“Forgive me, I forgot for a moment that I was an invalid,” he said.
From that day Hedvig suffered constant anxiety lest she should have a child.
Woman’s egoism is more negative than that of a man—it is a real minus quantity. For she reveals her sacrifice and her devotion in the very lines of her body. Her whole body is a manifestation of generosity, a splendid promise. From the day that her breasts fill out, invisible childish lips grope round them. Within the sweet swelling lines of her body and lips slumber the forces of regeneration. Her egoism is a barrenness, a cowardly self-betrayal, for she betrays her own body and she betrays the future …
Of course Hedvig was convinced she had the noblest motives. Of course it was the curse of heredity that frightened her. She did not admit even to herself that she would have been still more frightened had he been a healthy man, that it was her own body she was beginning to fear again and this time not with a vague and indefinite fear as before. No, now she knew what was at stake. At any moment there might begin to grow within her a strange being that would feed on her blood, would tear her body, would perhaps bring death to her. She grew cold with fear at the least disquieting sign. She had moments of hatred of her husband. And she began to behave with a meanness and nervous caution that deprived their life of all its charm.
Percy yielded. Probably it was criminal of him to hope for children.
He did not see through his wife, or at least only half saw through her. There were perhaps dark moments when he suspected the cowardly poverty of her character, but people of his type do not pursue disagreeable thoughts to the end. All the same Percy relapsed into a restless state. He felt as if he had been exiled from the kingdom of peace and health of which he had only had a glimpse. He left Seville and began to lead a roving life in Spain and the south of France. Galleries, ruins, mountains, waterfalls. It was the same old hunt for beauty! Several times he tried to stay in one place and take up his paint brush again. But these were only good intentions, interrupted by crises of discouragement. Towards Spring they reached Paris, for which he had all the time been longing. Percy settled in Montparnasse amongst the Scandinavian painters and talked art with feverish and excited interest. Here he suddenly fell victim to the modern extremists, to futurism, cubism, naivism and ultra-expressionism, on which he had formerly only bestowed an ironic curiosity. It seemed as if his very refinement and submissiveness had rendered him defenceless against the latest brutalities. He began to buy the crudest objects. The strangest things were sent to their studio on the Boulevard Raspail. There was a Portrait of a Lady, consisting of four straight, black-green lines on a pink ground. There was a picture called Motion which consisted of four triangular fields containing parts of a woman’s leg and a locomotive.
Percy looked stealthily at Hedvig when with eager explanations and cold enthusiasm he showed her these acquisitions. “I am not happy,” his look said. “This kind of art is not for happy people. It is for those who have something to avenge.”
They were, as a matter of fact, so many reproaches flung in the face of life because he was weak, enervated, sorely tried and without a future.
Hedvig had suffered all the time from his new associates, among whom she felt helpless and embarrassed. She was jealous of all the strange, poisonous indecency that they called modern art. She stared silently at the new monstrosities. Very well—he prefers all this to me, she thought. It did not merely hurt her. She had also a strange, suppressed feeling, never admitted, but nevertheless real, of becoming free, of slipping out of his hands; a throbbing, secret, insolent feeling that anything was possible. But with all this there immediately blended an anxious care, an old frightened care as old as the Selambshof days, which stirred within her every time he gave her expensive flowers, bought first-class tickets or threw a big silver coin to a beggar.
“What have you given for those pictures?” she asked defiantly.
He mentioned a large sum, several thousand francs. And she went into her own room with a pale face.
From this time Hedvig began to insist on their going home.
But Percy continued to buy modern art. Everything was not so provocative as those first pictures. There were also pearls of bold but still exquisitely tasteful expressionism. After running about all the day at exhibitions and art dealers he sat down to drink his apéritif. He looked out over the murmuring streams of humanity on the big boulevards, which always make you feel that you are a poor little drop in the ocean and may be washed away at any moment. But all the same there came into his eyes a little look of anger. And he did not turn to Hedvig, who sat there dressed in black looking stiff and disapproving, but to the young painters round the table. It was strange how the air of Paris made him free and independent:
“It’s a pity it’s so damned banal to make a donation,” he exclaimed. “But a poor wretch like me has no other way out. I have no children. I won’t live very much longer. I am an end and not a beginning like you boys. My money has no personal future. But if I add a wing to my little art gallery and fill it with first-class explosive matter and then present the whole splendour to the nation or rather to the
