Helga, her slight agitation vanished, told him that she was surprised. His offer was, she said, unexpected. Quite.
A little sardonically, Olsen interrupted her. He smiled too. “But of course I expected surprise. It is, is it not, the proper thing? And always you are proper, Frøken Helga, always.”
Helga, who had a stripped, naked feeling under his direct glance, drew herself up stiffly. Herr Olsen needn’t, she told him, be sarcastic. She was surprised. He must understand that she was being quite sincere, quite truthful about that. Really, she hadn’t expected him to do her so great an honor.
He made a little impatient gesture. Why, then, had she refused, ignored, his other, earlier suggestion?
At that Helga Crane took a deep indignant breath and was again, this time for an almost imperceptible second, silent. She had, then, been correct in her deduction. Her sensuous, petulant mouth hardened. That he should so frankly—so insolently, it seemed to her—admit his outrageous meaning was too much. She said, coldly: “Because, Herr Olsen, in my country the men, of my race, at least, don’t make such suggestions to decent girls. And thinking that you were a gentleman, introduced to me by my aunt, I chose to think myself mistaken, to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
“Very commendable, my Helga—and wise. Now you have your reward. Now I offer you marriage.”
“Thanks,” she answered, “thanks, awfully.”
“Yes,” and he reached for her slim cream hand, now lying quiet on Thor’s broad orange and black back. Helga let it lie in his large pink one, noting their contrast. “Yes, because I, poor artist that I am, cannot hold out against the deliberate lure of you. You disturb me. The longing for you does harm to my work. You creep into my brain and madden me,” and he kissed the small ivory hand. Quite decorously, Helga thought, for one so maddened that he was driven, against his inclination, to offer her marriage. But immediately, in extenuation, her mind leapt to the admirable casualness of Aunt Katrina’s expressed desire for this very thing, and recalled the unruffled calm of Uncle Poul under any and all circumstances. It was, as she had long ago decided, security. Balance.
“But,” the man before her was saying, “for me it will be an experience. It may be that with you, Helga, for wife, I will become great. Immortal. Who knows? I didn’t want to love you, but I had to. That is the truth. I make of myself a present to you. For love.” His voice held a theatrical note. At the same time he moved forward putting out his arms. His hands touched air. For Helga had moved back. Instantly he dropped his arms and took a step away, repelled by something suddenly wild in her face and manner. Sitting down, he passed a hand over his face with a quick, graceful gesture.
Tameness returned to Helga Crane. Her ironic gaze rested on the face of Axel Olsen, his leonine head, his broad nose—“broader than my own”—his bushy eyebrows, surmounting thick, drooping lids, which hid, she knew, sullen blue eyes. He stirred sharply, shaking off his momentary disconcertion.
In his assured, despotic way he went on: “You know, Helga, you are a contradiction. You have been, I suspect, corrupted by the good Fru Dahl, which is perhaps as well. Who knows? You have the warm impulsive nature of the women of Africa, but, my lovely, you have, I fear, the soul of a prostitute. You sell yourself to the highest buyer. I should of course be happy that it is I. And I am.” He stopped, contemplating her, lost apparently, for the second, in pleasant thoughts of the future.
To Helga he seemed to be the most distant, the most unreal figure in the world. She suppressed a ridiculous impulse to laugh. The effort sobered her. Abruptly she was aware that in the end, in some way, she would pay for this hour. A quick brief fear ran through her, leaving in its wake a sense of impending calamity. She wondered if for this she would pay all that she’d had.
And, suddenly, she didn’t at all care. She said, lightly, but firmly: “But you see, Herr Olsen, I’m not for sale. Not to you. Not to any white man. I don’t at all care to be owned. Even by you.”
The drooping lids lifted. The look in the blue eyes was, Helga thought, like the surprised stare of a puzzled baby. He hadn’t at all grasped her meaning.
She proceeded, deliberately: “I think you don’t understand me. What I’m trying to say is this, I don’t want you. I wouldn’t under any circumstances marry you,” and since she was, as she put it, being brutally frank, she added: “Now.”
He turned a little away from her, his face white but composed, and looked down into the gathering shadows in the little park before the house. At last he spoke, in a queer frozen voice: “You refuse me?”
“Yes,” Helga repeated with intentional carelessness. “I refuse you.”
The man’s full upper lip trembled. He wiped his forehead, where the gold hair was now lying flat and pale and lusterless. His eyes still avoided the girl in the high-backed chair before him. Helga felt a shiver of compunction. For an instant she regretted that she had not been a little kinder. But wasn’t it after all the greatest kindness to be cruel? But more gently, less indifferently, she said: “You see, I couldn’t marry a white man. I simply couldn’t. It isn’t just you, not just personal, you understand. It’s deeper, broader than that. It’s racial. Some day maybe you’ll be glad. We can’t tell, you know; if
