Jenny quotes

Then he walked a few steps—stood still—and walked again, but very slowly, listening to an inner voice. It was true, then—really true—that he was here, far, far away from everything he had longed so intensely to leave.

And he walked still more slowly, furtively, like one who has escaped from prison.

At the corner of the street there was a restaurant. He made for it, and on his way found a tobacco shop, where he bought some cigarettes, picture cards and stamps.

“I am slow at making acquaintances—in fact, I never really get to know people. I ought not to have come tonight, when you were kind enough to ask me.

Perhaps one needs training to enjoy oneself too,

” he said, with a short laugh.

“You have no right to say that, Mr. Gram.

Not one year of one’s life is wasted, as long as you have not reached a point where suicide is the only way out.

I don’t believe that the old generation, those from the time of the great illusions, were better off than we. The dreams of their youth stripped life bare for them. We young people, most of the ones I know, have started life without illusions.

“I am,” she said, and after a while:

“I have become an optimist since I have seen how much people really can stand without losing courage to struggle on, and without being degraded.”

“That is exactly what I think they are—reduced in value, anyway.”

Helge stood in the same spot as the evening before and gazed again at the town, with its background of hills under a sky as clear as the one over the mountaintops at home. He filled his lungs with the pure, cold air.

“Nowhere in the world, are there such mornings as in Rome,” said Jenny.

“I mean when the whole town is sunk in a sleep that grows lighter and lighter, and then suddenly awakes rested and fit. Heggen says it is because of the shutters; no windowpanes to catch the morning light and throw it on to your face.”

“

Let us go back now; it is getting cold.

”

He was lying looking at her:

“I believe it is you, Jenny, I am in love with,” he said suddenly.

She turned halfway towards him, with a faint smile, and shook her head.

“It attracts the sun; there are sparks in your hair, and the sunrays filter through your eyes.

Your mouth is quite transparent; it looks like a raspberry in the sun.

”

She had smiled: “Yes, Ella; so was I.”

Lonely! She had been lonely ever since her mother met Mr. Berner, who worked with her in the same office.

She was about ten at that time, but she understood at once that her dead father had departed from their home. His picture was still hanging there, but he was gone, and it dawned upon her what death really meant.

… to herself that she was dull sometimes and wished to make a conquest and flirt a little just like other girls—a pastime which in reality she did not approve of—that she preferred to imagine she was consumed by a thirst for life and clamouring senses.

Such high-flown words were only invented by men, poor things, not knowing that women generally are simple and vain, and so stupid that they are bored unless there is a man to entertain them.

That is the origin of the legend of the sensual woman—they are as rare as black swans, or disciplined, educated women.

a thing she was so unused to that it bewildered her.

Why could one not be friends with a man? If not, the world would be all a muddle.

She and Gunnar were friends—a solid, comfortable friendship.

She had to take care of me, because I needed her—now it is Gram. She is strong and determined, and she knows it, and nobody asks her in vain for help, but nobody can go on forever giving help and never getting any themselves.

Don’t you see that it will make her very lonely, always being the strongest?

She is lonely now, and if she marries that fellow she will never be anything else. We all talk to her about ourselves, and she has nobody she could talk to in the same way.

the unceasing warble of the larks in the sky, and the innumerable concertinas that played to the dancers in the osterias on the plain—concertinas with the peculiar, glassy sound, forever playing the same short Italian tunes. Why must she leave it all now?

The wind chilled her like a bath, till her body felt like a cool rich leaf, and she longed to give it to him.

They said goodbye for the last time at her door, and they could not part.

“But the picture of your wife in red is impressionistic, excellent. The more I look at it, the more I like it.”

“Yes, but that is a solitary instance.” After a pause “When I painted it, she was all the world to me. I was very much in love with her⁠—and I hated her intensely already.”

“Was it because of her you gave up painting?” asked Jenny.

“

The happiness in life is not only to be loved, Jenny; the greatest happiness is to love.

”

… to a man and submit to all the physical and mental intimacies as the consequence of it, and then discover one day that she did not know him, and that he had never known her—that the one had never understood the language of the other.

She lived because she was waiting; she did not want a lover, because she was expecting a master, and she did not wish to die⁠—not now while she was waiting.

No, she was not going to throw away her life either this way or that; she could not die so poor that she had not a single beloved thing to bid farewell to.

There was nothing else to do but to take up painting again, although it would probably not be much good now, lovesick as she was. She laughed. That was just what she was—lovesick.

The object did not exist at present, but the love was there.

Jenny went to the window and looked out. In the gathering darkness the sky looked almost violet, and the tiled roofs, the chimney-pots, and the telephone wires all melted together into one grey tint in the twilight.

He was not old, but his youthfulness belonged to another period, when youth was more unsophisticated and had a healthier creed. Perhaps she was naive too—with her aims and opinions—but it was in a quite different way.

Words change their meanings after twenty years⁠—was that the reason?

The gravel glittered red and purple, and the paint on the station building was blistered by the scorching sun. As she looked up everything went dark before her eyes for a moment;

Don’t you think I could make a name for myself good enough for the child too? It is only because I don’t know yet how to arrange it all that I am a little depressed sometimes, and also because you are so sad.

“Perhaps I am poor and dull and an egoist, but I am a woman, and as such I cannot but be happy at the prospect of being a mother.”

“My poor, brave girl! It makes it almost worse for me to see you take it that way.”

Some of the compassionate ladies came to look at it, trying to make acquaintance with her: “How nice!” But she was not pleased with the sketch, and cared neither to finish it nor to make a new one.

Then one day the hotel closed up again, the sea was stormy, and summer had gone.

Gunnar wrote from Italy, advising her to go there. Cesca wanted her to go to Sweden, and her mother, who knew nothing, wrote she could not understand why she stayed so long in Germany.

“But what goal did I have at all?” she said, with sudden vehemence. “

I wanted to live in such a way that I need never be ashamed of myself either as a woman or as an artist.

Never to do a thing I did not think right myself. I wanted to be upright, firm, and good, and never to have anyone else’s sorrow on my conscience. And what was the origin of the wrong—the cause of it all?

“But can you not see it is impossible?

It has sunk too deep; it has eaten into me like a corrosive acid, and I feel that what was once my inmost self is crumbling to pieces.

Yet I don’t want it—I don’t want it. Sometimes I am inclined to—I don’t know really what—to stop all the thoughts at once. Either to die—or to live a mad, awful life—drown in a misery still greater than the present one.

I had decided to live in Bavaria with him in the summer, because I was afraid the sea air would be too strong for him. He was going to lie in his pram under the apple trees while I painted.

There is not a place in the world I could go to where I have not been in my dreams with the boy.

There is nothing good or beautiful in all the world that I did not think, while I had him, he should learn and see. I have not a thing that was not his too.

he did not know me even—not really, anyhow. Some vague glimpses of reason had possibly begun to awaken in his little head, but, think of it, he never knew that I was his mother.

“Never a name had he, poor darling, only mother’s baby-boy, and I have nothing to remember him by, except just material things.”

She lifted her hands as if holding the child to her heart, then let them fall empty and lifeless on the table.

“Never a name had he, poor darling, only mother’s baby-boy, and I have nothing to remember him by, except just material things.”

She lifted her hands as if holding the child to her heart, then let them fall empty and lifeless on the table.

“I remember so distinctly my impression when I first touched him, felt his skin against mine. It was so soft, a little damp—the air had scarcely touched it yet, you see.

Gunnar and Jenny walked slowly in the shade of the arcade towards the church.

“Jenny,” he said all of a sudden, in a perfectly cool and everyday voice, “will you marry me?”

“No,” she answered after a pause, in a similar tone.

“I know that I alone understand you thoroughly. I know exactly what you are, and I love you as you are.

If your mind were full of stains and bleeding wounds, I would love and kiss them until you were clean and well again.

My love has no other purpose but to see you become what you always wanted to be and must be to feel happy.

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;

If he came now—he would win her. If he would but carry her the first bit of the way, she would try to walk the rest of it herself. And as she sat there waiting for him she decided in her shrinking soul:

If he comes, I shall live. If the other one comes, I must die.

And when she heard steps on the stairs, and they were not those of Gunnar, and there was a knock at the door, she bent her head and went shivering to open it for Helge Gram, instinctively feeling that she opened the door to the …

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.