Ida Brandt

by Herman Bang

  Nurse Øverud carefully took three small glasses out of her pocket, and the two sat down on chairs in front of the bed with the light shining down on Ida’s duvet.

  “Good health,” said Kjær.

  All three of them took a drink, while keeping the bottle on the floor as though to hide it, and Nurse Kjær said slowly as she sat there holding her glass, “There are forty of them there today.”

  “Well,” she continued (she had acquired the same habit of moving her hand up towards her nose as Sister Koch), “it was certainly about time they got married…they’ d managed to stick together for five and a half years now while Poulsen was working in the post office…Then last summer while I was at home I was sent up into the woods to find them. Poulsen had the Sunday off (Kjær laughed), as he had every third Sunday, and there he was, asleep with his head on Marie’s shawl, while Marie, poor creature, was tiptoeing quietly around picking raspberries, aye, aye,” she said and chinked glasses with Nurse Øverud, who was laughing.

  “It’s not easy to stay awake when you have had to drool over each other for five years.”

  “But is it right they are going to move to Samsø now?” asked Ida.

  “Yes, with sixteen hundred and a pension.”

  They sat for a while, and then Nurse Kjær said in a quite different tone:

  “Henriette wrote that the girls were going to decorate the church. It is so beautiful” – she paused for a moment – “that church at home, when it is decorated.”

  The last time Nurse Øverud helped to decorate the church, she told them in her Funen lilt, was for Anna Kjærbølling’s wedding.

  “Anna Kjærbølling, you know her, of course, Nurse Brandt. She comes from Broholm.”

  “Yes,” said Ida. “She has two delightful children.”

  “Yes, two lovely children.”

  Nurse Kjær still sat looking at the wall.

  “And I think, too,” she said slowly, “that children are the best thing of all.”

  There was a moment’s silence while they all three stared into the light with changed and, as it were, sharper faces.

  “Oh well, let’s wish them all the best,” said Nurse Kjær as she emptied her glass.

  “Yes, all the best,” said the others, chinking their glasses with hers.

  Nurse Kjær suddenly rose:

  “We must go over,” she said, walking across the floor with the bottle; but her thoughts were still with her sister, and in the same voice as before, as though she was watching them go, she said: “And they will be on Samsø tomorrow.”

  “Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  Ida locked her door again, and she heard them hurrying across the loft as she returned to her bed. She was so wide awake now, although her head was heavy. She was thinking of Olivia and her children and of Nina with her four tall boys, whom she had seen last year, and about her father and her home – at home in Ludvigsbakke.

  She could see the big white wing of the bailiff’s farm and the rooms in which everything was so clean and tidy and so quiet, and then there were the flowers, four in each window and four in the painted flower pots; and father’s shells, which she was never allowed to touch, were resplendent in the corners.

  And she saw the office as she knocked on the very bottom of the door when she was quite small and went in and said that dinner was ready. Her father was sitting at the green table in his long canvas coat and wearing his old straw hat – for he always “covered up” when he was in the office – and she clambered up in the big armchair and waited: all “father’s birds” were perched around them, in their big cases, behind glass.

  Until mother opened the door:

  “Brandt, dinner is waiting.”

  “Yes, dear. Is Ida here?”

  And he absent-mindedly caressed Ida with a pair of loving hands:

  “Yes dear, yes my dear.”

  They went in. Ida toddled along beside her father, who held her so close to his knee that she stumbled over his boots.

  “Brandt,” said her mother, “that’s no way to walk with the child.”

  After dinner, father sat down in the sofa with a handkerchief over his face; mother sat in her chair by the window. Before long they were both asleep.

  Ida tiptoed around quietly – she wore carpet slippers at home – and left the doors ajar. Then she sat down on a stool while her parents slept.

  After dinner, Ida went with her mother to have coffee at the Madsens in the school. This was up by the main road to the north, along which carriages would be driving. One of them was that of the pharmacist’s wife from Brædstrup.

  She had bought herself a sewing machine in Copenhagen now.

  Yes, Mrs Madsen had been over to see it. But she thought that things would last better if they were sewn by hand.

  Her mother nodded.

  “But you know they have to try everything out at the pharmacy,” she said.

  Ida sat on a small chair, learning to knit, and she had her own little cup.

  When Ida and her mother went home, they took the road leading past the farm. Only two solitary candles were burning, one in Miss Schrøder’s room and one in the steward’s wing.

  There was the sound of a voice: “Good evening.” It was Lars Jensen, the farm foreman; he rose from a bench.

  “Good evening,” replied mother.

  And they went on their way into the dark avenue leading to the bailiff’s house.

  At home, they could hear laughter in the hallway. It was the forester and his wife who had come over for supper. Mother went in to prepare things, and Ida curtsied first to Mrs Lund, quite a small, frail lady who had given birth to eleven boys and whose eyes had grown bigger at every birth, and then to her husband.

  “Well, and how is the young lady?” he said, lifting her up in both arms just in the midst of her curtsey and swinging her in the air. Lund was a man of enormous girth, and he laughed until he turned red right up to the back of his head.

  “Lund, Lund, you’ re so rough,” said his wife. “You’ re only used to romping about with boys.”

  “Oh,” said Lund as he continued to swing her around, “It’s good for her, so it is. It gets her blood circulating.”

  They went in to have something to eat. “Oh,” said Mrs Lund (for nowhere were there so many beautiful things on a table as at the bailiff’s). “How wonderful it must be to be able to look after everything as you do, Mrs Brandt.”

  Things were rather all over the place at the forester’ s; eleven was a somewhat large number of heirs to see to.

  They exchanged news from the neighbourhood and talked about the sewing machine. Lund had been in to see how it worked.

  “You must go and have a look at that great work of art,” he said.

  “But surely it works by hand?” said Mrs Brandt.

  “Yes, but heaven knows how long it will last.”

  “You know, Lund,” said his wife with a faraway look in her eyes, “it must surely be lovely to have one of those in a home where there are so many to make clothes for.”

  Lund just laughed:

  “Aye, née Silferhjelm,” – the pharmacist’s wife had her distinguished maiden name placed below Mogensen on her cards – “could surely manage to sew the few skirts she needs by hand.”

  “But there are people,” said Mrs Brandt as she handed a dish around, “who must be the first to have things.”

  “And then when you haven’t anything else to think about,” said Mrs Lund, “it is quite reasonable.”

  Mrs Lund, who always spoke in a tone as though she were trying to quieten someone down, changed the subject to the price of butter:

  “Now Levy has reduced his price by four skillings.”

  Mrs Brandt failed to understand that, for she had maintained her price all the time.

  “Well,” said Mrs Lund, shaking her head – she had four small curls at the back, tied with a velvet ribbon – “but it is presumably because things do not always turn out like that for
us at home… heaven knows how that happens.”

  “Let’s have a schnapps, Lund,” said Brandt who was doing little but look, first at one and then at the other. “Has Ida got anything to eat?”

  Ida was allowed to spread her butter herself with a blunt-edged knife. “You have to accustom children,” said her mother. “It is good for them.”

  “Cheers, Lund,” said the bailiff, and they went on to wonder when His Lordship could be expected. It would scarcely be before the end of June, in a couple of months.

  “When the woods are past their best,” said the forester.

  Ida was to go to bed after the meal. Her father put her on his knee when she said good night and bounced her up and down.

  “My, you do bounce that child around,” said Lund with a laugh, and Ida said good night to the others, one after the other in turn.

  The forester and his wife left at ten o’ clock.

  “Let me take your arm,” said Lund, for it was dark.

  “She’s a prickly one, you know,” he said. “She can’t forget we’ve known her as the housekeeper…and all that went with it.”

  “But they’ re very helpful, Lund,” she said.

  The forester said nothing to that. His only comment was: “She takes up a lot of space at the end of the table.”

  “And how nice everything is,” said his wife. She was always full of profound admiration when she was in other people’s homes.

  The Lunds made their way home.

  But Mrs Brandt went around putting away the silver.

  …Ida was to have a children’s party, and that must be now, before His Lordship came.

  The children had chocolate to drink on the Mound adjoining His Lordship’s garden.

  The girls sat in a row, all in starched dresses – with the two from the inn at the end of the table in tartan winter dresses and wearing earrings – all drinking and eating.

  Mrs Brandt, who was going around, wearing a white shawl and pouring out the cocoa, said:

  “I don’t think you have anything, have you Ingeborg?”

  Ingeborg was the judge’s only child and she was wearing net mittens decorated with small bows.

  Not a sound was to be heard.

  Ida, who was the smallest of them all, went around showing her dolls to those who were finished, and the forester’s two youngest, Edvard and Karl Johan, who had chapped hands (“Heaven knows how that happens,” said Mrs Lund: “but all the dirt in existence seems to land on those boys’ hands”) went for the dishes of cakes all of a sudden as though they had to grab at everything they were eating.

  “Sofie,” said Mrs Brandt, looking down along the silent table, “I do not think they have anything down there,” as though it was only a matter of filling them up.

  “No thank you,” said Ingeborg, when Mrs Brandt offered her more, “it’s so late to be having tea.”

  The two from the inn had turned their cups upside down.

  Brandt appeared at the bottom of the Mound – his trousers so easily found their way into the backs of his shoes as he walked:

  “Aha, this is a party,” he said as he came up. “Have you all got something?” he said. “Aha,” he went around pinching their cheeks, diffidently saying their names for he did not know what else to say, while the little girls shuffled and looked down at their skirts.

  “But then you’ d better play some games,” he repeated.

  “Then they had better play games,” he repeated to his wife.

  “But perhaps some of the children would like some more,” replied Mrs Brandt.

  “No,” said the eldest of those from the inn sharply, behind his cup, deciding it for them all.

  “Then you must go and play,” continued the father in the same tone; he did not know what they were to play.

  “We could have a game of handkerchief into the ring,” said the judge’s daughter Ingeborg, while the little girls sat there, flushed and quiet.

  “Well, yes, but little children must be allowed to make a noise,” said Brandt. “Children must make a noise, they must run around.” And suddenly, quite put out, he said:

  “I’ll fetch Schrøder, my dear.” And he went.

  “The forester’s two mumbled something about not knowing what was meant by handkerchief into the ring, and they went over and sulked by a tree.

  “Right, you can start,” said Ida hanging over the edge of a bench beside Ingeborg and handing her a handkerchief that was far too small to be thrown into the ring.

  Brandt ran through the garden and in through His Lordship’s gate. Up in the main building, all the doors were wide open and there was a smell of starched curtains and cleanliness.

  Miss Schrøder was standing on a stepladder in the middle of the sitting room in her stocking feet; when hard-pressed she was fond of taking off her shoes:

  “Lord, Mr Brandt, you’ve come to fetch me,” she shouted, letting her arms fall.

  “Yes, Schrøder my dear, you’ll have to go over there…they can’t get things going,” said Brandt, pushing his glasses up and down; “there’s no one who knows what children do to enjoy themselves.” He pulled both trouser legs up:

  “I think there are fifty of them,” he said.

  “Good heavens, of course I’ll come.” And Schrøder put her hands up to her hair: “But I’ve got all this to do.”

  Schrøder looked around; there were curtains on all the chairs: “And they’ll be here tomorrow!” She came down from the steps and flipped her shoes on. “This heat’s terrible on your legs,” she said. Heat was always a problem for Schrøder, and from the first day in June she was forever on her way down through the garden with a sheet; she used to bathe in the pond: there’s nothing in the world like water, she said.

  “Oh good Lord,” she looked at the curtains: “then we’ll hang them up tonight.”

  Down on the Mound they had started rolling lids.

  “Good heavens,” said Schrøder, surveying the group: “this is a bit tame, isn’t it? Let’s have something with a bit more go in it.”

  She lined the children up and they started to march. Ida took her hand, and when they had marched a little way, the judge’s daughter Ingeborg came and took her other hand.

  “Look,” she said to Ingeborg. “I am wearing bronze shoes.”

  The forester’s boys went after the girls from the inn and smacked their bottoms, for they were the last in line.

  Before long they started playing postman’s knock down by the pond. Brandt had gone with them and he had great fun getting in the way of the children wherever they tried to run.

  “That’s more like it,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Schrøder, pushing up her sleeves, “but I’ve got curtains to hang at twelve windows.”

  Mrs Brandt and Sofie, both of them straight backed, carried the dishes of sandwiches through the garden and up on the Mound to set the table.

  Ida was so happy. She twice ran across to Schrøder and kissed her hand, without saying a word.

  ∞∞∞

  His Lordship’s family were to take a trip into the woods in two carriages; they had turned out of the drive, and His Lordship was in his element in the young ladies’ coach. Mrs Brandt went across to the house with the local newspaper.

  Schrøder was in the pantry, where she had been packing the picnic.

  “Ugh, I haven’t a stitch on under this,” she said, touching the front of her print dress: “And now we can start to tidy up in the guest room.”

  She hurried out through the kitchen, where three smallholders’ wives from the tied cottages were attending to the workers’ supper, and then on across the corridor to the guest rooms.

  “Oh,” said Schrøder, “this is a mess if ever there was one.”

  All the doors between the rooms were open, and no one had closed their suitcases. Dresses and shirts lay here and hung there. Schrøder talked away as she hung things up and moved things around.

  Mrs Brandt said nothing, but went around lifting the skirts a
s though to judge the materials they were made of.

  “Yes indeed, it’s all right for some,” she said.

  “Well,” said Schrøder, turning around; she had gone ahead: “These Copenhageners often don’t have much in the way of underclothes…You can tell that from how often they have to have them washed while they’ re here.”

  Mrs Brandt did not reply or carry on the conversation – it was never Mrs Brandt’s custom to ask anything – she merely used her grey eyes while Schrøder ran about in front of her and carried on and chatted:

  “Aye, heaven knows how it’s going to turn out for Miss With and Falkenstjerne but they’ re suited to each other, you know, tall men with short wives, that always works…”

  “And she’s a lovely girl,” said Schrøder.

  She closed a trunk and launched herself into the idea:

  “Miss Adlerberg,” she said, “has a waist, you know, such as it was nice to have at one time. When you could get Miss Jensen to pop over from Brædstrup in the middle of the day…”

  Miss Jensen was the seamstress in Brædstrup, and she sometimes did a fitting for someone in the guest rooms during the summer.

  “That’s a ‘Garibaldi’,” explained Schrøder as she entered the innermost room, where two strong trunks were closed and locked and the dresses were hanging on the hooks, wrapped in tulle.

  “Miss Schrøder, Miss Schrøder,” shouted Ida outside the window.

  “That’s Ida,” said Schrøder, reaching out and lifting the “little thing” in through the window before unrolling a long, broad black moiré train out of a length of tulle that stretched right across the floor.

  “That’s her dress, and what a train. It’s lined.”

  While Ida stood looking up at all that silk, Schrøder laughed and held the skirt over her like a cloak; but Mrs Brandt examined the lining:

  “The lining is old,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Schrøder. “But you know it really is wonderful what they can get out of it.”

  Schrøder always expressed wonderment at the Copenhageners.

  “And now we’ll go on,” she said.

  When they reached the last window, she suddenly put Ida out on the gravel path again.