Part III
I
Towards evening of a clear and calm afternoon in May there was a haze over the black sites of the city; the naked walls looked reddish yellow and the factory chimneys a livery brown in the sunlight. Large and small houses, high and low roofs, stood outlined against the greyish-purple air, heavy with dust and smoke and vapours. A little tree by a red wall showed tiny greenish-yellow leaves, transparent in the sunlight.
The mould on the board walls of the workshops was bright green and the soot flakes on the factory walls jet black in some places and in others covered, as it were, with a thin, glistening silvery film.
Jenny had been walking about all the morning in the outskirts of the town, where the sky rose dark blue and hot over the olive-golden fir-tops and the amber-coloured buds of the leaf trees, but here in the city over the high houses and the net of telephone wires it was growing pale behind a thin veil of opal-white haze. This was really the prettier sight of the two, though Gert could not see it. To him the city was always ugly, grey, and dirty; it was the city they had cursed, all those young men of the eighties who had been obliged to settle down there to work. He was probably standing at his window this moment, looking out in the sun, and to him the play of light in line and colour was not worth noticing; it was merely a sunray outside his prison window.
She stopped a few steps from his door, looking up and down the street, as usual. There was nobody she knew, only business people on their way home. It was past six o’clock.
She ran up the stairs—those dreadful iron steps that echoed their movements when they stole down from his rooms late in the winter nights. The naked walls seemed ever to retain the cold, raw air.
She hurried along the corridor and gave the usual three knocks at his door. Gram opened it. He put his arm round her, and locked the door with his other hand as they kissed. Over his shoulder she could see the flowers on the little table, with wine and foreign fruits in a crystal bowl. There was a slight mist of cigarette smoke in the room, and she knew that he had been sitting there since four o’clock waiting for her.
“I could not come before,” she whispered. “I was so sorry to let you wait.” When he released her she went to the table, bending over the flowers. “I will take two and make myself nice, may I? I am getting so spoilt since I have come to you, Gert.” She stretched out her hands to him.
“When must you go?” he asked, kissing her arms tenderly.
Jenny bent her head:
“I promised to be back for supper. Mother always waits up for me, and she is so tired now; she needs me to help her in the evening with one thing or another,” she said quickly. “It is not so easy to get away from home, you see,” she whispered in excuse.
He listened to her many words with bowed head. When she came towards him he took her in his arms so that her face was hidden against his shoulder.
She could not lie, poor little thing, not so well, anyhow, that he would believe it for a single merciful second. In the winter—the very short time of their love—and in the early spring she could always be away from home.
“It is tiresome, Gert, but now I am living at home it is much more difficult to manage; you know I have to be there because mother needs the money as well as the help. You agreed with me, did you not, that I had better move home?”
Gert nodded assent. They were sitting on the sofa close together, Jenny’s head resting on his shoulder, so that she could not see his face.
“I was in the country this morning, walking where we used to go together. Let us go there again soon—the day after tomorrow if it is fine—will you? You are sorry because I have to go home so early today, are you not?”
“My dear, have I not said that thousands of times already?” She could hear from his voice that he was saying this with his melancholy smile again. “I am grateful for every second of your life that you give me.”
“Don’t speak like that, Gert,” she said, pained.
“Why should I not say it when it is true? Dearest little girl, do you think I will ever forget that all you have given me is as a princely grace, and I can never understand how you came to give it to me at all?”
“When I realized last winter that you were fond of me—how much you really loved me—I said to myself it must stop. But then I understood that I could not be without you, and so I gave myself to you. Was that a grace? When I could not let you go?”
“I call it an inconceivable grace that you ever came to love me.”
She nestled in his arms without speaking.
“My own darling … so young and sweet you are. …”
“I am not young, Gert. When you met me I was already beginning to get old without ever having been young. You seemed young to me, much younger at heart than I, because you still believed in what I called childish dreams and used to laugh at them. You have made me believe in love and tenderness and all such things.”
Gert Gram smiled, and whispered: “Perhaps my heart was not older than yours—for it seemed to me that I had never yet had any youth, and deep down in my soul I still entertained the hope that some day youth would touch me, if only for once, with his wand. But my hair has turned
