So you loaf about looking out of the window when you ought to be counting nails!”

And now it was discovered that he had used the scales. Jespersen found one packet with ninety-eight nails and another with a hundred and one instead of a hundred, and ran off to tell his master. Next day Kasper was sent for from the inner office.

The thought of this is a culmination of delight for Egholm in his sleepless state, but at the same time, he notes, in parenthesis, as it were, that he is now on the brink of the abyss he knows will shortly swallow him up.

The stately man with the dark, full beard talks to him of doing one’s duty to the utmost, not merely as far as may be seen. And during the speech Kasper discovers on the leather-covered wall a picture in a gilded oval frame – a painting of Clara.

To him it seems even more lovely, even more living, than the girl herself; his eyes are simply held spellbound to the beautiful vision.

Konsul Steen glances absently in the same direction, and then, with a very eloquent gesture, places himself between Kasper and his daughter.

“Have you already forgotten your duties in life, which your parents, honest people, I have no doubt, taught you? What did you say your father was?”

“I’m a foundling,” says the boy, with dignity, enjoying his master’s embarrassment.

Afterwards, standing out in the passage, he remembers only that one question and answer. But, most of all, Clara’s portrait is burned deep into his brain. Many a time he steals a peep at it through the keyhole. Even in the golden days when Clara’s living self would place her hand in his and follow him adventuring through the gloomy cellars, or over mountains of sacks to the topmost opening of the loft, telling him her troubles and her joys, and listening to all his confessions, with her firm, commanding, and yet so innocent eyes fixed on his – even then the painting did not lose its halo. And throughout the many years of struggle, it lived on in his joy and his anguish, mostly in anguish, it is true, for there was certainly nothing merely amusing when it rose up like life before his mental vision, in all its smiling, merciless beauty, rendering his agony tenfold worse. Egholm had spoken to several people about that same thing, among them the doctor at the hospital where he had once been a patient for some time. The doctor knew that sort of thing very well; it was what was called an obsession. Well and good – but was that any explanation, after all? No; it was rather something mysterious, something of the nature of magic, that had come into his life from the time he married Anna.

Anna – yes…

He writhed and twisted in his bed, as if he were on a spit. His heart pumped audibly and irregularly.

To begin with, she had opened the door, letting out all the warmth, and made him nervous with all the things she strewed about the floor.

Then there had been that trouble about the dark-room, which had driven him out of his senses with its insistence.

Why couldn’t she understand that it was not her his blows were aimed at, but at Fate?

What was a photographer without a dark-room?

No – she could not understand. Not an atom. She could only stand there and say “But, Egholm…” and plague him about her kitchen.

Egholm half raised himself in bed, utterly in the power of his nightmare thoughts, and struck wildly at the air with his clenched fist.

The vision – yes, there it was!

“Herregud!– can’t a man be left to sleep in peace?” he murmured offendedly, yet with a sort of humility at the same time. “I’m so tired…”

But as in the gleam of lightning he saw again and again Jomfru Clara, and at last she stood there clearly, steadfastly, with her great deep and mischievous eyes radiantly upon him.

He groaned and shuddered, flinging himself desperately about as he lay, for he knew what was coming now.

Hastily, mechanically, he ran through the scene once more. There stood Anna, and there he himself…

“But, Egholm…”

“You are the serpent…”

His fist shot out into the dark, and struck, this time, not Anna, but the pale, bright girl who seemed to glide into her place.

“Oh – oh!” He writhed and groaned again, drawing in his breath between closed lips, as one who has suddenly cut a deep wound in his hand.

“Aren’t you well, dear?” It was Anna’s voice, close at hand.

He lay stiff and still, hardly breathing now. The interruption had driven the horrors away.

Ridiculous – but so it was with him. He remembered, for instance, having been haunted by a snake – one he had seen preserved in spirits at some railway station office or other … yes. That had stopped, after a while, of itself. But it was worse with Clara’s picture. In a way, it was more beautiful, of course – oh, so beautiful…

He yawned audibly.

But he thought many other things out yet: of his business and his money affairs; of Vang and Vang’s domestic life; of an invention he wanted to get on with – a thing of almost world-revolutionary importance, a steam turbine, that could go forward or back like lightning. It would make him a rich man – a wealthy man…

A little later he dropped off to sleep, lying on his back, and breathing still in little unsteady gasps.

Fru Egholm’s straw mattress creaked as she rose quietly, and with a gentle touch here and there tucked his bedclothes close about him.

In the next room Hedvig was talking in her sleep – something about cakes…

“Herregud!” murmured her mother – “dreaming of cakes means illness. I hope it doesn’t mean Emanuel’s going to get the chickenpox.”

With a sigh she fell off to sleep.

The clock struck two.

XIII

Madam Hermansen came into every house in Knarreby, without exception – whence follows, that she came to Egholm’s.

How she managed to effect an entry there, where shutters and bolts were carefully set to hide the shame of poverty, is not stated.

Presumably, she came of herself, like most diseases – and she came again and again, like a series of bad relapses. She literally clung to the Egholms, and almost neglected her other visits therefor.

They were somehow more remarkable than others, she thought. They had a past.

Madam Hermansen herself was tolerated – almost, one might say, esteemed. At any rate, no attempt was ever made to find a cure for her. Egholm enjoyed the abundant laughter with which she greeted even the most diluted sample of his wit, and Fru Egholm needed someone to confide in.

It was all very well for him. In his all too extensive leisure, he made excursions through the town, spending hours in talk with fishermen down at the harbour, or going off for solitary walks along the shore or in the woods. She, on the other hand, could only trip about in the two small rooms, with never a sight of the sun beyond the narrow strip that drew like the hand of a clock across the kitchen floor from four till half-past seven in the morning. And no one to talk to but her husband and the children. Little wonder, then, that the flow of speech so long held back poured forth in flood when Madam Hermansen began deftly working at the sluices.

The talk itself was but a detail, that cropped up before one knew, thought Fru Egholm at times; but if she had not had someone to look at her needlework, why, in the long run, it would mean sinking down to the level of a man.

True, Madam Hermansen was no connoisseur of art, but a dollymop who never achieved more than the knitting of stockings herself. On the other hand, she was ready to prostrate herself in admiration of even the most trivial piece of embroidery or crochet-work. There was something in that…

“Why, it almost turns my head only to look at it,” she declared, fingering the coverlet for the chest of drawers. It was one afternoon in May, and the two women were alone in the house with little Emanuel.

“Oh, you could learn it yourself in five minutes.” Fru Egholm flushed with pride, and her hands flew over the work. “No, but you should see a thing I made just before we left Odense. Fancy crochet.”

“Heaven preserve us! Me! Never to my dying day! It’s more than I’m ever likely to learn, I’m sure. What was it you called it?”

“Fancy crochet. And then I lost it – it was a cruel shame, really. And such a lovely pattern.”

“Stolen?” cried Fru Hermansen, slapping her thighs.

“No. I gave it away to a woman that came up to congratulate when Emanuel was born. She praised it up, and I saw what she meant, of course. But here’s another thing you must see.”

She rose, and took out a pin-cushion from a drawer.

“There’s nothing special about that, of course…”

But Madam Hermansen declared she had never seen anything like it. The pale pink silk showing all glossy through under the crochet cover was simply luxurious.

“Ah yes! That’s the sort of things a body would like to have about the house,” she said, turning it over in her chapped and knotty hands. “And what do you use a thing like that for, now?”

“Oh, fine ladies use it for brooches and things. But it’s mostly meant for a young girl, you know, to have on a chest of drawers, this way…”

“Yes, yes, that’s much the best. Why, it would be a sin and a shame to stick pins in a thing like that.”

“Look here,” said Fru Egholm, flushing, “you keep it. Yes, do; it’s yours. No, no; do as I say – and we’ll speak no more about it.”

Madam Hermansen made a great fuss of protest, but allowed herself to be persuaded, and thrust it under her shawl. She held it as if it had been a live lobster.

And Fru Egholm brought out other things. There was a newspaper holder worked with poppies, and a cushion embroidered on canvas.

“There’s little pleasure in having them,” she sighed. “Egholm, he doesn’t value it more than the dirt under his feet.”

“Ah! It’s just the same with Hermansen, now. One Sunday afternoon I came home and found him, as true as I’m here, sitting on the curtains, smoking, as careless as could be. But your husband – I thought he was a model.”

“Egholm doesn’t smoke. If he did, he’d be just the same. But I can tell you a thing – just to show what he thinks about my work. Ah, Madam Hermansen, take my word for it, there’s many a slight a woman has to put up with that hurts more than all your blows.”

“And he’s been on the railway, too…”

“It doesn’t change human nature, after all. It was these here things from the auction at Gammelhauge, the mirror and the chest of drawers, and the big chair over by the window, and that very one you’re sitting in now. Now, tell me honestly, would you call them nice to look at?”

Madam Hermansen shifted a little under in her big green shawl.

“They’re a trifle old fashioned to my mind.” And she sniffed disdainfully.

“Old fashioned and worm eaten and heavy and clumsy – you needn’t be afraid to say it. Why, it’s almost two men’s work to lift a chair like that. And as for the glass – why, it makes you look like a chimney-sweep. The chest of drawers is not so bad; it does hold a good deal. Wools and odds and ends… But, all the same…”

“My daughter she had one with nickel handles to pull out,” said Madam Hermansen, poking at it. “And walnut’s the nicest you can have, so the joiner man said.”

“Yes, that’s what I say. But what do you think Egholm said? ‘Rare specimens,’ he said – ‘solid mahogany!’ Ugh! Well, do you know what I did? I set to work then and there and made up something to cover the worst of it. Those butterflies for the rocking-chair, and the cloth with the stars on for the chest of drawers, and paper roses to put in by the mirror. It took me the whole of a night, but I wouldn’t have grudged it, if I’d only got a thimbleful of thanks for my pains. And now, just listen, and I’ll tell you the thanks I got. One day the Sanitary Inspector came round to have a look at the sink. He’d brought a whole crowd with him – it was a commission or something, with the mayor and the doctor and the vet, and so on. Then one of them gets it into his head he’d like to have a look round the place. Egholm, of course, waves his hand and says, ‘With pleasure.’ And never a thought in his head of anything the matter.”

Madam Hermansen nodded sympathetically.

“Well, they came in through the kitchen and stood there poking about at the sink for a bit, and while they’re at it, Egholm comes in here. And then – what do you say to this? – he rushes round the room and pulls it all off. As true as I’m here; the butterflies and the paper flowers, and the toilet cover and all. Threw the flowers under the table, and stuffed the rest in under his coat. Now, if that isn’t simply disgraceful…”

“And what did you say to him?” Madam Hermansen shook herself, giving out a perfume of leeks and celery from under her shawl.

“Not a word. I had to keep it all back, and bow and scrape to the gentlemen, with my heart like to bursting all the time. ‘We must take all that stuff out of the way when anyone comes,’ he says after. Oh, he’s that full of his fashionable notions, there’s no room for human feeling in his breast. And if there is one thing I can’t abide, it is that fashionable nonsense.”

“Well, now, I don’t know that it’s altogether put on, you know, with him, seeing he’s a man of good family, as you might say.”

“Good family – h’m. As to that…” Fru Egholm raised her eyebrows.

“Well, well, I don’t know, of course,” said Madam Hermansen, shifting heavily a little forward. “I thought he was a parson’s son, and his parents were dead?”

“No, indeed he’s not. Nothing of the kind.”

“He’s not a circus child, is he? – there’s some say he is.”

“It wouldn’t be so surprising, with all his antics generally. But the real truth is, he’s a foundling – that is to say, illegitimate.” Fru Egholm uttered the last word with a certain coldness, but a moment after sighed compassionately.

“You don’t say so! Well, now, I never did…” Madam Hermansen sat rocking backwards and forwards in ecstasy, and as she realised what a grand piece of news she had got hold of, a silent laughter began bubbling up from her heart.

Fru Egholm looked at her in some surprise, and, uncertain how to take her, bent over the cradle and busied herself with the child.

“Why, then, Madam Danielsen was right, after all,” said Madam Hermansen. “But who was his mother, then?”

“Well, to tell the truth, she was a fine lady, and married a professor after – and that’s a strange thing, seeing what a plenty of honest girls there are about. She must have been a baggage, though, all the same, to get into trouble like that.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Madam Hermansen, patting the hairpins that jostled each other in a knot of hair about the size of a walnut. “And his father?”

“Oh, a scatter-brained fellow. Government official, they called him, but he was a painter – an artist, you know – besides, and I daresay it was that was his undoing in the end, when he led the girl astray.”

“But I thought the doctors at the Foundling Hospital were under oath not to tell who the parents were?”

“That’s true enough. But d’you think Egholm would be put off like that? No, he set to work – that is, when he was grown up – and advertised in Berlingske Tidende, putting it all in, so-and-so, as if he didn’t know what shame was. And then his sister – half-sister, that is, of course – wrote and came along of her own accord. Nice enough in her way, she was, too, but you could see she was one of the same sort…”

Fru Egholm made a grimace involving numerous wrinkles of the nose. Madam Hermansen nodded as one who understood.

“Yes … she gave herself out for an artist, like her father had been – and she was the image of him to look at, too.”

“But I thought…”

“Well, that of course, in a way. For they said she used to go sitting in a public place and painting pictures with a man stark naked as a model.”

“Heaven preserve us!” gasped Madam Hermansen. “In all my born days… Well, she must have been a nice one.”

“She and Egholm simply slobbered over each other with their affected ways. She called him her dear lost brother, and how glad she was to find him again – and all that sort of thing. I simply said there was no need to carry on too much about it that I could see, for if they had grown up together, like as not they’d have been tearing each other’s eyes out. He was a terrible child, I believe – used to pour sand over the cake-man’s basket outside Rundetaarn, and let off fireworks in the street and so on.”