In the grey morning light, he came over to her to kiss her:
“My glorious Jenny. How wonderfully beautiful you are. You are mine now, and everything will come right, will it not? Oh, I love you so.
“Are you tired? You must sleep when I have gone, and I will come to see you again at noon. Sleep soundly, my darling Jenny. Are you so tired?”
“Yes, very tired, Helge.”
She was lying with her eyes half closed, looking at the pale morning light coming through the ribs of the blind.
He kissed her when he stood fully dressed, holding his hat; then he kneeled by her bed and put an arm under her shoulder:
“Thank you for tonight. Do you remember that I said those same words to you the first morning in Rome, when we were at Aventine?”
Jenny nodded on her pillow.
“One more kiss—and good night—my lovely Jenny.”
At the door he stopped:
“What about the front door? Is there a key, or is it one of those ordinary ones with a latch?”
“Yes, an ordinary one. You can open it all right from the inside.”
She remained in bed with her eyes closed. She saw her own body as it lay under the cover, white, bare, beautiful—a thing that she had flung away as she had the gloves. It was not hers any more.
She gave a start on hearing Heggen mount the stairs slowly and open his door. He walked up and down in his room, then came out again and went up the stairs to the roof. She heard him pacing to and fro above her head. She was sure he knew, but it did not make much impression on her tired brain. She felt no pain now. It seemed to her that he would probably think what had happened as natural and unavoidable as she did. She could not decide what was the next thing to do—it must just come as the other had done, as a necessary consequence of her opening the door last night to Helge.
She put out one foot from under the cover and lay looking at it. It was pretty. She bent it, accentuating the instep. Yes, it was pretty, white with blue veins and pink heel and toes.
She was tired—it was nice to feel so utterly tired. It felt like having recovered from some keen suffering. She was tired now, and what she had to do she did mechanically.
She got up and dressed. When she had put on stockings, bodice, and a skirt she slipped her feet into a pair of bronze slippers, washed, and did her hair in front of the glass without noticing the reflection of her face in it. Then she went to the small table where she kept her painting things, looking for the box containing her implements. In the night she had been thinking of the small triangular scraper—she had sometimes played with it, putting it against her artery.
She took it out, looked at it, testing it with her finger, but she put it back again and took out a folding knife that she had once bought in Paris. It had a corkscrew, tin-opener, and many blades; one was short, pointed, and broad. She opened it.
She went back to her bed and sat down on it. Putting her pillow on the table at the side of the bed, she steadied her left hand on it and cut through the artery.
The blood spurted out, hitting a small watercolour on the wall above her bed. Noticing it, she moved her hand. She lay down on the bed and mechanically pushed off her shoes with her feet, and put her hand under the cover to prevent the blood from making a mess.
She did not think; she was not afraid; she felt only that she was surrendering to the inevitable. The pain of the cut was not great—only sharp and distinct, and concentrated on one spot.
After a while a strange, unknown sensation took hold of her, an agony that grew and grew—not a fear of anything in particular, but the feeling of an ache round her heart and sickness, as it were. She opened her eyes, but black specks flickered before her sight and she could not breathe. The room seemed to crumble down on her. She tumbled out of bed, tore the door open, rushed up the stairs to the roof, and collapsed on the last step.
Helge had met Gunnar Heggen as he came out of the front door. They had looked at each other, both touching their hats, and passed on without a word.
That meeting had sobered Helge. After the intoxication of the night his mood instantly changed to the other extreme, and what he had experienced seemed to him incredible, inconceivable, and monstrous.
He had dreamt of this meeting with her all these years. She, the queen of his dreams, had scarcely spoken to him, at first sitting quiet and cold and then suddenly throwing herself into his arms, wild, mad, without saying a word. It struck him now that she had said nothing—nothing at all to his words of love in the night. A strange, appalling woman, his Jenny. He realized suddenly that she had never been his.
Helge walked about in the quiet streets, up and down the Corso. He tried to think of her as she had been when they were engaged, to separate the dreams from the reality, but he could not form a clear picture of her, and he realized that he had never penetrated to the bottom of her soul. There had always been something about her he could not see, though he felt it was there.
He did not really know anything about her. Heggen might be with her now—why not? There had been another—she said so herself—who? How many more? What else that he did not know—but had always felt? …
And now—after this
