THEODORE

By GUSTAV HELLSTRÖM

Emma Antonsson was the last to leave the meeting for the unemployed. After it was all over and most of the people had trooped out into the autumn rain which came down at an angle of forty-five degrees, she had struck up a conversation with a married friend of her own age, a woman who, like herself, worked at one of the large factories. It was no gay conversation. Two forty-five-year-old working women seldom have anything very cheerful to tell each other, especially in days of unemployment. But tonight the conversation was not only depressing; in the end it had irritated Emma Antonsson. As if she could help that her married friend had lost her job in the paper factory while she herself had been kept on for four miserable days a week! One had to be just, in this world, even in one’s misery! The talk had degenerated into a wrangle, with bitter, cutting retorts, and of these Emma Antonsson’s were without doubt the least effective since she was the one who was best off, from a material standpoint. “But you’ve your husband, and he hasn’t been fired.” “But Enberg and I, we’ve seven children, and you haven’t any!” “But how can I have children when I haven’t any husband! You’re not going to blame me for not having run around in my young days like so many others, are you?” “Well, you’re better off than the rest of us.” “You don’t expect me to go and give up my job just because you’ve lost yours, do you?”

At last the watchman forced them to make for the door by putting out the electric lights, all except a bulb over by the stage. But Emma Antonsson did not leave. Now that the other had gone it somehow seemed to her that in spite of everything she had been in the wrong and the arguments which a moment ago seemed absolutely indisputable now suffered from a very serious flaw springing from the fact that she was better off than Elin Enberg. There was no getting away from it, and she felt suddenly ashamed and increasingly sorry at having revealed, too openly, her own advantages. That was why she stood there, irresolute. She felt an absolutely unreasonable and instinctive need of appealing to the watchman. Hadn’t she been working at Yllet factory since she was sixteen? In other words, for twenty-nine long years? And should she now, in her old age, be blamed because she hadn’t done a lot of silly things when she was young, like so many other girls, and called a lot of misery down on her shoulders? Was it more than right that she who had been so long in a place should be allowed to keep it?

The watchman shrugged his shoulders and stopped her flow of words by a mumbled remark that it was good that there was somebody who wasn’t too badly off in these rotten times. The answer didn’t please Emma Antonsson; she suspected an insinuation back of it and with a snort about spiteful good-for-nothings, she left the hall.

But just as she stepped into the hobby she shrunk back, frightened. She had seen—or she thought she had seen—a shadow glide up the stairs to the gallery, and as she stood there in her fright she heard, above the violent thumpings of her heart, a very real and sort of crackling noise on the stairs. In her agitated state of mind she did not realise exactly what was taking place and her sudden fear of the passing shadow somehow blended with her subconscious feeling of guilt at being better off than so many others, and all at once her indolent and at the same time turbulent imagination terrorised her with the thought that she was being followed. Perhaps some one was lying in wait for her, perhaps some one wanted to get even with her because she was a little more fortunately situated than the others. Things she had seen in the movies suddenly rose before her and although she was not usually timid, she screamed and rushed toward the door.

“There’s some one hiding on the stairs,” she cried to the watchman when he appeared.

The watchman went into the lobby and peered up the stairs to the gallery.

“What? You here again?” he called to the invisible entity. “Get down out of there, you know you can’t sleep there.”

Dragging, shuffling steps were heard while the watchman remonstrated. “That’s the third time this week. It’s tough on you, poor devil, but what’s to be done about it? You know the regulations.”

Before him and Emma Antonsson stood, a moment later, a young, exceedingly emaciated man, or boy, rather, with dark eyes, brown, curly hair peeping out under the wet sports cap, and a complexion so pale and white that the dark eyes looked like black holes in a cranium with skin drawn over it. His clothes were threadbare and sent out a stench of rain and dirt. The opening of the upturned coat collar gave a glimpse of a shirt that was gray for having been worn too long. He started shamefacedly on the wet, muddy floor as if seeking a hole to creep into, raising his eyes as high as the watchman’s chin, every now and then, as if attempting to beg, both hopelessly and helplessly, for something which the pouring rain outside made too evident for words.

“I know,” said the watchman, “it’s hard on you, you poor crow, and with such devil’s weather I suppose I’ll have to let you sleep on a bench in here. But it’ll be getting cold here, too, you know, as cold as on the barge where you’ve been staying.”

The watchman turned to Emma Antonsson.

“He’s a sailor and he hasn’t even a place to sleep.”

The blood rushed suddenly to the young man’s face. For a few seconds the pale skin seemed to glow with a red light from within, at the thought of getting a roof over his head. And this red glow, this suddenly flaming, hungry gratitude made Emma Antonsson realise that he was not an ordinary tramp. She listened to the pouring rain outside, she looked at the thinly clad boy in whose dark, pleading eyes hope had been kindled, and from these two sensations of sight and hearing her thoughts flew these two sensations of sight and hearing her thoughts flew to the shiny black raincoat she was wearing, which no rain could soak through. And her thoughts went even further, they followed her home to her own room where there was a fire in the stove and where she had both bed and sofa. And like a red thread through these (for her) appalling contrasts ran the gist of the tiff with Elin Enberg: you are better off than we. It cut her sharply and bitterly and the difference between her own and the young man’s position and the quarrel all became one, and melted, so to speak, into one resolution.

“He can sleep on my sofa tonight,” she said to the watchman.

Again the stranger’s cheeks became fired with a rush of blood and a light shone far back in his dark brown eyes, while a soft smile came over the full lips which, in the midst of the general pallor, stood out as the red lips of a consumptive.

Not until then, when a little more life and colour came over him because of the bit of unexpected good luck, did she think of him as anything else than an object of pity. She said suddenly, with a sterner tone in her voice:

“How old are you, anyway?”

“I’m nineteen.”

“All right,” she said curtly, “I’m forty-five, so don’t get any crazy ideas in your head. He won’t think anything funny, will he?”

She didn’t look at him, but at the watchman, as if she put the question to him, or wanted to have a witness to the agreement. The stranger did not answer. He merely smiled, a quick, feeble smile which conveyed a sort of bitterness over the suspicion that anyone could ascribe other desires to him than those connected with hunger and thirst.

“Let’s go,” Emma Antonsson commanded.

The stranger’s head crawled down in the upturned coat collar as far as it could go, and the man followed her out into the pouring rain. He kept half a step back of her. Over his whole person there was something of a lost, hungry, and dripping wet dog which suddenly hears a kind word, and follows. . . .

II

He had been lying on her sofa, now, for over six weeks, at night.

Strictly speaking she had nothing to complain of. He was a very quiet young man, was Theodore, very willing and kind in every way. For a hungry unemployed he had unusually regular habits. He was up before her, in the morning, dressed himself and washed, made fire in the stove, went down in the courtyard to get water, while she got out of bed and made her humble toilette and locked the door as she went to work. And when at a quarter after five she again tramped up the two flights of stairs to her room she would find him either waiting outside the door or sitting on the top step. Then, without her asking him, he would pick up the pail to get water, light the lantern and go down in the wood bin to chop the wood for the next day.

All these little chores which lightened her work in a very great degree, he had assumed of his own accord, from the very first day, although she had not, by either word or thought, inferred that he ought to do something in return for his lodgings on the sofa. To begin with she thought: “So you’re the sort of fellow who tries to ingratiate himself with the ladies to lead an easy life! In a couple of days you’ll be asking me for the loan of twenty-five cents, and before long you’ll ask for a crown. But that business won’t go here. I’m too old to be taken in by such stuff.” And she laughed to herself at the thought of her own shrewdness.

But after a couple of weeks she had to give up this idea. Several days passed and she didn’t know what to think about Theodore, he was so different from what experience and hearsay had taught her that men were, as a rule. He remained just as unselfishly helpful, as quiet and introspective and he never asked for even the slightest penny. It was only little by little that a light dawned on her. If he was so different from everybody else, if he knew how to remain in his place and attend to the work so well, it was because he was a sailor and not a factory worker. She noticed it in many other things, too. He had only one change of underclothes, for instance, which had been dirty and full of holes when he arrived. But he was astonishingly clever in mending them and keeping them clean. He washed his shirt and his drawers every Saturday and it was a joy to see the way he mended his stockings every Sunday morning after they had been drying, over the stove, during the night. And the fact that he could sit absolutely still for half an hour at a time, bent slightly forward and starting out ahead of him, or down at the floor, his elbows on his knees and his chin in his hands, this, too, was explained by his being a sailor.

Nor did she have anything to complain of, in regard to his temperance. Not even once had it happened, when he came home in the evening, that his breath smelled of brandy as he moved near her. Once in a while, in the evening, he would take a cigarette out of his pocket and light it. This was the only vice she had discovered in him. And then his passion for coffee.

She had never offered him a meal. Just why she could not say. Probably because in her blood lay the consciousness of many generations past, that a man must get his own food and not ask a woman for it. How he kept body and soul together during his fruitless search for work she did not know and she did not ask. Perhaps way down in her heart, unbeknownst even to herself, was a voice which whispered that she didn’t want to know. In speaking of food she had limited herself to referring, in a casual way, to some kind people in town, saying where they lived, and apparently he had taken the hint for it happened sometimes in the evening that he put his hand in his pocket and pulled out a package of cold relishes. And, undoubtedly, every now and then he would get a job which brought him a little something, for he would get a shave, and then there were, of course, the cigarettes.

But coffee wasn’t food and it seemed to her that she could offer him coffee without leading him into bad habits or lowering him in his own eyes. And besides she understood his passion for it better; it was her own.

While she had nothing direct to complain of in his behaviour, therefore, she nevertheless often felt annoyed and embarrassed at having him stay with her. There were several irritating details. The fact of having to undress in the dark, at night, for instance. Of course she had often thought of buying a screen; you could get one in a second-hand shop for almost nothing. But the mere thought incensed her. It was as if the screen would separate them and change their relationship entirely. She couldn’t exactly explain why, but the mere thought of the screen gave her such an unpleasant feeling that she preferred the discomfort of undressing in the dark.

And then there were her fellow-workers, in the factory, both men and women, particularly the latter. They teased her a lot about him. “Look at her, old paragon of virtue! Once the devil gets in them you can’t tell where they’ll end!” It wasn’t that she couldn’t answer back, or that she didn’t have a clear conscience, but it couldn’t be denied that she often wished she could get rid of him. The only thing was how to go about it. That he had no prospects of getting work was all too evident. A place in a factory was not to be thought of. And out in the country there was nothing to do, either, for crowds kept pouring into the city from the fields like packs of wolves, in the hope of finding an opening in the factory town. And as for the sea, great heavens!—for months and months rows upon rows of boats had been lying idle along the quays in the harbour while one shipbroker after another who a few years ago had been rolling in wealth now had only his bare hands left. And besides they were in December, now. You couldn’t put a poor devil out into the street at this time of the year, even if it was unpleasant to undress in the dark, night after night.

If anyone had told Emma Antonsson that she would feel a gnawing unrest in her heart when he, one day, would come and tell her that he was going, she would have dismissed the idea with scorn.

III

And yet that day and that hour came.

One night, in the middle of December, as he sat, as usual, bent forward, staring down on the floor in front of him, he Said, Suddenly:

“Listen, Emma. I’ve been thinking it over. I guess I’d better enlist in the navy.”

She was sitting by the table darning stockings in the light of the kitchen lamp.

“Do you think so, Theodore?”

“Yes. By God, I don’t like the idea. (It was the first time she had heard him swear.) But what can a fellow do? They say times won’t get any better. And the Crown pays. . . . I’ll have to do my military service anyway, so I might as well enlist now, for three years. I think that’s what I’ve heard them say. By that time things will be pick ing up, on the sea. I don’t know when they start recruiting, but I’m going to find out, if you’ll let me stay till . . ."

“Of course, Theodore, since you’ve stayed so long you may as well stay a few days more.”

She didn’t mean to blame him for not having left sooner, she simply answered the last words in another’s remark as people often do, even if the words have no bearing on the main subject. But in this case there was a deeper reason for her not wanting to enter into a discussion on the main subject, that of enlisting. The words army, navy and recruiting always made her see red with her whole being’s inmost eye. Strictly speaking there was no conscious “anti-militarism” or any objection to preparedness back of her hatred. Socialistic theories about the proletariat’s inter nationalism merely clung to her as clothes hang on a body of flesh and blood. For she had seen . . . year after year she had seen, in the factory, what army and military training meant: young mothers with infants, plunged into want and misery, when the Crown demanded that the father do his military service; old, worn-out mothers obliged to go back to work again, as their only support failed them. These yearly sights constituted the heart and brains, the nerves and muscles of her hatred to militarism. And the party’s theories simply suited this body like an all-too-well cut uniform.

It was therefore some time before she replied, rather evasively:

“But you don’t have to enlist at once, Theodore. Why don’t you wait till after Christmas? Sometimes things pick up, in the factories, after New Year. And then you won’t have to go and enlist.”

Women like Emma Antonsson know what reality is, unless they are so old that they have renounced all idea of happiness in this world and transported it into a world to come. And they look reality square in the face. It didn’t take Emma Antonsson many days to realise that it was not only hatred for the army and navy and military training which had made her suggest that he put off making a decision until after Christmas. A restless feeling came over her, a feeling she had experienced often before, for other men, and which she thought had died in her, long ago. And now, when its days were numbered, now that he was going to leave the little room, it came back again. Perhaps it wasn’t as strong as in olden days, and perhaps it wouldn’t take much effort to stifle it, but the mere fact that it was there, and that it was the last time in her life that she would experience it—all this resulted in her no longer pushing it away from her, but welcoming it, wrapping herself up in it, and clinging to it as one sits and clings to the Sun’s last rays, in the fall.

And sometimes it happened that a smile passed over her features, while she said to herself:

“And to think that I’m not too old for such ideas! . . .”

And when her fellow-workers in the factory now teased her about her lodger she no longer knew how to answer back, sharply, and she ended up by lying: she said she had put him out.

She bought a screen in the second-hand shop and put it up in front of her bed. For that matter it was absolutely unnecessary now. She had told him to come home later and to sneak up the stairs when no one saw him. She had also given him a key to the room, so she did not have to get up and open the door for him, as she lay in the dark, waiting to hear his muffled steps as he walked in his stocking feet, in the hall.

She lay and wondered what kept him out so late, what he did, and if he had any other friends. She couldn’t go to sleep before she heard him undress. And even after that she often lay awake a long time. He was no longer the pitiful and more or less cumbersome unemployed, crushed by social iniquity: he had become a secret force which, in the dark, filled the little room with tension and drove sleep away. Only when she heard his heavy, regular breathing and she knew that he had fallen asleep, could she sleep. But even then her slumber was light. If he merely turned or—as he often did—sighed in his sleep as if weighed down by the suffering he had gone through, she would wake up with a shiver and peer out into the dark, waiting for the tension in the room to receive a solution, waiting for something to happen. . . .

IV

And then Christmas Eve came.

It fell on a Sunday, that year. She had set the table with candles and had brought home some delicatessen, cold meat, red beets, two pigs’ feet, a few slices of ham, a couple of bottles of Christmas brew and as a present for him, a package of cigarettes and a mouthpiece. A few days before he had had a little extra job carrying Christmas trees and people’s generosity had apparently made the job a profitable one, for the night before Christmas he came home with a package of new underclothes, a stiff collar and a tie.

But there was no Christmas feeling. And yet he had never talked so much as that night. About other Christmases he had had. His father had been a sailor, like himself, that is to say, not a real sailor, but a carpenter on board ship, and he went off on long expeditions and most Christmases he had been away. He tried to explain as well as he could the feeling they had at home, on Christmas Eve. It was as if the mother sat all the time harking, peering into the dark, for a sound, a greeting. If the weather was bad she would shiver every time the storm rattled the windows and she would lean anxiously against the panes. She did not need to say anything, the children knew what she was thinking of and sometimes they would try to comfort her by saying that perhaps the weather wasn’t so bad where he was. But she would only shake her head. All the years she had been married she had never been able to get used to the idea that the weather wasn’t the same in the part of the world where he might be, as in her own town. And then they did not hear from him for a long time. And then came the news from the consulate general in London. The tackle had come tumbling down and hit him in the head, and he was dead. It happened in Halifax.

“And that broke my mother. She was never quite herself again, after that. She sort of lost her mind. There were some letters which she had written him and which she knew he always carried with him, in his kit-box, and she wanted them back, and when she didn’t get them she sort of lost her mind. They were letters she had written during all the years they had been married. And a few years after she died.”

And then there were the Christmases he had celebrated on sea, or in some port. If on board, the old man—Emma knew what he meant—the captain, that is, always read something from the Bible. You can’t help it, on sea you get a touch of religion, somehow, sooner or later. My father was that way, and my mother, too, for that matter. They had both grown up in a God-fearing home—not religious in the sense that they sang psalms from morning till night and spoke of imitating Jesus, but religious in the sense that they thought of one thing and another and knew that death comes, all of a sudden, when one least suspects it. Like my father: to lie and get killed in port, a sober, decent fellow, who never tasted a drop of strong liquor after he married my mother. Although, come to think of it, it was sort of right for a carpenter to die from tackle falling on him, and not like a real sailor, at sea.

Emma sat and listened to him. She scarcely heard what he said, she only sat and was surprised at the life she tried to penetrate and which was so entirely different from the life she had known at the factory. She understood better, now, his quiet ways and his sense of order. And at the same time he became more distant and fascinating than before: it was as though he had become older because his experiences of life had been so totally different from hers. When did a factory worker of his age speak of death or realise that there were different ways of being religious? Not even she herself had done that. In her thoughts she sat and looked up at him. He knew a great deal, for his age. He had seen foreign lands, and he had thought about God and death. . . .

“And I myself,” he said, “I was to have saved money to study for first officer, and then I would have gone to sea and saved up some more and studied for captain. But here I go day after day, getting thinner and more stupid all the time, till I want to send everything to hell, and enlist . . ."

“But if you wait a little, Theodore, times may get better.”

He only shrugged his shoulders:

“This can’t go on any longer. I’m not the man to hang around here any more. You see it isn’t as if I didn’t want to work. But what can you do when your job stops?”

“You don’t think I’d put you out, do you?”

“It isn’t that . . ."

Emma did not dare look at him. She felt an oppressive tugging at her heart and she understood why he wanted to go, and more than ever she would have liked to keep him there, if she had only known how to go about it.

They went to bed early. She lay in the darkness, unable to sleep. Suddenly she started. What was that? What ailed him? It sounded as if he were crying. She raised herself slowly upon one elbow and listened intently. Yes, he was crying. Her heart beat wildly. But she did not dare move. She lay listening to him cry, heard the sniveling he tried to hide, and wished she could do something for him. At last the sniveling broke out into heartbreaking sobs and all at once she was out of bed, and found her way to the sofa. She caught his head, fell down by his side, saying things she scarcely understood and which she scarcely knew were in her.

V

In the daytime neither referred to what had happened.

She saw by his evasive eyes that he despised himself and her. But with the darkness her courage came back. This was her last, her very last love—or whatever sensible people called it—her very, very last. And after it would come old age, nothing but the factory and old age. In the darkness she did not care that he despised her, she did not care about anything beyond knowing how his scorn broke down, melted; there was a bitter triumph in this, and in the thought that back of what was now going on lay the death he talked about, the death which is called old age.

In this way she kept him there till the middle of February. Then one evening he told her he had enlisted and was leaving for Karlskrona the following day. He told her about it in his same quiet manner. There was no sorrow at parting, rather, perhaps, relief at being free.

“And so you’re going, Theodore.”

That was all she said. She had known, for a little over a week, that she was going to be a mother. But she did not say anything about it. What was to be said? She looked reality in the face. She had nothing to ask of him, not even his name. What could anyone ask of a nineteen-year-old boy? That would only make all that had happened so ridiculous, so ugly, or whatever one would call it. And then there was something else that she had been thinking of, these last days. She felt that the child that was to come into the world would be her own, hers only, and no one else’s in the world. If she could only keep silent. She didn’t need any father for it, she did not have to give any name. She need only tell the minister she didn’t know who the man was. The child was hers, only hers, no one else’s in the world.

She had thought it all over, she had thought everything out, these last days. It would be hard, yes, just before it came into the world. She would meet with sneers and taunts and coarse jokes, when she would no longer be able to hide what had happened. But it would have to be. People forget.

And after it was born and she would be well enough to go back to the factory, she would put the child in the nursery in the morning, and in the evening she would get it and wrap it up in a gray blanket, as she had seen so many of the younger women do. All night she would have it to herself, it would lie at her bosom, she would feel its warmth, she would hear it breathe, she would. . . . She would no longer be lonely. And it would grow up and go to school, and in sixteen years or so, when she would be too old to go to the factory, it would begin where she left off.

She looked up at Theodore.

“So you’ve enlisted.”

He nodded his head in reply, as if he were afraid, by a word, to start a discussion.

And then everything was silent again.