Karin Michaëlis

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ You think that love can be wrenched out of a man’s life as easily as a tooth is drawn, root and all.
Agony brings your husband to reason and his senses, he belies what he feels and cries, “I love no one but you!” But even then can you leave him alone? Certainly not. You now insist on his telling everything, betraying and deceiving. You know, as a Catholic, he cannot claim a divorce, and yet you ask if he will marry her in the case of your retiring? Not a word of this offer do you intend seriously. [176] You want to humiliate and torment him. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!” ”

“ No, Lili cared for Schlegel, and for you, too.... Probably you are saying to yourself, “A woman must love one man or the other.”
With some show of reason you will argue, “In leaving my house, at any rate, she proved that Schlegel alone claimed her affection.”
Nevertheless I maintain that you are wrong.
[77]
Lili showed every sign of a sane, well-balanced nature. Well, her famous serenity and calmness deceived us all. Behind this serene exterior was the most feminine of all feminine qualities—the fanciful imagination of the visionary. Do you or I know anything about her first girlish dreams? ”

“ 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!” ”

“ 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. ”

“ Locke has succeeded in uniting with the firm carefulness of his early work the rapid, fluent, vibrating style that makes his later books so delightful; therefore it is easy to make the deduction that ‘Clementina’ is the best piece of work he has done.”—New York Evening Sun
“Among the novels of the past five years no books have more consistently produced an effect at once certain, satisfactory and delightful than those of William J. Locke. This latest addition to his shelf is full of life and laughter and the love not only of man for woman but of man for man and for humanity. ”

“ Magna, it’s not selfishness which makes me dread letting Kelly out of my hands—the day does not seem far off when I shall be forced to live under another roof from that which shelters him, and that is why I don’t want to die.
My every thought is dedicated to him for whom and with whom I now live, and so I will continue to live without complaint so [160] long as life is granted me. I have looked it all in the face, and have recoiled, shuddering, at the petrifying horror of impossibilities, but I have made my resolve. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When a man possesses a woman as completely as you possessed Lili, he thinks himself quite safe. You never doubted for a moment that, having you, she could wish for anything else.
You are not only a clever and capable man, you are kind, and an entertaining companion; in short, you have many excellent qualities which Lili exalted to the skies. But your nature is not very poetical; you are, in fact, rather prosaic, and only believe what you see. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Are the little cosmopolitan godless angels of children really so hard to bring up as you think? They have, of course, the artistic temperament, and you attempt to model them into normal human beings. You will never succeed.
And is Malthe’s depression of spirits of any great significance? There is cause for it. He has of late, with justice or injustice, been overlooked, and younger powers have been preferred before him; his name has no longer the cachet it once had, and even his talent seems to have taken a back seat. But, dear Jeanne, you are greatly to blame for this. ”

“ The waiters go round pouring out coffee the whole time, while we sit in a rosy twilight. Every one pays every one else little choice and sincerely-meant compliments. Call it an empty life, if you like, and I won’t deny that it is.
You ask what I have been doing since I took flight from my now desolate and dilapidated villa. If I only knew myself I would tell you. It all seems so long ago I travelled about with Jeanne, my young housemate and friend, and we really did nothing but kill time.
Rumours of my Monte Carlo period have no doubt penetrated to Denmark. ”

“ It’s not what Kelly is to be, but how he becomes what he is, that is going to be for me the main question. I fold my hands in my lap, and I confess my powerlessness.
Make Kelly a man. Make Kelly a good man.
You will understand, Magna, that I could not say all this if we stood face to face. While I have been writing Kelly has been several times to the door. He wants to know what I am doing. Every time I feel tempted to lay down my pen to enjoy his society. He asked me the other day, “Mother, do you believe that people’s fate is pre-ordained?” ”

“ It is quite a matter of indifference to me if people shake their heads at my insane action. How should they know that Kelly alone, only this boy with the vicious little face and criminal glance is the source of all my bliss and riches in this life? ”

“ I should leave my home, and my children, and go away. I should take leave of life, and fall asleep quietly, oh, so quietly, never to awake.
The darkness of the grave would have to be round me, so that not a sound disturbed my happiness.
To live and know that you loved me! I could not do it. My strength would be lacking. I can only love.
Henry said one day, “Don’t touch any of my little bottles.” I was staring at them so hard. Each of the little bottles contained the peace of the grave. But I must go on [107] living for the sake of my little children, for Henry’s sake. ”

“ This letter might be written in twenty different ways, but only one is the right way, and now I begin writing to you in the same style as I write in my own poor, dull diary. You know it is only lazy people who can bear to record the barrenness of their daily life in a diary.
Accept my warmest and most sincere congratulations, dear Jeanne, and don’t shed any more tears on my account. You have not transgressed anything, you dear child, with your refined humanity. ”

“ She doesn’t mind who he is, or what he looks like, if only she may be granted the wonderful happiness of having a husband. I lied my utmost to comfort her.
And if she can’t get a husband, she intends to adopt a child.
A really sick, starving, miserable child. I said tamely, that if I cherished—as God forbid that I should—such a fad, I would, at all events, seek out a healthy, pretty, and well-nourished [72] infant. Whereupon she answered, “I don’t want a child to live for my sake; I want to live for the sake of a child.” She is a fine, but rather queer creature. ”

“ I talk and laugh, and am two people at once, one of whom watches the gaucheries of the other with sad eyes; the other who is quite at sea how she shall act to please you. And that is I myself, I, who in every one else’s society, feel as free as the pollen of the buttercups as it flies over the fields. I talk on and on as if I must fill space with my words, fearful that the embarrassment of silence will turn my features to stone, fearful, too, of discovering a glint of boredom in your glance. Your glance! ”

“ I was quite prepared that she would confess to having committed some crime. But no, that wasn’t it.
[70]
She had only been in all innocence a nun for twenty-two years. Twenty-two years a nun! Think of it! There were the years, too, that she was pupil and novice, making altogether twenty-six years behind the walls of a convent, subjected to the convent discipline and the weary convent habit. And now she has broken loose, like a prisoner who makes a rope of his bedclothes to escape over walls to freedom. ”

“ 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. ”

“ And it all comes of my freak of using the subway under the river instead of taking a motor. What induced me to waste time in that fashion? I who, of all others, detest subterranean zigzagging?
Was it a presentment? Did I expect a sensation, and wish to gloat over the sight of roofless night-wanderers, who for five cents travel backwards and forwards by this route all day? One’s way of living and thinking is different in New York from what it is in [139] great European capitals. We don’t follow each other like sheep. We think more for ourselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Instead she married Richard Lindtner, a wealthy Dane, and made her home with him in the Old Market Place at Copenhagen, where for twenty-two [9] years she was, to outward appearances, a happy and contented wife.
“I allowed my senses to be inflamed while my mind remained cold and my heart contracted with disgust. I consciously profaned the sacred words of love by applying them to a man whom I chose for his money. 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....” ”

“ Schlegel was a man, but had he been a portrait or a character in a novel, [84] Lili would have fallen in love with him just the same, because her love was purely of the imagination.
You must do what you please. But one thing I wish you to understand.... If you are not going to act in the matter I shall act. I confess openly that I am a selfish woman, but I am very fond of Lili, and if you abandon her in this cruel and senseless way I shall have her to live with me here, and shall do my best to console her for the loss of an ungrateful husband, and a pack of stupid, undemonstrative children. ”

“ And as it’s the custom to adorn and paint the dead till they look twenty or thirty years younger than when they were alive, you will comprehend how that appeals to the vanity of one who has warded off the burden of age. I should just like to know how any woman devoid of vanity could exist in this city of light and sunshine. I belong to two or three clubs where ladies of seventy and eighty congregate, with porcelain complexions, powdered coiffures, and Gainsborough hats. ”

“ Oluf doesn’t like Kelly drinking schnaps. So Kelly doesn’t drink schnaps. Oluf wants Kelly’s moustache to grow, so Kelly lets it grow.
“So long as I have Oluf, who takes care of me, you need not be afraid of me.” Those words are close to my heart.
And yet I have still some anxiety. The world is so big, and here things are reduced to such a groove. I notice the effect on Oluf [182] when Kelly tells him about America. Who knows if the day will not come when the pair come to bid me and Magna farewell to go off on adventures? ”