But now it was Hedvig’s turn to steal into Percy’s picture galleries. Yes, the roles were strangely reversed. She positively felt attracted to her former chamber of horror. She would stay there for a long time staring around her. It was not that any artistic instincts had awakened in her. It was not that she had begun to understand any of these new paradoxes. No, but she imbibed courage from their impudent recklessness. She deafened her conscience with their excesses. “Everything is permitted,” that was what Percy’s pictures whispered into the ear of a Selamb.
Life and death soar strangely near each other in love. You give and take with the same recklessness. Sacrifice and selfishness disport themselves side by side. And just at the moment when the human egoism is nearest to its dissolution it is sometimes most blindly cruel.
During these weeks Hedvig loved Percy and killed him. There came a moment when she began to be afraid to look into his face. But all the same she could not find the strength to spare him. During the day she invented many a cunning trick to escape seeing the truth. There was something round his mouth and eyes which now and then filled her with a cold terror, almost with hatred. It was the disease in him she hated. She would feel fits of cruel invincible hunger for the moment when death would at last strike its blow and no longer creep stealthily around them. And all the same she loved him, loved for the first time in her life with a kind of dim, wild abandon. So strange is the human heart. In the midst of these fits she longed for the night, the darkness, the great, teeming, blind darkness when she could once more draw him to her, kiss him, drink up his fever.
Sometimes Hedvig was seized by a kind of dark frenzy. Their love had resembled a silent bitter struggle with death. Percy sank back with perspiring temples. Convulsively, like, a drowning man, he would seize her black hair and stare into her eyes, which he saw in spite of the darkness and which seemed to him surrounded by pale little dancing flames:
“My beautiful angel of death,” he whispered. “My beautiful angel of death.” And in his voice was a strange mixture of love, hopelessness and, to the very last, playful irony.
One such night there came a fresh hæmorrhage of the lungs. It was the third, and Percy knew at once that it was the last. For several days he lay there white and thin and faded away without any serious pain. The winter had come early. The light from the snow on the pines lit up the room just as in the sanatorium in Switzerland. The doctors had that all-wise and important expression which always means that they are completely powerless. Percy had recovered his little, wan, ironical, submissive smile. He did not complain and did not seem to regret anything. He smiled also to his wife without wondering at her metamorphosis.
Hedvig had turned nurse again. Silent, indefatigable, with the expression of painfully heroic resignation of her profession she moved silently about his bed. Not a word did they speak of what had passed between them. They were like people who have become sober and who scarcely suspect what they have done during their intoxication.
Until one day Percy wanted to be carried out into the new gallery.
At first Hedvig objected vehemently. He was not to be moved. He could not bear the least movement. Only after persistent prayers did she give in to his whim, but with an injured, worried expression. And she did not leave him alone. Erect and rigid she stood on guard by his pillow in the hall.
Here the dying Percy lay amongst all his new art. A look of bitterness and weariness fell across his face. He shivered a little. The walls looked around him indescribably cold and unsubstantial. They seemed to radiate cold and meaninglessness. The stiffness and perverse spasms of the latest fashion in art gave him a terrible feeling of a blighted life frozen in death.
“They can never have had a fire here,” he mumbled, and crept right down under the bedclothes.
Hedvig was already prepared to have him carried back to the bedroom. But then Percy caught a glimpse through his half-closed eyelids of a little spring landscape, a hill with apple trees in bloom against white walls. In the midst of all the frostiness he received a lovely impression of a pure motive, of a simplicity that was full of meaning and of quiet appealing beauty. And he remembered again his promises in Paris. They again seemed to him important and binding. He took the picture with him and had it placed at the foot of the bed when he was carried back into his “crypt,” as he called his bedroom alcove. Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow I will send for a lawyer and will arrange the matter.
But the lawyer was not sent for. Percy had other things to dream about. In the twilight Hedvig came and sat down on the edge of his bed. She had been into town for a while, for the first time for weeks. She looked as solemn as a priestess. And after a moment’s silence she told him that she expected a child.
Percy did not say much. He whispered thanks. Then he kissed her hand and put it on his chest. And then he lay there
