Tales of Two Countries
A simple pain can be conquered in open fight; a nervous fever, or any
other “regular” illness, goes through a normal development and comes
to a crisis. But while toothache has the long-drawn sameness of the
tape-worm, bread-sorrows envelop their victim like a grimy cloud: he
puts them on every morning with his threadbare clothes, and he seldom
sleeps so deeply as to forget them.
It was in the long fight against encroaching poverty that Sören had worn
himself out; and yet he was great at economy.
But there are two sorts of economy: the active and the passive. Passive
economy thinks day and night of the way to save a half-penny; active
economy broods no less intently on the way to earn a dollar. The first
sort of economy, the passive, prevails among us; the active in the great
nations--chiefly in America.
Sören’s strength lay in the passive direction. He devoted all his spare
time and some of his office-hours to thinking out schemes for saving and
retrenchment. But whether it was that the luck was against him, or, more
probably, that his income was really too small to support a wife and
five children--in any case, his financial position went from bad to
worse.
Every place in life seems filled to the uttermost, and yet there are
people who make their way everywhere. Sören did not belong to this
class. He sought in vain for the extra work on which he and Marie
had reckoned as a vague but ample source of income. Nor had his good
connections availed him aught. There are always plenty of people ready
to help young men of promise who can help themselves; but the needy
father of a family is never welcome.
Sören had been a man of many friends. It could not be said that they
had drawn back from him, but he seemed somehow to have disappeared
from their view. When they happened to meet, there was a certain
embarrassment on both sides. Sören no longer cared for the things
that interested them, and they were bored when he held forth upon the
severity of his daily grind, and the expensiveness of living.
And if, now and then, one of his old friends invited him to a
bachelor-party, he did as people are apt to do whose every-day fare is
extremely frugal: he ate and drank too much. The lively but well-bred
and circumspect Sören declined into a sort of butt, who made rambling
speeches, and around whom the young whelps of the party would gather
after dinner to make sport for themselves. But what impressed his
friends most painfully of all, was his utter neglect of his personal
appearance.
For he had once been extremely particular in his dress; in his student
days he had been called “the exquisite Sören.” And even after his
marriage he had for some time contrived to wear his modest attire with
a certain air. But after bitter necessity had forced him to keep every
garment in use an unnaturally long time, his vanity had at last given
way. And when once a man’s sense of personal neatness is impaired, he is
apt to lose it utterly. When a new coat became absolutely necessary, it
was his wife that had to awaken him to the fact; and when his collars
became quite too ragged at the edges, he trimmed them with a pair of
scissors.
He had other things to think about, poor fellow. But when people came
into the office, or when he was entering another person’s house, he had
a purely mechanical habit of moistening his fingers at his lips,
and rubbing the lapels of his coat. This was the sole relic of “the
exquisite Sören’s” exquisiteness--like one of the rudimentary organs,
dwindled through lack of use, which zoologists find in certain
animals.--
Sören’s worst enemy, however, dwelt within him. In his youth he had
dabbled in philosophy, and this baneful passion for thinking would now
attack him from time to time, crushing all resistance, and, in the end,
turning everything topsy-turvy.
It was when he thought about his children that this befell him.
When he regarded these little creatures, who, as he could not conceal
from himself, became more and more neglected as time went on, he found
it impossible to place them under the category of golden-locked angels
had sent him by heaven. He had to admit that heaven does not send us
these gifts without a certain inducement on our side; and then Sören
asked himself: “Had you any right to do this?” He thought of his own
life, which had begun under fortunate conditions. His family had been in
easy circumstances; his father, a government official, had given him the
best education to be had in the country; he had gone forth to the battle
of life fully equipped--and what had come of it all?
And how could he equip his children for the fight into which he was
sending them? They had begun their life in need and penury, which had,
as far as possible, to be concealed; they had early learned the bitter
lesson of the disparity between inward expectations and demands and
outward circumstances; and from their slovenly home they would take with
them the most crushing inheritance, perhaps, under which a man can toil
through life; to wit, poverty with pretensions.
Sören tried to tell himself that heaven would take care of them. But he
was ashamed to do so, for he felt it was only a phrase of self-excuse,
designed to allay the qualms of conscience.
These thoughts were his worst torment; but, truth to tell, they did not
often attack him, for Sören had sunk into apathy. That was the Sheriff’s
view of his case. “My clerk was quite a clever fellow in his time,” he
used to say. “But, you know, his hasty marriage, his large family, and
all that--in short, he has almost done for himself.”
Badly dressed and badly fed, beset with debts and cares, he was worn out
and weary before he had accomplished anything. And life went its way,
and Sören dragged himself along in its train. He seemed to be forgotten
by all save heaven, which, as aforesaid, sent him year by year a little
angel with locks of gold--
Sören’s young wife had clung faithfully to her husband through these six
years, and she, too, had reached the same point.
The first year of her married life had glided away like a dream of
dizzy bliss. When she held up the little golden-locked angel for the
admiration of her lady friends, she was beautiful with the beauty of
perfect maternal happiness; and Miss Ludvigsen said: “Here is love in
its ideal form.”
But Mrs. Olsen’s “nest” soon became too small; the family increased
while the income stood still.
She was daily confronted by new claims, new cares, and new duties. Marie
set staunchly to work, for she was a courageous and sensible woman.
It is not one of the so-called elevating employments to have charge of
a houseful of little children, with no means of satisfying even moderate
requirements in respect of comfort and well-being. In addition to this,
she was never thoroughly robust; she oscillated perpetually between
having just had, and being just about to have, a child. As she toiled
from morning to night, she lost her buoyancy of spirit, and her mind
became bitter. She sometimes asked herself: “What is the meaning of it
all?”
She saw the eagerness of young girls to be married, and the air of
self-complacency with which young men offer to marry them; she thought
of her own experience, and felt as though she had been befooled.
But it was not right of Marie to think thus, for she had been
excellently brought up.
The view of life to which she had from the first been habituated, was
the only beautiful one, the only one that could enable her to preserve
her ideals intact. No unlovely and prosaic theory of existence had ever
cast its shadow over her development; she knew that love is the most
beautiful thing on earth, that it transcends reason and is consummated
in marriage; as to children, she had learned to blush when they were
mentioned.
A strict watch had always been kept upon her reading. She had read many
earnest volumes on the duties of woman; she knew that her happiness lies
in being loved by a man, and that her mission is to be his wife. She
knew how evil-disposed people will often place obstacles between two
lovers, but she knew, too, that true love will at last emerge victorious
from the fight. When people met with disaster in the battle of life, it
was because they were false to the ideal. She had faith in the ideal,
although she did not know what it was.
She knew and loved those poets whom she was allowed to read. Much of
their erotics she only half understood, but that made it all the more
lovely. She knew that marriage was a serious, a very serious thing, for
which a clergyman was indispensable; and she understood that marriages
are made in heaven, as engagements are made in the ballroom. But
when, in these youthful days, she pictured to herself this serious
institution, she seemed to be looking into an enchanted grove, with
Cupids weaving garlands, and storks bringing little golden-locked angels
under their wings; while before a little cabin in the background, which
yet was large enough to contain all the bliss in the world, sat the
ideal married couple, gazing into the depths of each other’s eyes.
No one had ever been so ill-bred as to say to her: “Excuse me, young
lady, would you not like to come with me to a different point of view,
and look at the matter from the other side? How if it should turn out to
be a mere set-scene of painted pasteboard?”
Sören’s young wife had now had ample opportunities of studying the
set-scene from the other side.
Mrs. Olsen had at first come about her early and late, and overwhelmed
her with advice and criticism. Both Sören and his wife were many a time
heartily tired of her; but they owed the Olsens so much.
Little by little, however, the old lady’s zeal cooled down. When
the young people’s house was no longer so clean, so orderly, and so
exemplary that she could plume herself upon her work, she gradually
withdrew; and when Sören’s wife once in a while came to ask her for
advice or assistance, the Sheriff’s lady would mount her high horse,
until Marie ceased to trouble her. But if, in society, conversation
happened to fall upon the Sheriff’s clerk, and any one expressed
compassion for his poor wife, with her many children and her miserable
income, Mrs. Olsen would not fail to put in her word with great
decision: “I can assure you it would be just the same if Marie had twice
as much to live on and no children at all. You see, she’s--” and Mrs.
Olsen made a motion with her hands, as if she were squandering something
abroad, to right and left.
Marie seldom went to parties, and if she did appear, in her at least
ten-times-altered marriage dress, it was generally to sit alone in a
corner, or to carry on a tedious conversation with a similarly situated
housewife about the dearness of the times and the unreasonableness of
servant-girls.
And the young ladies who had gathered the gentlemen around them, either
in the middle of the room or wherever they found the most comfortable
chairs to stretch themselves in, whispered to each other: “How tiresome
it is that young married women can never talk about anything but
housekeeping and the nursery.”
In the early days, Marie had often had visits from her many
friends. They were enchanted with her charming house, and the little
golden-locked angel had positively to be protected from their greedy
admiration. But when one of them now chanced to stray in her direction,
it was quite a different affair. There was no longer any golden-locked
angel to be exhibited in a clean, embroidered frock with red ribbons.
The children, who were never presentable without warning, were huddled
hastily away--dropping their toys about the floor, forgetting to pick
up half-eaten pieces of bread-and-butter from the chairs, and leaving