Karin Michaëlis

“ Can you still have the courage, Magna, to let the innocent child, offspring of your heart, become Kelly’s playfellow? And if you are so courageous, how shall I be able to exonerate myself if you come to me one day and say, “Kelly has corrupted my boy”?
I put the words into your mouth, Magna.
Say no, while there is still time. You are strong, stronger than any other woman I know, since you have found yourself again through strenuous exertion and labour. But there are powers that the strongest cannot conquer. ”

“ It is the restlessness of the senses. She wants more life than she can get on this island. She knows I see through her, and casts her eyes downward when I look at her.
Joergen Malthe,
You are the only man I ever loved. And now, by means of this letter, I am digging a fathomless pit between us. I am not the woman you thought me; and my true self you could never love.
I am like a criminal who has had recourse to every deceit to avoid confession, but whose strength gives way at last under the pressure of threats and torture, and who finds unspeakable relief in declaring his guilt. ”

“ I see something beyond the barrier, [121] and I don’t see it. It is not death, but there is something that hurts more than death.
And the evening was the happiest of my life.
Perhaps it is nothing at all. Perhaps it is only my heart breaking for happiness, but can it hurt so much when one’s heart breaks for happiness?
It was at the moment when you went out at the door. Magna Wellmann turned her head and said, “That was the evening of the year,” and you nodded. Then was it. It felt as if all my joy had suddenly been hemmed up in a coffin and couldn’t breathe. ”

“ Magna, you will think me brutal, too, because I now tell you in black and white what formerly I lacked the courage to say. Believe me, it was often on the tip of my tongue to exclaim: "Better have a lover than torment this poor man whose temperament is so different to your own."
I will not say you did not care for your husband. You learnt to see his good qualities; but there was no true union between you. You hated his work. Not like a woman who is jealous of the time spent away from her; but because you believed such arduous brain work made him less ardent as a lover. ”

“ You wonderful human creature, Magna. Other women suffer intolerably during the nine months of pregnancy, and grow irritable and ugly. But you are blooming as if it were the most perfectly natural condition to be in. What a contrast to your ordinary mood and your old escapades. You are not in the least afraid to bring a child into the world at your age; and in such circumstances every line of your letter breathes freshness and health, and there is no disguising it.
Do you know, your letter awoke in me the first longing for Denmark since I packed my boxes and went out into the wide world. ”

“ From that moment I was a changed woman. Not better perhaps, but quite different. A thousand new feelings awoke in me; I saw, heard, and felt in an entirely new way. All humanity assumed a new aspect. I, who had hitherto been so indifferent to the weal or woe of my fellow-creatures, began to observe and to understand them. I became sympathetic. Towards women—not towards men. I do not understand the male sex, and this must be my excuse for the way in which I have so often treated men. For me there was, and is, only one man in the world: Joergen Malthe. ”

“ All the time your smile is cold and meditative, and your glance is extinguished like a lamp that has consumed its last drop of oil. My poor heart tells me the reason—you are wondering at yourself for giving way to a mood which means so little to you.
But when, saddened, I try to move away, you again offer me your mouth as a friendly almsgiving.... The letter, the barren letter I hold it to my heart. I leave my house and go into the deepest part of the wood till I find a place solitary enough to lie down in. ”

“ Who has never caught mother or sister in a falsehood or a subterfuge? Who has not sometimes seen in the heart of mother or sister, as by a lightning flash, an abyss which the profoundest love cannot bridge over?
Who has ever really understood his mother or sister?
The human being dwells and moves alone. Each woman dwells in her own planet formed of centrifugal fires enveloped in a thin crust of earth. And as each star runs its eternal course through space, isolated amid countless myriads of other stars, so each woman goes her solitary way through life. ”

“ You cannot deny that your marriage was a grave mistake.
There was just the chance—a remote one—that you might have met the kind of husband to suit you: an eminently masculine type, the kind who would have kept the whip-hand over you, and regarded a wife as half-mistress, half-slave. Even then I think your conjugal happiness would have ceased the first day he lost the attraction of novelty.
Professor Wellmann, your quiet, correct husband, was as great a torment to you as you were to him. Without intending it, you made his life a misery. ”

“ He has lost faith in his talent. Therefore he is irritable and dejected, and Jeanne, who all these years has had enough to do in bringing children into the world, and caring for them and him, now stands suddenly still, looks round and behind her, and feels disillusioned. Now is the time when she wants the tenderest words he has ever lavished on her, but he, with his head full of building plans, sees no sense or object in two people talking of love—two people who have proved their love with their whole life. ”

“ I could humble myself to be his mistress; I could die with him. But set up a home with Joergen Malthe—never!
The terrible part of home life is that every piece of furniture in the house forms a link in the chain which binds two married people long after love has died out—if, indeed, it ever existed between them. Two human beings—who differ as much as two human beings always must do—are compelled to adopt the same tastes, the same outlook. The home is built upon this incessant conflict. The struggle often goes on in silence, but it is not the less bitter, even when concealed. ”

“ Time and life—I scarcely know what—have changed me—and you are not like the majority of women, and Malthe is not a man like other men.
You may perhaps cause him a never-ending torment by speaking. Be clear on this, or you may cause yourself no less pain by keeping silent, and letting what is past and over for ever be forgotten. I know you, Jeanne; every day and every hour you will despise yourself more and more because his belief in you is so boundless. ”

“ Lili had not the strength to fight the first sharp anguish. The shock bewildered her, and the love of her imagination seemed to her at the moment the true one. She felt she was betraying you, Schlegel, and herself; and since self-sacrifice had become the law of her life, she was prepared to renounce everything as a proof of her love.
[82]
You, Professor Rothe, have acted very foolishly. You have done just what any average conventional man would have done. Your hurt vanity silenced the voice of your heart. ”

“ Once I longed for you with a consuming ardour.
Now, alas, I am but a pile of burnt-out ashes. The winds of heaven have dispersed my dreams.
I go on living because it is not in my nature to do away with myself. I live, and shall continue to live.
If only you knew what goes on within me, and how low I have sunk that I can write this confession!
There are thoughts that a woman can never reveal to the man she loves—even if her own life and his were at stake....
It is night. The stars are bright overhead. Joergen Malthe, why have I written all this to you?... What do I really want of you?... ”

“ Such an awful look of terror haunted her eyes, that at her gaze a cold shiver, born of one's own fears and forebodings, ran through one.
She compelled us to realise the things we scarcely dare foresee....
I shall never forget a letter in which she wrote these words in a queer, faltering handwriting:
"If men suspected what took place in a woman's inner life after forty, they would avoid us like the plague, or knock us on the head like mad dogs."
Such a philosophy of life ended in the poor woman being shut up in a madhouse. ”

“ It is like standing in a brilliantly lighted room that becomes suddenly dark.
Once I received flowers from you which I never thanked you for. You know nothing about these flowers. Shall I tell you their story? But you mustn’t laugh.
I always feel happy when I think of them. It is almost as if the flowers were standing again in the window, and I lying in my hypnotic sleep, unable to open my eyes but knowing all the time that your yellow orchids, trembling like a swarm of golden butterflies [114] on their delicate stalks were standing there in the window. ”

“ Meanwhile I developed into the frivolous society woman everybody took me to be. Every woman wears the mask which best suits her purpose. My mask was my smile. I did not wish others to see through me. Sometimes, during a sudden silence, I have caught the echo of my own laugh—that laugh in which you, too, delighted—and hearing it I have shuddered.
No! That is not quite true. I was a different woman with you. A real, living creature lived and breathed behind the mask. You taught me to live. You looked into my eyes, and heard my real laughter.
How many hours we spent together, Joergen, you and I! ”

“ First and foremost, Agnete, you must look into yourself, and get rid of the lie which like an octopus has caught you in its embrace and smothers the best within you.
The lie about your husband’s deficiency. Your expressions of longing for a harmony of souls is a lie, just as your pretension to love with the soul and not with the senses is a lie.
You are one of the many women who, for reasons which I fail to understand, find no salvation in your relations to a man. ”

“ In Richard's house in the Old Market I never felt at home. Yet when I left it I felt as though all my nerves were being torn from my body.
Joergen Malthe is the man I love; but apart from that he is a stranger to me. We do not think or feel alike. He has his world and I have mine. I should only be like a vampire to him. His work would be hateful to me before a month was past. All women in love are like Magna Wellmann. I shudder when I think of the big ugly room where he lives and works ”

“ It’s when you realise I am a woman ... suddenly, as if a mask fell from my face, you realise that I am a woman, and not only a woman, but a woman meant for you. And the smile that then encloses me like a snare has not its origin in your consciousness and knowledge of my love, but its origin is in me because I am a woman. ”

“ A man must not let himself be crushed. It would hurt me to feel that people pitied you. You are much too good to be pitied.
Certainly it would have been better if, as you said, one of us had died. But in that case you would have had to take the plunge into eternity, for I am looking forward with joy to life on my island.
For twenty years I have lived under the shadow of your wing in the Old Market Place. May I live another twenty under the great forest trees, wedded to solitude.
How the gossips will gossip! But we two, clever people, will laugh at their gossip. ”

“ You are now just about the age I was when we first met each other; that age which for women is so difficult and dangerous. And the inexplicable happiness is not granted to every woman to come through the time unscathed and triumphant as I did. ”

“ I can believe that a woman who admired strength and manliness might see in Schlegel a type of firm, inflexible manhood; while a woman attracted by tenderness might equally think him capable of the most yielding gentleness. The secret probably lay in the fact that this man, who knew so many women, possessed the rare faculty of taking each one according to her temperament.
Schlegel was a living man; but had he been a portrait, or character in a novel, Lillie would have fallen in love with him just the same, because her love was purely of the imagination. ”

“ Don’t you see, dear child, a clever woman never makes scenes. It isn’t politic. A scene that lasts an hour does fourteen days’ detriment to her appearance.
Your question, “What ought I to do now?” really means, “How can I punish him further?”
Rather you should ask, “What can I do to heal his wounded soul?” And this is my answer, Agnete, “You can do it by confessing your own mistakes, and forgetting his.”
You must not ape humility, and let something cry within you, “See what a sacrifice I am making!” ”

“ We are compounded so strangely of good and bad, truth and falsehood, that it requires the most delicate touch to unravel the tangled skein of our natures and find the starting point.
No man is capable of the task.
During recent years it has become the fashion for notorious women to publish their reminiscences in the form of a diary. But has any woman reader discovered in all this literature a single intimate feature, a single frank revelation of all that is kept hidden behind a thousand veils? ”

“ There I had Richard from morning till night. To be bored alone is bad; to be bored in the society of one other person is much worse. To think that Richard never noticed it! His incessant talk reminded me [12] of a mill-wheel, and I felt as though all the flour were blowing into my eyes.”
In another place she says: “I am now sure that even if the difference in our own age did not exist, I could never marry Malthe.... I could do foolish, even mean things for the sake of the one man I loved with all my heart.... But set up a home with Joergen Malthe—never!” ”

“ If I had more sensibility, and a little imagination—even as much as Torp, who makes verses with the help of her hymn-book—I think I should turn my attention to literature. Women like to wade in their memories as one wades through dry leaves in autumn. I believe I should be very clever in opening a series of whited sepulchres, and, without betraying any personalities, I should collect my exhumed mummies under the general title of, "Woman at the Dangerous Age." But besides imagination, I lack the necessary perseverance to occupy myself for long together with other people's affairs. ”

“ Jeanne must really collect herself, and understand that all this is nothing but a transition. When I think of it, I can recall no case among the many I have known—except, of course, my own—of a single woman who has managed to get through these years without a slight rumpus of some kind. Afterwards they have taken endless trouble to patch up the wounds they have inflicted. Now, Jeanne has been more than unreasonable in this respect. There isn’t a man in the world who can stand such an everlasting adoration. ”

“ Lillie must never have the vexation of learning that I detested her girls simply because they represented the youthful generation which sooner or later must supplant me.
I have made good use of my eyes, and I know what I have seen: the same enmity exists between two generations as between the sexes.
While the young folk in their arrogant cruelty laugh at us who are growing old, we, in our turn, amuse ourselves by making fun of them. If women could buy back their lost youth by the blood of those nearest and dearest to them, what crimes the world would witness! ”

“ Yet the world compels them to steer a false course. Their youth only counts so long as their complexions remain clear and their figures slim. Otherwise they are exposed to cruel mockery. A woman who tries late in life to make good her claim to existence, is regarded with contempt. For her there is neither shelter nor sympathy.
It sometimes happens that a winter gale strips all the leaves from a tree in a single night. When does a woman grow old in body and soul in one swift and merciful moment? ”

“ My dear Magna, listen to me. A woman of your temperament ought never to bind herself by marriage to any man, and is certainly not fit to have children. You were intended—do not take the words as an insult—to lead the life of a fille de joie. The term sounds ugly—but I know no other that is equally applicable. Your vehement temperament, your insatiable desire for new excitements—in a word, your whole nature tends that way. ”

“ Men do not know how to smile. They look more or less benevolent, more or less pleased, more or less love-smitten; but they are not pliable or subtle enough to smile. A woman who is not sufficiently prudent to mask her features, gives away her soul in a smile. I have known women who revealed their whole natures in this way.
No woman speaks aloud, but most women smile aloud. And the fact that in so doing we unveil all our artifice, all the whirlpool of our inmost being to each other, proves the extraordinary solidarity of our sex. ”

“ Autumn! Torp has made a huge fire of logs in the open grate. The burning wood gives out an intoxicating perfume and fills the house with cosey warmth. For want of something better to do I am looking after the fire myself. I carefully strip the bark from each log before throwing it on the flames. The smell of burning birch-bark goes to my head like strong wine. Dreams come and go.
Joergen Malthe, what a mere boy you are!
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
The garden looks like a neglected churchyard, forgotten of the living. The virginia creeper falls in blood-red streamers from the verandah. ”

“ Later on, I shall enjoy writing you a condensed account of all the follies which can be committed by a woman who suddenly finds herself at a mature age complete mistress of her actions.
Follow my advice, offered for the twentieth time: go on seeing your friends; you cannot do without them. Really there is no need for you to mourn for a year with crape on the chandeliers and immortelles around my portrait.
You have been a kind, faithful, and delicate-minded friend to me, and I am not so lacking in delicacy myself that I do not appreciate this in my inmost heart. ”

“ Women's doctors may be as clever and sly as they please, but they will never learn any of the things that women confide to each other. It is inevitable. Between the sexes lies not only a deep, eternal hostility, but the unfathomable abyss of a complete lack of reciprocal comprehension.
For instance, all the words in a language will never express what a smile will express—and between women a smile is like a masonic sign; we can use them between ourselves without any fear of their being misunderstood by the other sex. ”