Growth of the Soil, Knut Hamsun [best self help books to read txt] 📗

two children; she was from Christiania, and wore a hat⁠—a hat with feathers in. They had given her three months for the second one, but the first was never discovered, said Barbro.

Axel listened to all this and grew more than ever afraid of her. He tried to understand, to make out things a little in the darkness, but she was right after all; he took these things too seriously in his way. With all her vulgar depravity, Barbro was not worth a single earnest thought. Infanticide meant nothing to her, there was nothing extraordinary in the killing of a child; she thought of it only with the looseness and moral nastiness that was to be expected of a servant-girl. It was plain, too, in the days that followed; never an hour did she give herself up to thought; she was easy and natural as ever, unalterably shallow and foolish, unalterably a servant-girl. “I must go and have my teeth seen to,” she said. “And I want one of those new cloaks.” There was a new kind of half-length coat that had been fashionable for some years past, and Barbro must have one.

And when she took it all so naturally, what could Axel do but give way? And it was not always that he had any real suspicion of her; she herself had never confessed, had indeed denied time and again, but without indignation, without insistence, as a trifle, as a servant-girl would have denied having broken a dish, whether she had done so or not. But after a couple of weeks, Axel could stand it no longer; he stopped dead one day in the middle of the room and saw it all as by a revelation. Great Heaven! everyone must have seen how it was with her, heavy with child and plain to see⁠—and now with her figure as before⁠—but where was the child? Suppose others came to look for it? They would be asking about it sooner or later. And if there had been nothing wrong, it would have been far better to have had the child buried decently in the churchyard. Not there in the bushes, there on his land.⁠ ⁠…

“No. ’Twould only have made a fuss,” said Barbro. “They’d have cut it open and had an inquest, and all that. I didn’t want to be bothered.”

“If only it mayn’t come to worse later on,” said he.

Barbro asked easily: “What’s there to worry about? Let it lie where it is.” Ay, she smiled, and asked: “Are you afraid it’ll come after you? Leave all that nonsense, and say no more about it.”

“Ay, well.⁠ ⁠…”

“Did I drown the child? I’ve told you it drowned itself in the water when I slipped in. I never heard such things as you get in your head. And, anyway, it would never be found out,” said she.

“ ’Twas found out all the same with Inger at Sellanraa,” said Axel.

Barbro thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t care,” said she. “The law’s all different now, and if you read the papers you’d know. There’s heaps that have done it, and don’t get anything to speak of.” Barbro sets out to explain it, to teach him, as it were⁠—getting him to take a broad view of things. It was not for nothing she herself had been out in the world and seen and heard and learned so much; now she could sit here and be more than a match for him. She had three main arguments which she was continually advancing: In the first place, she had not done it. In the second, it was not such a terrible thing, after all, if she had done it. But in the third place, it would never be found out.

“Everything gets found out, seems to me,” he objected.

“Not by a long way,” she answered. And whether to astonish him or to encourage him, or perhaps from sheer vanity and as something to boast of, all of a sudden she threw a bombshell. Thus: “I’ve done something myself that never got found out.”

“You?” said he, all unbelieving. “What have you done?”

“What have I done? Killed something.”

She had not meant, perhaps, to go so far, but she had to go on now; there he was, staring at her. Oh, and it was not grand, indomitable boldness even; it was mere bravado, vulgar showing off; she wanted to look big herself, and silence him. “You don’t believe me?” she cried. “D’you remember that in the paper about the body of a child found in the harbour? ’Twas me that did it.”

“What?” said he.

“Body of a child. You never remember anything. We read about it in the paper you brought up.”

After a moment he burst out: “You must be out of your senses!”

But his confusion seemed to incite her more, to give her a sort of artificial strength; she could even give the details. “I had it in my box⁠—it was dead then, of course⁠—I did that as soon as it was born. And when we got out into the harbour, I threw it overboard.”

Axel sat dark and silent, but she went on. It was a long time back now, many years, the time she had first come to Maaneland. So, there, he could see ’twas not everything was found out, not by a long way! What would things be like if everything folk did got out? What about all the married people in the towns and the things they did? They killed their children before they were born⁠—there were doctors who managed that. They didn’t want more than one, or at most two children, and so they’d get in a doctor to get rid of it before it come. Ho, Axel need not think that was such a great affair out in the world!

“Ho!” said Axel. “Then I suppose you did get rid of the last one too, that way?”

“No, I didn’t,” she answered carelessly as could be, “for I dropped it,” she said. But even then she must go on again about