“I have offered you marriage, Helga Crane, and you answer me with some strange talk of race and shame. What nonsense is this?”
Helga let that pass because she couldn’t, she felt, explain. It would be too difficult, too mortifying. She had no words which could adequately, and without laceration to her pride, convey to him the pitfalls into which very easily they might step. “I might,” she said, “have considered it once—when I first came. But you, hoping for a more informal arrangement, waited too long. You missed the moment. I had time to think. Now I couldn’t. Nothing is worth the risk. We might come to hate each other. I’ve been through it, or something like it. I know. I couldn’t do it. And I’m glad.”
Rising, she held out her hand, relieved that he was still silent. “Good afternoon,” she said formally. “It has been a great honor—”
“A tragedy,” he corrected, barely touching her hand with his moist fingertips.
“Why?” Helga countered, and for an instant felt as if something sinister and internecine flew back and forth between them like poison.
“I mean,” he said, and quite solemnly, “that though I don’t entirely understand you, yet in a way I do too. And—” He hesitated. Went on. “I think that my picture of you is, after all, the true Helga Crane. Therefore—a tragedy. For someone. For me? Perhaps.”
“Oh, the picture!” Helga lifted her shoulders in a little impatient motion.
Ceremoniously Axel Olsen bowed himself out, leaving her grateful for the urbanity which permitted them to part without too much awkwardness. No other man, she thought, of her acquaintance could have managed it so well—except, perhaps, Robert Anderson.
“I’m glad,” she declared to herself in another moment, “that I refused him. And,” she added honestly, “I’m glad that I had the chance. He took it awfully well, though—for a tragedy.” And she made a tiny frown.
The picture—she had never quite, in spite of her deep interest in him, and her desire for his admiration and approval, forgiven Olsen for that portrait. It wasn’t, she contended, herself at all, but some disgusting sensual creature with her features. Herr and Fru Dahl had not exactly liked it either, although collectors, artists, and critics had been unanimous in their praise and it had been hung on the line at an annual exhibition, where it had attracted much flattering attention and many tempting offers.
Now Helga went in and stood for a long time before it, with its creator’s parting words in mind: “… a tragedy … my picture is, after all, the true Helga Crane.” Vehemently she shook her head. “It isn’t, it isn’t at all,” she said aloud. Bosh! Pure artistic bosh and conceit. Nothing else. Anyone with half an eye could see that it wasn’t, at all, like her.
“Marie,” she called to the maid passing in the hall, “do you think this is a good picture of me?”
Marie blushed. Hesitated. “Of course, Frøken, I know Herr Olsen is a great artist, but no, I don’t like that picture. It looks bad, wicked. Begging your pardon, Frøken.”
“Thanks, Marie, I don’t like it either.”
Yes, anyone with half an eye could see that it wasn’t she.
XVI
Glad though the Dahls may have been that their niece had had the chance of refusing the hand of Axel Olsen, they were anything but glad that she had taken that chance. Very plainly they said so, and quite firmly they pointed out to her the advisability of retrieving the opportunity, if, indeed, such a thing were possible. But it wasn’t, even had Helga been so inclined, for, they were to learn from the columns of Politikken, Axel Olsen had gone off suddenly to some queer place in the Balkans. To rest, the newspapers said. To get Frøken Crane out of his mind, the gossips said.
Life in the Dahl ménage went on, smoothly as before, but not so pleasantly. The combined disappointment and sense of guilt of the Dahls and Helga colored everything. Though she had resolved not to think that they felt that she had, as it were, “let them down,” Helga knew that they did. They had not so much expected as hoped that she would bring down Olsen, and so secure the link between the merely fashionable set to which they belonged and the artistic one after which they hankered. It was of course true that there were others, plenty of them. But there was only one Olsen. And Helga, for some idiotic reason connected with race, had refused him. Certainly there was no use in thinking, even, of the others. If she had refused him, she would refuse any and all for the same reason. It was, it seemed, all-embracing.
“It isn’t,” Uncle Poul had tried to point out to her, “as if there were hundreds of mulattoes here. That, I can understand, might make it a little different. But there’s only you. You’re unique here, don’t you see? Besides, Olsen has money and enviable position. Nobody’d dare to say, or even to think anything odd or unkind of you or him. Come now, Helga, it isn’t this foolishness about race. Not here in Denmark. You’ve never spoken of it before. It can’t be just that. You’re too sensible. It must be something else. I wish you’d try to explain. You don’t perhaps like Olsen?”
Helga had been silent, thinking what a severe wrench to Herr Dahl’s ideas of decency was this conversation. For he had an almost fanatic regard for reticence, and a peculiar shrinking from what he looked upon as indecent exposure of the emotions.
“Just what is it, Helga?” he asked again, because the pause had grown awkward, for him.
“I can’t explain any better than I have,” she had begun tremulously, “it’s just something—something deep down inside of me,” and had turned away to hide a face convulsed by threatening tears.
But
