Peter had to stop in bed quite a long time. He had injured his spine. He got up again even more bent, more pale and more flabby in the face than before.
He was now a man without pity. If Peter the Boss had had before his sentimental moments, they were now a thing of the past. And he had, as it were, grown too coarse for all fear. And he procured for himself a watchdog—a great, shaggy, wolf-like monster—chiefly for the pleasure of seeing people anxiously sneaking past Selambshof. And then the harsh barking of the dog was a kind of company at nights. For Peter had begun to find difficulty in sleeping.
III
The Angel of Death
Hedvig’s and Percy’s marriage had for long been unconsummated. At first in the Swiss mountain sanatorium Hedvig was not allowed to live in the same house as her husband. Later on when he was better she still remained his nurse.
“Think of your fever,” she said, and withdrew gently from his delicate approaches. “It is your duty to get well, Percy dear.”
Percy was all too far away from the thousandfold stimulant of art from which in his longing and his imagination he had otherwise derived vitality. His natural submissiveness was still further fortified by the strict discipline of the sanatorium. So he yielded and always acquiesced in her cold sisterly behaviour to him. But only to approach her again at the next opportunity with the same persistent, childlike, half-embarrassed supplication for love. And if he had not done so Hedvig would certainly have felt secretly hurt and worried. After having wandered about the whole day in the pure cold air and in the light of the white snow-capped peaks, among the brotherhood of suffering and among the recaptured convalescents high up in the seclusion of the alpine world it was pleasant in the evening to whisper a soft “no” to the adoring husband. There was rehabilitation in it. It healed old wounds. It was an innocent triumph. She lived through happy days. There was nothing that tempted or scorched or tore at the heart. There was just life enough for Hedvig Hill.
“No, Percy dear. For your own sake. Your temperature would rise. …”
And she uttered her “no” in the same tone as others would whisper their “yes.” “See how I sacrifice everything for you,” she seemed to say, “my best years, my womanhood, my beauty, I sacrifice all for you, darling Percy.” Even to herself she made a sacrifice of her half-heartedness and her fear—though she probably suspected in her inmost heart this unsatisfied longing of Percy’s was in the long run more dangerous to him than ordinary life together as husband and wife. The truth was that Hedvig Hill sipped at what she did not dare to drink at one draft. She hugged to herself the glimpse of pain she saw in Percy’s glance after her refusal. She cherished the mist of pulsing blood in his blue eyes, so like those of a precocious boy. And she warmed her lonely bed with it.
Then one day came when Percy was—not cured, because a complete cure seemed almost out of question—but anyhow, so much better that he could think of moving about in the world once again.
The doctors spoke of the south.
Hedvig felt a nervous dread of all that was to come. It was as if they were being turned out of a safe refuge, she thought. She would have preferred to remain amongst the brotherhood of the doomed, bewitched by the mountain spirits up there into a half-life in the big white monastery.
“But Percy, would it not be safer to spend one more winter in the sanatorium?” she whispered.
Percy shook his head and smiled. He had been very mysterious these last days; he had sent off and received a number of telegrams.
“Where are we going? Wouldn’t it be best to go home?” wondered Hedvig.
“You are going to have a magnificent present,” cried Percy, who glowed with the pleasure of planning, acting and moving about after years of supervision and inactivity.
So they went down into the valley when the first September days had already sprayed the woods with gold. There the train stood ready. The smoke, the noise, the jolting about soon tired Percy, who was so spoilt with fresh air and quiet. Then Hedvig turned nurse again, and wrapped him up in their reserved compartment. But that evening the train rushed into a town by the sea under the mountains. It was Genoa and they at once went aboard a steamer which seemed to have waited only for them in order to depart.
“But where is this boat going to? Where are we going?” wondered Hedvig.
She positively knew nothing. Percy only smiled mysteriously.
One brilliantly fine morning they went ashore at white Cadiz.
“Here is my present,” said Percy. “It is the country that suits your hair and your eyes.”
At the sanatorium Hedvig had forgotten to be Spanish. She felt terribly nervous and cast out into the unknown.
“Now we will choose towns for you, just as one chooses frocks,” continued Percy. “We shall begin with Seville, though I suspect that Toledo would be the most suitable.”
So they arrived at Seville.
“I can’t offer you an auto-da-fé,” he whispered. “You will have to be satisfied with a corrida.”
Above the entrance to the plaza de toros there stood in big letters “Press Bullfight in commemoration of the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary.”
With eyes that still smarted and burnt from all the pitiless light on the yellow sand of the arena Hedvig saw within a fraction of a second a little grey bull, with the picador’s dart in his neck, bury his horns into the stomach of the rearing horse. The horse beat the air helplessly with his forefeet and
