Niels could not help smiling; he felt so superior, and was so sorry for her, as she stood there, girlishly unhappy in the midst of all this confession. He was softened and could not find any hard words.
He went over to her.
Meanwhile she had turned the chair toward her and had sunk down on it, and now she was sitting there quite forlorn and pathetic, leaning back with arms hanging and face lifted, gazing out under lowered eyelids through the darkened parlor with its two rows of chairs into the dim anteroom.
Niels laid his arm along the back of the chair and rested his hand on its arm, as he bent over her. “And you had quite forgotten—me?” he whispered.
She seemed not to hear him and did not even lift her eyes, but at last she shook her head, very faintly, and, after another long pause, shook it again, very faintly.
Round about them everything was very still at first. Then a maid came clattering along the halls and singing, as she polished the door-locks; the noise of the knobs turning cut brutally into the silence and made it seem deeper than before when it suddenly came back. After a while, nothing was heard except the drowsy, monotonous tapping of the blinds.
The silence seemed to rob them of the power of speech, almost of thought. She sat as before with her eyes fixed on the dim anteroom, while he remained standing, bending over her, gazing at the pattern of her silk dress, and, unconsciously, lured by the enveloping stillness, he began to rock her in the chair—very—softly—very—softly. …
She lifted her eyelids for a look at his shadowed profile, and lowered them again in quiet content. It was like a long embrace; it was as though she gave herself into his arms when the chair went back, and when it swung forward again, and her feet touched the floor, there was something of him in the pressure of the boards against her foot. He felt it too; the process began to interest him, and he rocked more and more vigorously. It was as though he came nearer and nearer to taking her as he drew the chair farther back; there was anticipation in the instant when it was about to plunge forward again, and when it came down there was a strange satisfaction in the soft tap of her passive feet against the floor; then when he pushed it down yet a little farther there was complete possession in the action which pressed her sole gently against the floor and forced her to raise her knee ever so slightly.
“Let us not dream!” said Niels at last with a sigh and relinquished the chair.
“Yes, let us!” she said almost pleadingly, and looked innocently at him with great wistful eyes.
She had risen slowly.
“No dreams!” said Niels nervously, putting his arm around her waist. “Too many dreams have passed between you and me. Have you never felt them? Have they never touched you like a light breath caressing your cheek or stirring your hair? Is it possible that the night has never been tremulous with sigh upon sigh that dropped and died on your lips?”
He kissed her, and it seemed to him that she grew less young under his kisses, less young, but lovelier, more glowing in her beauty, more alluring.
“I want you to know it,” he said. “You don’t know how I love you, how I have suffered and longed. Oh, if those rooms at the embankment could speak, Tema!”
He kissed her again and again, and she threw her arms around his neck with such abandon that her wide silk sleeves fell back above the billowing lace of the white undersleeves, above the gray elastic that held them together over the elbow.
“What could those rooms say, Niels?”
“Tema, they could say, ten thousand times and more; they could pray in that name, rage in that name, sigh and sob in it; they could threaten Tema, too.”
“Could they?”
From the street below came a conversation floating in through the open window complete and unabridged, the most commonplace worldly wisdom drawled in shopworn phrases, welded together by two untemperamental, gossipy voices. All this prose made it more wonderful yet to stand there, heart to heart, sheltered in the soft, dim light.
“How I love you, sweetheart, sweetheart—in my arms you are so dear; are you so dear, so dear? And your hair—I can hardly speak, and all my memories—so dear—all my memories of how I cried and was wretched and longed so miserably, they press on and force their way in as if they too would be happy with me in my happiness—do you understand?—Do you remember, Tema, the moonlight last year? Are you fond of it?—Oh, you don’t know how cruel it can be. Such a clear, moonlight night, when the air seems to have stiffened in cold light, and the clouds lie there in long layers—Tema, flowers and leaves hold their fragrance so close around them it is like a frost of scents covering them, and all sounds seem so far away and die so suddenly and do not linger at all—Such a night is so merciless, for it makes longing grow so strangely intense; the silence draws it out from every corner of your soul, sucks it out with hard lips, and there is no glimmering hope, no slumbering promise in all that clearness. Oh, how I cried, Tema! Tema, have you never cried through a moonlight night? Sweetheart, it would be a shame if you should cry; you shall never cry, there shall always be sunshine for you and
