“How can you imagine I would do such a great wrong, and sin against God?”
“You mean because you don’t love me? But I tell you it does not matter, because I know my love is such that you will end by returning it, when you have lived wrapped in it for a time.”
He seized her in his arms, covering her face with kisses. She made no resistance, but whispered:
“Don’t, Gunnar, please.”
He released her reluctantly:
“Why may I not?”
“Because it is you. I don’t know if I should have minded if it had been anybody else for whom I did not care at all.”
Gunnar held her hand and they walked up and down in the moonlight.
“I understand. When you had the little boy you thought your life had some aim and purpose again after all these aimless years, because you loved him and you needed him. When he died you became indifferent to everything and considered yourself superfluous in the world.”
Jenny nodded:
“There are a few people I care for enough to be sorry if I knew them in distress and glad if all was well with them. But I myself cannot add either to their sorrow or their joy—it has always been so, and one of the reasons why I was unhappy and filled with longing was just that my life was spent without making anybody happy. My sole wish and yearning was to make another being happy. I have always believed in that as the greatest blessing in life. You spoke of the joy of work—to me it never seemed enough, and it is very selfish, besides, because the greatest joy and satisfaction of it is yours alone; you cannot share it with anybody else. Unless you can share your happiness with others, you lose the greatest possible joy. When you are quite young and feel strongly you are selfish perhaps sometimes—I have felt it myself when I have reached a step nearer my goal, but as a rule it is only the abnormal beings who amass riches for any other purpose than spending. A woman’s life is useless to my mind if she is not the joy of somebody else—and I have never been that—I have only caused sorrow. The little happiness I have been able to give was only what anyone else could have given just as well; they have loved me only for what they imagined me to be, not for my real self.
“After my baby’s death I began to realize how fortunate it was that there was nobody in the world whom I could cause a really inconsolable grief—nobody to whom I was indispensable.
“And now you tell me all this. You have always been the one person I least of all wanted to drag into my confused life; I have always been more fond of you, in a way, than of anyone else I know. I enjoyed our friendship so much, because I thought that love and all it brings in its train could never come between us. You were too good for it, I thought. Oh, how I wish it had never changed!”
“To me it seems now that it has never been different,” he said gently. “I love you and you need me. I know I can make you happy again, and when I have done that you will have made me happy.”
Jenny shook her head:
“If I had the least bit of faith in myself left, it would be different. I might have listened to you if I had not felt so keenly that I have done with life. You say you love me, but I know that what you think you love in me is destroyed—dead. It is the same old story: you are in love with some quality you dream that I possess—that I have before or might have acquired. But one day you would see me as I really am, and I should only have made you unhappy too.”
“I should never look upon it as unhappiness whatever my fate might be. You may not be aware of it yourself, but I know that in the state you are now it only needs a touch for you to fall—into something that would be madness. But I love you, and I can see all the way that has led you to it, and if you feel I would follow you to try and carry you back in my arms, because I love you in spite of all.”
As they stood by their doors in the dark passage he took her hands: “Jenny, rather than be alone, would you not like me to remain with you tonight?”
She looked at him with a curious smile.
“Oh, Jenny!” He shook his head. “I may come to you, all the same. Would you be angry—or sorry?”
“I think I should be sorry—for your sake. No, do not come, Gunnar. I will not take your love when I know I could just as well give mine to anybody else.”
He laughed a little, half angrily, half sadly.
“Then I ought to do it. If once you were mine you would never belong to anybody else—I know you too well for that—but as you ask me not to, I will wait:” he added, with the same curious little laugh.
XI
All day long the weather had been bad, with cold, pale clouds high up in the sky; towards evening some thin brass-yellow stripes appeared on the western horizon. Jenny had been up to Monte Celio to sketch in the afternoon, but it did not come to much—she had been sitting listlessly on the big stairs outside of San Gregorio, looking down into the grove where the big trees were beginning to bud and daisies shone all over the grass. She came back through the avenue below the south side of the Palatine. The ruins showed dull grey against the palms of the convent on the mountaintop; the evergreen shrubs hung on the slope, powdered with chalky dust.
Some shivering postcard-sellers loitered about
