He turned on his way, hurrying back to her door, driven by fear and by rage. The front door stood open. He rushed up the stairs—she would have to answer him—tell him everything—he would not let her go. The door was open; he looked in and saw the empty bed with the bloodstained sheets and the blood on the floor. Turning round, he saw that she was lying huddled at the top of the stairs, and that the marble steps were red with her blood.
With a scream he ran up the stairs and lifted her up. He felt her body limp against his arm and her hands hung down cold—and he understood that the body he had held in his arms a few hours ago, hot and trembling with life, was now a dead thing, and would soon be carrion.
He sank to his knees with her on his arm, calling out wildly.
Heggen tore open the door to the terrace. His face was white and drawn. He saw Jenny. Seizing Helge, he flung him aside and bent down on his knees beside her.
“She was lying there when I came back—lying there. …”
“Run for a doctor—quick!” Gunnar had pulled away her clothes, feeling her heart; he steadied her head and lifted her hands. Then he saw the wound, and, pulling out the blue silk ribbon from her bodice, he tied it hard round her wrist.
“Yes, but where shall I find. …”
Gunnar gave a sudden cry of rage—then said in a quiet voice:
“I will go. Carry her in,” but he took her in his own arms and went towards the door. At sight of the bloodstained bed his face twitched. Turning away, he pushed open the door to his room and placed her on his own untouched bed. Then he rushed down the stairs.
Helge had moved at his side the whole time, his mouth half open as if paralysed in the act of crying out. But he stopped at Gunnar’s door. When he was left alone with her he stole into the room, touching her hand with his fingertips, and he fell down beside the bed, crying wildly, hysterically, with his head against it. …
XI
Gunnar walked along the narrow road, overgrown with grass, between the high, whitewashed garden walls. On the one side lay the barracks, probably with a terrace, as high up over his head some soldiers were laughing and talking. A tuft of yellow flowers, growing in a cleft of the wall, hung swaying. On the other side of the road the huge old poplars by the Cestius pyramid and the cypress grove in the new part of the cemetery stretched their tops towards the blue and silver clouded sky.
Outside the grated gate a girl sat crocheting. She opened to him, curtseying to thank him for the coin he gave her.
The spring air was mild and damp; in the closed green shade of the churchyard it became wet and warm as in a hothouse, and the narcissus along the border of the path gave out a hot, sickly scent.
The old cypresses stood round the graves that lay, green and dark with creepers and violets, set in terraces from the ivy-clad wall of the town. Above the flowers rose the monuments of the dead, little marble temples, white figures of angels, and big, heavy slabs of stone. Moss grew on them and on the trunks of the cypresses. Here and there a white or red flower still clung to the camelia trees, but most of them lay brown and faded on the black earth, exhaling raw, damp fumes. He remembered something he had read: the Japanese did not like camelias because they fell off whole and fresh like heads chopped off.
Jenny Winge lay buried at the farthest end of the cemetery near the chapel on a grassy slope, covered with daisies. There were only a few graves. On the border of the slope cypresses had been planted, but they were still very small, like toy trees with their pointed green tops on straight brown trunks, reminding one of the pillars in a cloister arcade. Her grave was a little way from the others; it was only a pale grey mound of earth, the grass round it having been trodden down when it was being dug. The sun shone on it and the dark cypresses formed a wall behind it.
Covering his face with his hands, Gunnar bent on his knees until his head rested on the faded wreaths.
The weariness of spring weighted his limbs, the blood flowed aching with sorrow and regret at every beat of his heavy heart.
Jenny—Jenny—Jenny—he heard her pretty name in every trill of the birds—and she was dead.
Lying far down in the dark. He had cut off a curl from her fair hair and carried it in his pocketbook. He took it out and held it in the sunshine—those poor little filmy threads were the only part of her luxurious, glossy hair the sun could reach and warm.
She was dead and gone. There were some pictures of hers … there had been a short notice about her in the papers. And the mother and sisters mourned her at home, but the real Jenny they had never known, and they knew nothing about her life or her death. The others—those who had known—stared in despair after her, not understanding what they knew.
She who lay there was his Jenny; she belonged to him alone.
Helge Gram had come to him; he had asked and told, wailed and begged:
“I don’t understand anything. If you do, Heggen, I beg you to tell me. You know—will you not tell me what you know?”
He had not answered.
“There was another; she told me so. Who was it? Was it you?”
“No.”
“Do you know who it was?”
“Yes, but I am not going to tell you.
