PREFACE

Readers and admirers of “The Dangerous Age”—and their name is legion—will find themselves perfectly at home in the following story. To them, Elsie Lindtner’s rambling aphorisms, her Bashkirtseffian revelations of soul, the remarkably frank letters which she delights to write to her friends, among whom she numbers her divorced husband; above all, her rather preposterous obsession with regard to the dangers of middle age, will be familiar as a twice-told tale.

Doubtless many will be charmed to meet Elsie Lindtner again, when she has passed through the dreaded furnace of her “forties,” and is still keeping the spark of inextinguishable youthfulness alive within her, by gambling[6] at Monte Carlo, travelling in Greece with Jeanne of the flaming hair, fencing in London, riding in New York, and finally finding happiness and salvation in the adoption of a small offscouring of the streets.

But for those who may have missed reading the little masterpiece of modern femininity which only a short time ago set a whole continent by the ears, some sort of key is, possibly, necessary to the enjoyment of “Elsie Lindtner.”

In “The Dangerous Age” Elsie Lindtner writes an autobiographical letter to Joergen Malthe, the rising young architect, who has been her ardent admirer. She tells him now that her mother died when she was born, and her father was bankrupt, and lived disgraced in retirement, while she was left to the care of a servant girl.

From her she learnt that lack of money was the cause of their sordid life, and from that moment she worshipped money.

[7]

“I sometimes buried a coin that had been given me,” she writes, “as a dog buries a bone.”

When she went to school little Elsbeth Bugge was soon informed that she was “the prettiest girl in the school”; that a pretty face was worth a fortune.

“From that moment I entered upon the accursed cult of my person which absorbed the rest of my childhood and all my first youth.... I avoided the sun lest I should get freckles; I collected rain water for washing; I slept with gloves, and though I adored sweets, I refrained from eating them on account of my teeth. I spent hours brushing my hair.”

One day when she came home she found the only big mirror in the house had been transferred from her father’s room and hung in her own.

“I made myself quite ill with excitement, and the maid had to put me to bed. But[8] later on, when the house was quiet, I got up and lit my lamp. I spent hours gazing at myself in the glass. There I sat till the sun rose.”

Then follows an account of how this child, scarcely in her teens, positively set her cap at a rich, elderly widower, because he had a fine house.

“My brain reeled as I said to myself, ‘Some day I will live in that house as wife of the Chief Magistrate.’”

The precociousness of Marie Bashkirtseff who fell in love with a duke when she ought to have been playing with her dolls, pales into insignificance beside this confession.

Elsie left school and went back to Denmark engaged to Herr von Brincken, the Chief Magistrate, but he had heart disease and she did not marry him. Instead she married Richard Lindtner, a wealthy Dane, and made her home with him in the Old Market Place at Copenhagen, where for twenty-two[9] years she was, to outward appearances, a happy and contented wife.

“I allowed my senses to be inflamed while my mind remained cold and my heart contracted with disgust. I consciously profaned the sacred words of love by applying them to a man whom I chose for his money. Meanwhile, I developed into the frivolous society woman everybody took me to be. Every woman wears the mask which best suits her purpose. My mask was my smile....”

It is only in this book, the second instalment of Elsie Lindtner’s fragmentary diary and correspondence, that she gives us a reason for leaving her husband after twenty-two years of married life, the wish that he should have children. In “The Dangerous Age” she hints at other and various reasons. To her friend and cousin, Lili Rothe, the perfect wife and mother of “lanky daughters,” who could love another man passionately without ceasing to love her husband, she writes, when[10] announcing her divorce, “There is no special reason ... none at least that is explicable to the world. As far as I know Richard has no entanglements, and I have no lover. There is no shadow of a scandal connected with our separation beyond that which must inevitably arise when two middle-aged partners throw down their cards in the middle of a rubber.... My real reason is so simple and clear that few will be content to accept it.... You know that Richard and I have got on as well as two people of opposite sex can do. There has never been an angry word between us.

But one day the impulse—or whatever you like to call it—took possession of me that I must live alone—quite alone, and all to myself. Call it an absurd idea ... call it hysteria—which, perhaps, it is—I must get right away from everybody and everything. Joergen Malthe has planned and built a little villa for me in the belief that it was for some one else. The house is on an island, the name[11] of which I will keep to myself for the present.”

In her self-communings, however, she never disguises the fact that escape from boredom was the main motive of her returning to the White Villa.

“Richard is still travelling, and entertains me scrupulously with accounts of the sights he sees and his lonely nights.... As in the past, he bores me with his interminable descriptions, and his whole middle-class outlook....”

Richard’s neatness and tidy ways bored her; his correctness in the convenances; even his way of eating, and “to watch him eat was a daily torture.”

“Sundays were no better in the Old Market Place. There I had Richard from morning till night. To be bored alone is bad; to be bored in the society of one other person is much worse. To think that Richard never noticed it! His incessant talk reminded me[12] of a mill-wheel, and I felt as though all the flour were blowing into my eyes.”

In another place she says: “I am now sure that even if the difference in our own age did not exist, I could never marry Malthe.... I could do foolish, even mean things for the sake of the one man I loved with all my heart.... But set up a home with Joergen Malthe—never!”

The terrible part of home-life is that every piece of furniture in the house forms a link in the chain which binds two married people long after love has died out—if indeed it ever existed. Two human beings—who differ as much as two human beings always must do—are forced to adopt the same tastes, the same outlook. The home is built upon this incessant conflict.

“How often Richard and I gave way to each other with a consideration masking an annoyance that rankled more than a violent quarrel.... What a profound contempt I[13] felt for his tastes and, without saying so, how he disapproved of mine. No, his home was not mine, although we lived in it like an ideal couple. My person for his money—that was the bargain crudely but truthfully expressed.”

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

Even in her White Villa, on its island with a forest of her very own, Elsie Lindtner, to her intense disappointment, was bored. She lived there with two servants, Torp, the cook (a delightful figure), who believed in spooks, and whose teeth chattered when she told ghost stories; and Jeanne, the mysterious young housemaid with “amber eyes” and hair that glowed like red fungi against the snow, who wore silk stockings, and won Elsie’s heart by admiring and dressing Elsie’s own wonderful hair. Jeanne became the salient interest in Elsie’s hermit life on the island, and was promoted to the intimacy of companion and confidante. It was Jeanne who arranged the[14] flowers artistically with her “long, pointed fingers,” and picked up her skirts disdainfully when she passed the flirtatious gardener, to whose fascinations Torp, the cook, became a hapless prey. Torp “made herself thin in collecting fat chickens for him,” and he played cards with her in the basement kitchen.

Jeanne rowed hard in the little white boat across the lake to catch the last post with Elsie’s fatal invitation to Malthe. “I will never part with Jeanne,” Elsie said as she watched her. Then she wandered at random in the woods and fields, and scarcely seemed to feel the ground under her feet. The flowers smelt so sweet, and she was so deeply moved.

“How can I sleep? I feel I must stay awake until my letter is in his hands.... Now it is speeding to him through the quiet night. The letter yearns towards him as I do myself.... I am young again, yes, young, young! How blue the night is.”

[15]

But she could not, alas, young as she felt, get into the white embroidered muslin which used to become her so well, and Malthe’s first glance told her all.

“He cast down his eyes so that he might not hurt me again.” One reads of tears of blood. “... During the few hours he spent in my house I think we smiled ‘smiles of blood.’”

Malthe left the White Villa the same night, and said at parting, “I feel like the worst of criminals.”

After this shattering blow Elsie in her despair craved for even the boring society of the husband she had deserted. She was, to use her own expression, “greedy of Richard’s caresses,” and invited him, too, to visit her on her island. But Richard declined altogether. He had just become engaged to a girl, “a mere chit of nineteen.”

“He has made a fool of me! I am done for. Nothing is left to me but to efface myself as soon as possible.”

[16]

Elsie Lindtner’s method of effacing herself for the second time was to quit her desert island, and take a Cook’s tour round the world with Jeanne.

Thus it happens that we renew acquaintance with her breaking the bank at Monte Carlo in the first pages of this book to which she has given her own name, though it might just as appropriately have been entitled “More Dangerous Age Reflections.” For here, again, the “transition” is the absorbing topic of Elsie Lindtner’s thoughts and correspondence; one might almost say it is “the bee in her bonnet.” Even when she has emerged triumphantly, as she boasts afterwards, from its perils, and has found a new source of interest and happiness in the street arab whom she has adopted, she seems unable to keep the subject out of her conversation and letters. She goes so far as to warn strangers of the “stealthy footsteps of the approaching years,” and disputes with her dear friend, the extraordinary[17] widow, Magna Wellmann, which of them came through those years, “when we are all more or less mad,” with the greatest éclat.

In “Elsie Lindtner” we miss the mise en scène of the White Villa on the island, with its forest and lake, for when Elsie re-visits it with Kelly, it hardly seems the same place, with no Torp and no gardener.... We miss, too, the first, fine, careless rapture of feminine revolt which characterises “The Dangerous Age,” and the Jeanne of these pages is not so vivid as the Jeanne of the former book. In compensation we have more of Magna, and we have Lili Rothe’s love-letters—which were addressed but never sent to the man she loved. Also, as in the previous volume, we have Elsie Lindtner’s letters, with their strange, pathetic eloquence, marvellously revealing a woman’s complicated soul. Their literary merit and their value as a picture of life cannot fail to impress all readers.

Beatrice Marshall.

[18]

[19]

ELSIE LINDTNER

[20]

[21]

Elsie Lindtner

Monte Carlo.

Dear Richard,

Thank you for the money, and forgive my audacious telegram. I am directing this letter to your office, as it has nothing to do with domestic affairs.

You really must help me. We, Jeanne and I, are stranded here like a pair of adventuresses, and don’t know what to do. I have wired to my lawyer, who has simply replied with an unconditional “No.” The creature seems to think he has the right to manage my fortune as well as myself. Naturally, I find it far from pleasant to be obliged to apply to you, but you are the only person I can think of to whom I can turn without risking a refusal.

I have been gambling, winning and losing,[22] finally losing. I am overdrawn, and the last draft which Riise had the grace to send me is gone.

Your money kept me going for two hours, but now that is gone, too. I have pawned the few valuables I possessed, but I am determined to win everything back. So please don’t give me good advice; instead, go and talk to Riise. Explain to him that it is urgent, and I must have the money. I am quite indifferent as to what becomes of the capital. I don’t mind paying dearly for this spree—or whatever you like to call it—and being poor afterwards in consequence. If the matter goes awry, you’ll hear nothing more of Elsie Lindtner. I shall neither take poison nor shoot myself. There is a more comfortable way out of it. A Brazilian, whom I don’t like, has lent me a big sum of money. If I borrow any more of him, it’ll have to come to a bargain. Make Riise sell the stock, even at a heavy loss, I must have money.[23] Meanwhile send me all you can spare at the moment by cheque. I hope you continue to be as happy as ever.

With many thanks in advance,

Yours,

Elsie.

[24]

Monte Carlo.

Dear Richard,

A friend in need is a friend indeed. Accept my thanks for your prompt and ready help. All the same, I could not wait till it came, and borrowed again from the Brazilian. His obnoxious money has brought me luck. If it had been the other way about—well, never mind. It was a mad, desperate plunge on my part. Now that it is over I cannot understand how I could nerve myself for it. But I have won. The night before last I raked in two hundred and fifty thousand francs besides all that I had lost. After that I laid down to sleep. Your money has just arrived. I shall send it back at once with what you sent me before, and the amount I have wrung out of Riise. Jeanne has started packing.

[25]

To-morrow we leave here. We are going for Jeanne’s sake. She has taken my gambling too much to heart.

Now, if you possibly can, forget this little episode. I wasn’t completely myself. It’s all over, and too late to repent. We intend to spend the rest of the winter in Tangiers and Cairo, and probably in Helvan. Jeanne wants to go to India, and I have no objection so long as the journey is not too difficult. At all events, we shall spend a few weeks in Paris, just to fit ourselves out stylishly.

It is positively disgraceful of me that I have forgotten to congratulate you on the birth of your son and heir. How I should like to see your paternal countenance—you might send me a photograph of yourself with the Crown Prince, and now, farewell, till circumstances throw us together again.

Elsie.

[26]

⁂ ⁂ ⁂

How long can things go on like this? We wander hither and thither, and have no abiding place, as if we were fugitives condemned to be eternally on the move. And we feign enjoyment of this perpetual unsettlement. Jeanne has long ago seen through the pitiable farce, but she continues to play her part loyally out of gratitude for the small kindness I have shown her. We get on quite well together. Jeanne reads in my face when it is best to speak, and when to be silent.

She is happiest on shore with terra firma beneath her feet, while I like best the gliding days and nights on board ship; the sky above, the sea beneath me, my brain vacant, and all my senses lulled to sleep. It reminds me of the early days on my solitary island, when every trifling incident was an affair of huge importance. The flight of a seagull, the top of a mast above the horizon—a ship sailing by in the night. We spend the day on our deck chairs, half dozing over a book, or conversing[27] in a company voice; but at night we throw ulsters over our nightgowns and pace the deck, our natures expanding like flowers which only shed their perfume after dark.

I have become very fond of Jeanne. Her poor, withered heart, too early developed, too soon faded, awakes a certain gentle compassion within me. All my opinions are accepted by her eagerly as golden rules for the ordering of life. If only I could forget! existence might be bearable. But I cannot forget. The glance which showed me the corpse of his love follows me continually everywhere. The humiliation in that glance! I don’t love him, and I don’t hate him. I am getting too lukewarm to hate. But contempt rankles—Jeanne is careful to say nothing that can hurt me, and yet sometimes she hurts me by being too tactfully silent! I don’t want to be pitied, so we while away hours over our toilette.

How long can it go on?

[28]

Athens.

Here it is as nice as anywhere else. I struggle bravely to let myself be enchanted with Greece’s past, but in reality I care as little about it as I care for the potshares on the Keramaikos.

We are attending Professor Dörpfeld’s lectures on “The Acropolis,” and I am more interested in the way the man says things than in concentrating my mind on what he says. He has made himself so thoroughly familiar with the plastic beauty of the world, that finally the invisible words that fall from his lips seem to have become plastic, too. I take no interest in why the pillars are thickest in the middle. It is the olive groves, and the lights and shadows flitting over Athens, that charm and engross me.

Jeanne takes it all in like a gaping-mouthed schoolgirl; she studies the history of art in the hotel. I have given her leave to go on an[29] excavating expedition, but without me. I strongly object to riding through snow up to my waist, sleeping in tents on the bare ground, and living on mutton and canned goods. My laziness is growing.

Luxor.

I am uneasy about Jeanne. She is strung up to a state of enthusiasm which alienates me. Is it travelling that has developed her, or are her hitherto dormant abilities awakening? We are simply travelling to kill time, but she takes everything with the same tremendous seriousness as that day in Berlin when she first heard Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. She regards me as if it were long ago an accepted fact that we each exist for ourselves, alone in our separate worlds. She skips half the meals to roam about among the temples. To-night we sat on top of the great pylon and watched the sun go down. For me it was just like a beautiful decorative[30] effect at the theatre. I couldn’t help thinking of “Aïda.” She wouldn’t come in when I did, and when I suggested that the night air was chilly she answered quite snappishly, “I wish to see the moon illumine the classic sea.” Of course, I left her alone, but I couldn’t sleep, and at about midnight I heard her come back. My door was open, and I called her in. She sat down on the end of my bed and

was crying. What can be the matter with her?

I am not going to torment her with questions. She shall be free to come and go as she chooses—so long as she spares me the paeans of an enthusiasm which I cannot share. It is all very well here but I prefer myself in the Paris boulevards, Unter den Linden, and Bond Street. I feel so poverty-stricken when I see others full of emotional élan.

Yes, that is it. That is why I am nervous about Jeanne’s enthusiasm for art. She reminds me of old days when Malthe, in my[31] yellow room looking over the market-place, told me of his travels, and I deluded myself into imagining I understood what he was talking about....