Egholm and his God

XI

Hedvig sat in front of the stove, crumpling up newspapers and thrusting them in through the open door, to keep the fire from going out entirely.

“This will never do,” said her mother, wringing her hands. Egholm was tramping up and down in the next room, stopping every now and then to open the door and ask if the supper wasn’t nearly ready. His face was pale – he was always most dangerous when he was hungry.

“Huh! Let them wait,” said Hedvig.

“Run outside, dear, and see if you can’t find some bits of something – a piece of board or some twigs or anything that’ll burn. I fancy I saw some stuff under that bush in the corner.”

Hedvig was always happiest when she found a chance of using her legs. She explored the yard across and across, quartering like a hound in all directions, and finding not a little in the way of fuel. When she had filled her apron, there was a knocking at one of the windows. At first she tried to ignore it, and was hurrying in with her findings, but the knocking was repeated, and more loudly. She turned angrily and looked in.

A brown-eyed young workman in the carpenter’s shop stood beckoning to her, both hands full of beautiful lumps of newly cut wood.

This was a language Hedvig understood; she picked up her heels and ran to the workshop door.

“You the photographer’s?” he asked, with a bashful grin and a slight lisp in his voice, as he laid the blocks like an offering in her apron.

“Yes,” said Hedvig. “We haven’t had time to get in any wood as yet. Mother and I only came to-day. We’re going to have chicken soup for dinner. There’s visitors.”

“But what are the bones for?” said the man, picking about among the contents of the apron.

Hedvig flushed, but, ready witted as ever, answered, laughing:

“Oh. Perhaps you don’t do that here. In Odense we always use bones for the fire when we can get them. They burn almost better than wood.”

“What’s your name?”

“Hedvig Egholm. And what’s yours? You’re the carpenter’s son, I suppose?”

“No, I’m only working here, that’s all. My room’s just at that end – like to come and see it?”

“No, thanks. I must make haste in.”

“Well, then, come this evening, or to-morrow. Will you?” he asked eagerly, routing about in all the corners for more wood.

But Hedvig only laughed, and shook her heavy yellow plaits. She came back to her mother with a load that reached to her chin. There was no need to use the bones, after all – they burnt well enough, it is true, but stank abominably in the burning.

Emanuel was given a row of the neat wooden blocks, set up on the table before him.

“Look – there’s the puff-puff,” said Hedvig.

The child laughed all over his face, but a moment later he was nibbling at the engine.

In the next room Egholm was still talking about the manifold vicissitudes of his life.

He had started as a grocer’s assistant in Helsingør, then in Aalborg; after that he had been a photographer, in the time of the war, when the Austrians were there. He had made a fortune, but it had vanished in an attempt to double it, in Göteborg, Sweden, where there was no photographer at that time at all. Then on to Copenhagen with but a few small coins remaining, and, despite this adverse beginning, the possession of the biggest photographic studio in the town a few months later.

This was Egholm’s chef-d’œuvre; he had told the story of it a hundred times. And by frequent repetition, it had gained a certain style, as he omitted more and more of the commonplace. He told of his bold advertisements – a new departure altogether – his growing staff of assistants, the eagerness of the public to come first, and the tearful envy of his competitors. And when, in the flight of his telling, he reached its highest point, where he really was the greatest photographer in the place – he stopped. He felt he must remain there on those heights, above the clouds; he wished his hearers always to remember him as there and so. The miserable descent he passed over, and began as a matter of course with his appointment on the railways, as station assistant, at a wretched rate of pay.

Vang did not seem to miss the intervening chapters; he sat wallowing in the delicious smell of cooking that came through from the kitchen.

Egholm told of his railway period, how he had rushed about the country, now at some desolate little station on the Jutland moors, now in big places like Odense or Frederikshavn. He sighed, and passed over the conflicts with authority, and his dismissal. No, he would not think of those things now; not a thought. He turned abruptly to the annals of the Brethren of St. John. True, there was much that was disappointing about his relations with that community, but, after all, there had been something grand in its way about the final meeting. Had he not stood there alone, and told them the truth, in such a wise that even the fellow from Copenhagen had polished his glasses and shaken in his shoes, finding nothing to say in return? Had he not gained the victory? They had thrown him out – but was not that in itself sufficient evidence that his words were true, and had pierced them accordingly?

“Yes, and then I heard a shout from someone down by the door; it was Meilby. You know, the photographer I used to teach English. He was rather like you, by the way, Vang – the same gentle sort of eyes…”

Augh! Egholm realised suddenly that he had said that once before to-day. He had got to the end of his repertoire. A sense of shame came over him, he cleared his throat, and cried in a forced voice:

“Hi, Anna! Vang says he’ll have his money back if the performance doesn’t begin very soon.”

Vang grunted; that was the sort of thing he understood. But Fru Egholm shivered in fear.

“Yes, yes, in a minute – five minutes more! Hedvig, for Heaven’s sake, look and see if it’s nearly done?”

“Yes; it’s peeling now,” reported Hedvig, and her mother left the horseradish to go and taste the soup. Herregud! it was as weak as ditchwater. She closed her eyes, and tasted once again, looking very much like a blinking hen herself. “Ditchwater, simply!”

“Hedvig!” She routed out a pocket-handkerchief, and untied a twenty-five øre from one corner. “Run out and get a quarter of butter, there’s a dear.”

“Well, and what then?” she said sullenly to herself. “It’s got to be used, and I’m not sorry I did it. Egholm always likes his things a little on the rich side, and now after he’s been so angry…”

It was hard to please him anyway when he was in that mood. Who would have thought he could have turned so furious just for a little remark like that?.. What was it now she had happened to say?

Her brain was puzzling to remember it as she bustled about the final preparations. She talked to herself in an undertone, weeping silently the while.

“Anna, what do you think you’re doing out there?” cried Egholm.

Hedvig answered with a brief, sharp word, which her mother tried to cover with a “Sh!”

“Yes, dear – yes,” she called.

At the last moment she had hit upon a new and ingenious plan for saving her housewifely credit. The soup could be served up in the plates outside, and brought to table thus; the nasty dish thing could be used for the fowl itself. Fortunately, Vang might not know it was a developing tank at all.

Hedvig carried Vang’s plate in, walking stiffly as a wooden doll, and biting her lips till they showed white. But Vang, with a single friendly tug at her pigtails, made her open her mouth at once.

She laughed, showing her fresh white teeth. That was Hedvig’s way.

Vang gulped down the hot soup with a gurgling noise like a malstrøm. Egholm looked across nervously and enviously, and when Hedvig came round behind his chair, he reached out backwards greedily, but was sadly disappointed. No second helping – only the big geranium that Hedvig had brought in to set in the middle of the table. This was her mother’s last brilliant effort; no one could see now that the plates were not alike. She had even fastened paper round the pot, as if it were a birthday tribute.

They ate in silence, but when the dish was empty, and each was wrenching at his skinny, fleshless wing, Vang let off his long-restrained witticism:

“Egholm, what do you say? Can a chicken swim?”

“Swim? A chicken? Why, I suppose so – no, that is, I don’t think so.”

“Well, shall we try if we can teach it?”

“I – I don’t quite follow… And, anyhow there’s only the ghost of it left now, ha ha!”

“Well, there’s time yet, for it’s fluttering about just now in this little round pond just here!” Vang rose heavily, as if from repletion, snorting with delight at the success of his little joke, and drew a circle with one finger over the front of his well-expanded waistcoat. “All we want’s a drop of something for it to practise in!”

Hedvig was dispatched to buy akvavit with the few coins Vang found in his pockets; he gave her the most precise instructions as to which particular brand it was to be.

Egholm never drank with his meals as a rule, but that evening he took three glasses of the spirit, though it burned his throat like fire. Vang made no attempt to force him, but simply said “Skaal!” and tossed off his glass.

Egholm, however, had other reasons.

He had fancied he could eat himself into oblivion, and was trying now – with just as little effect – to drink his trouble away. But it only grew the worse.

It was Anna’s eyes that would keep rising up before him.

Anna’s grey-green eyes, with their frightened look, in a setting of swollen, blue, and bloodshot flesh, that hung in pouches down on either side of her nose.

It was not that he felt remorse for what he had done; that did not cost him a thought. But the effects of it – those eyes– haunted him now, following him everywhere he turned, relentlessly, cruelly. He writhed, and sighed, overflowing with self-pity for his troubles.

Eating did not help him, drinking was equally futile; there was but one thing to do, then – to start talking again, before it grew worse. It was nothing to what it might be yet. And Egholm launched out into a sea of talk, diving into it, swimming out into it, hoping to leave the thing that followed him outdistanced on the shore.

“And the money I made in Aalborg when the Austrians were there – you’ve no idea. My studio was simply besieged by all those black-bearded soldiers with their strings and stripes – and they’d no lack of cash, I can tell you. But then while they were sitting about waiting, there would come some slip of a lieutenant and turn the whole lot of them out to make way for him. And one dirty thief I remember that wouldn’t pay – between you and me, the photos were not much good, and that’s the truth. Showed him with three or four heads, you understand. But the General simply told him to pay up sharp, if he didn’t want his brains blown out. And that settled it. The General, of course, was a particular friend of mine. I’ll tell you while I think of it. It was this way. He wanted his photo taken, of course, like all the rest of them, but he must have it done up at the castle itself, in the great hall, and that was as dark as a cellar. I managed to get him out on the steps at last, though he cursed and swore all the time, and hacked about on the stone paving with his spurs. All the others got out of the way – sloped off like shadows – and there was I all alone with him, in a ghastly fright, and making a fearful mess of things with the camera. The interpreter had vanished, too. Then, just as I was ready, at the critical moment, you understand, I rapped out in German, ‘Now! Look pleasant, please!’ All photographers used to do that, you know, in those days. I said it without thinking.

“You should have seen him. First he swore like the very devil; you could almost see the blue flames dancing round him. But then he burst out laughing.

“He wanted me to go back to Austria with him. Tried all he knew to get me to go.”

Egholm sighed, and gazed vacantly before him, trying if the vision that haunted him were gone.

… Eyes, eyes. Eyes full of terror, set in patches of bruised flesh, and a drop of congealed blood just at the side of the nose…

He sprang violently to his feet, and started talking about Göteborg. The canals, where the women did their washing, the park, Trädgården, and Masthugget, where he had been out one Sunday. He talked Swedish, and gave a long account of a funeral – Anna had lost one child in Göteborg – the first.

Meanwhile, Vang was quietly getting to the bottom of the bottle, and when at last Egholm, weary of his desperate fluttering on empty words, flung himself down, Vang felt that it was his turn to speak.

“Ahem! – seeing no other gentleman has risen Henrik Vang now begs to propose: ‘The Ladies.’ My friend, my old and faithful friend, wake up and listen to my words. You have honoured me. You have invited me to share your board. The supper was good – rather tough, that fowl, but, after all, that’s neither here nor there. In a word, you have done me a great honour, and I propose then to honour you in return. My friend, my old and faithful friend, you are a man. You can assert yourself, and get your own way. But Henrik Vang, he can’t. And I ask you now: How shall we gain the mastery over woman? There! That, my friend, is the problem – the problem of the future.”

“But is it true that she knocks you about?” asked Egholm, grasping eagerly at anything to turn the current of his own thoughts.

“Sh! Wait. Let me. I’ll tell you the whole story, from the time when she was parlourmaid at the house. I was only a boy, really – it was just after Mother had died. No – I won’t begin there, though. Nothing happened, really, till four or five years after, when I came home after I’d been out in the world a bit. Therese had got to be housekeeper, then. And Father, he said I was to leave her alone. Well, that of course put me on to her at once. There were enough of them about I could have got if I’d cared – what do you think? Ah, you don’t know the sort of man Henrik Vang was to look at in those days! But she was nearest to hand, of course. Ever so near… Oh! And handsome, that she was. In two layers, as you might say, one outside the other. Father, he was after us whenever he got a chance. He offered me his gold watch to leave her alone, but I wasn’t such a fool. I’d have that anyway when he was gone, and I told him so. But then one day comes Therese and shows me where he’d been pinching her – arms black and blue. Well, I wasn’t going to stand that, you know, so we got a special licence, and went off and got married in Fredericia. Father, he didn’t know about it, of course, and when he sees us coming up the steps arm in arm, he says: ‘Henrik, do you know I’ve kept that girl ever since your mother died?’ ‘That’s as may be,’ says I. ‘Anyhow, she’s mine now.’ And then I up and showed him our wedding ring – cost me ten kroner, it did. Then says he: ‘Out you get – out of my house. A thousand kroner a year, that’s all you’ll get. The hotel here I’ll keep, as long as I’ve strength to lift a glass!’”

The tears flowed down over Vang’s puffy purple cheeks. Egholm sniffed once or twice in sympathy, and forgot his own troubles for a moment.

Vang licked a last drop from the neck of the bottle, and went on:

“Well, you see, Therese had never expected that – nor had I. But don’t let’s talk about me. What was I to expect? Drunken fool, that’s all. Perhaps it was that made her turn religious. I don’t know. I never can think things out. It tires me. Well, she said to me: ‘Look here, you get me a place at the Postmaster’s or the Stationmaster’s, or one of those you’re always drinking with.’ Well, they simply laughed at me. But the religious lot, they didn’t mind. Only the worst of it was, from the time she set her thoughts on heaven, it’s been simply hell for me! Now, how d’you explain that?”

Egholm saw him off, going out to the gate with him, and at the same moment Hedvig opened the kitchen door. Yes, the dish was empty. A good thing they had helped themselves before it went in.

They lit the lamp, and began making things ready for the night. There was a jumble of things in every corner. Empty bottles by the dozen, and in one place she found a parcel, carefully wrapped in newspaper, containing the skins and skeleton remains of smoked herrings. Father, no doubt, thought that was the easiest way of clearing up after him.

“We’ll sleep in the little room, of course,” said Hedvig firmly to her mother.

“Ye – es,” said her mother quietly. But as Hedvig began dragging the bedding across, she put on her sternest face, and said:

“Never you mind where your mother’s to sleep or not to sleep. You know your Bible, don’t you, enough to remember about man and wife being one?”

“Ho!”

“But I’ll be there under the window. Yes, that’s best.”

“I know what I’d have done if I’d been you,” said Hedvig firmly. “I wouldn’t have washed that dish.”

“The one with the poison! Heavens, child – why, they might have been ever so ill!”