As Trains Pass By Read online

  “Let me tell you, Miss Jensen, why the parents send their children to the Free School: it is because Miss Sørensen knows her job well,” the minister had said.

  The innkeeper’s wife was the only person to whom Miss Jensen had confided “the words”:

  “And what is an unmarried lady to do, Mrs Madsen?” she had said. “Tears are the only defence a woman has.”

  Miss Jensen sat weeping in her corner. Darkness began to fall, and finally she rose and went out into the kitchen.

  She lit a small paraffin cooking stove and put some water on for tea. She laid a cloth across one corner of the kitchen table and arranged some bread and butter in front of the solitary plate.

  But while she was doing this, she was lost in thought, pondering again on the vicar’s words.

  The pug had gone out with her and placed itself on a cushion in front of its empty dish.

  Miss Jensen took the dish and filled it with white bread that had been softened in the warm water.

  The pug had the dish placed before it and started eating the food almost without moving.

  Miss Jensen had lit a solitary candle. She drank her tea with an open rye bread sandwich, using her knife to cut the bread into delicate little squares.

  When she had drunk her tea, Miss Jensen went to bed. She carried the pug in her arms and put it down on the duvet at the foot of the bed. Then she fetched the school register and laid it on the table at the bedside.

  She locked the door and looked in all the corners and under the bed by the light of her candle.

  Then she undressed, combed out her plaits and hung them up on the mirror.

  The pug was already asleep, snoring on the duvet.

  Miss Jensen did not sleep well since Mr Linde had said those words.

  Mrs Bai went back along the road towards the station. She opened the gate and went on to the platform. It was quite empty, so silent that you could hear the humming of the two telegraph wires.

  With her hands on her lap, Mrs Bai sat down on the bench outside the door and looked out across the fields. Mrs Bai was much inclined to sit in this way wherever there was a chair or a bench or a flight of steps.

  She looked out across the fields, the great stretches of ploughed land and the meadows beyond. The sky was clear and pale blue. There was nothing for the eyes to rest upon with ease, other than the chapel, you could see that with its stepped gables and the tower right over on the other side of the flat field.

  Mrs Bai felt cold and got up. She went across to the garden hedge, looked in over it, opened the gate and entered. The garden was a triangular strip along the railway; there was a kitchen garden at the front, and behind this there was a lawn with some tall roses in front of the summer house beneath the elder bush.

  She examined the roses; there were a few buds on them still. They had flowered faithfully all through the year.

  But now they would soon have to be covered.

  The leaves were falling already. But there was no protection for anything, of course.

  Mrs Bai went out of the garden again and along the platform into the little courtyard behind the wooden fencing. She called for the maid and told her she wanted to feed the pigeons.

  She received the corn in an earthenware bowl and started to call the pigeons and scatter the corn out across the stones.

  She was very fond of pigeons. She had been ever since she was a child.

  There had been such a lot of them at home in the big merchant’s house in the town. Oh how they used to flock around the dovecote just opposite the door leading into the workshop.

  It was as though she could hear the cooing and murmuring merely by thinking of the courtyard at home.

  That was the old house, for later, when her father died, they sold the old workshop and everything else, and moved away.

  The pigeons flew down around Mrs Bai, picking at the corn.

  “Marie,” said Mrs Bai, “just come and see how bad-tempered the speckled one is.”

  Marie appeared in the kitchen door and discussed the pigeons. Mrs Bai emptied out the rest of the bowl. “Some of them are going to meet their fate when Bai’s friends come to play Hombre.”

  She went up the steps. “It gets dark so early now,” she said and went inside.

  The living room was rather dark and felt warm as she came in from outside. Mrs Bai sat down at the piano and played a tune.

  She never played except when it was growing dark, always the same three or four melodies, sentimental little things that she played languorously and slowly, all in the same manner so they all assumed the same quality.

  As she sat there playing the piano in the dark sitting room, Mrs Bai almost always thought of her home. They had been a big family, and there had always been such a variety of things at home.

  She was the youngest of them all. While her father was still alive, she was so small that she could hardly even reach her plate at dinner.

  Her father would sit on the sofa in his shirt sleeves, and the children would stand around the table and help themselves.

  “Straighten your backs, children,” her father would say.

  He himself would sit with his broad back slumped forward and his arms right across the table.

  Her mother went to and fro, fetching and bringing.

  The lads from the workshop all ate out in the kitchen, seated at the long table.

  They giggled and argued so noisily that it could be heard through the door, and they suddenly made such a row that it sounded as though the house was about to collapse.

  “What’s all that din about?” her father shouted, banging the table in the living room.

  They fell quite silent out in the kitchen. There was only a gentle scraping sound from one who was searching for something under the table after the kerfuffle.

  “Dreadful crowd,” said her father.

  After lunch he slept for an hour on the sofa. He woke on the dot:

  “Now I have given some serious thought to the country’s best interests,” he said, being given a cup of coffee before returning to the workshop.

  Everything changed when her father died. Katinka was sent to the school along with Consul Lasson’s children and the mayor’s daughter Fanny.

  And she was also invited to the consul’s.

  The other siblings were dispersed. She was left alone with her mother.

  Those years were the best in Katinka’s life, there in the little town where she knew everyone and everyone knew her. In the afternoons, she and her mother would sit in the drawing room, each at a window, her mother by the one with the “mirror”; Katinka would do French embroidery or read.

  The sun fell in bright stripes through the flowers in the windows, out across the white floor.

  Katinka read a great number of novels from the public library, novels about people of aristocratic birth, but she also read poems that she copied into an album.

  “Tinka,” said her mother. “Here comes Ida Levy. Oh, she’s wearing her yellow hat.”

  Tinka looked up: “She’s going for her music lesson,” she said.

  Ida Levy went past, and they looked at her and she nodded to them and asked with her fingers whether they were coming to meet the “half past nine”.

  “Oh, it’s dreadful the way Ida Levy wears her heels down,” said Tinka as she watched her.

  “She gets that from her mother,” said mother.

  They go past, one by one, the land agent and the two lieutenants, the director and the doctor. And they wave to them, and upstairs they nod and exchange a few words about each of them.

  They know where everyone is going and what they are going to do.

  They know every costume and every flower on every hat. And every day they make the same comments about the same things.

  Minna Helms passes and nods.

  “Did you see Minna Helms?” says mother.

  “Yes.” And Katinka looks at her and screws up her eyes against the sun.

  “She could do with a new coa
t,” she says.

  “Poor things, where are they going to get one from?” Her mother looks in the mirror: “Aye, it looks pretty worn,” she says. “I think she could sew some new edging on it though. But it’s probably as Mrs Noes says: Mrs Helms doesn’t have much, and she isn’t much bothered.”

  “If only that clerk of hers would pull himself together and do something about it,” said Tinka.

  Five o’clock came, and the young girls would call for each other to go for a walk, and arm in arm they would walk up and down the street, meeting and gathering in groups and laughing and chatting and going their way.

  In the evenings, after tea, the mothers would come along as well to meet the half-past-nine train, and things were much quieter as they walked out along the station road.

  “Katinka,” said her mother, turning round – she was walking in front with Mrs Levy – “There’s Mr Bai. So he must have the evening off.”

  Mr Bai passed by and greeted them. And Katinka nodded and blushed. For her friends were always teasing her about Mr Bai.

  “So he is off to play skittles,” said Mrs Levy.

  On Sundays they went to church. Everyone wore their best clothes, and their singing resounded beneath the vaulted roof while the sun entered through the big chancel windows.

  Thora Berg was such a naughty one to sit beside in church.

  She sat there all the time the parson was in the pulpit, saying, “Well, my dear” and pinching her arm.

  Aye, Thora Berg was quite a tomboy.

  In the evening, soil and pebbles rained down against Tinka’s windows.

  And they heard noise and laughter all the way down the street.

  “That’s Thora going home from a party,” said Tinka. “They’ve been at the mayor’s.”

  Thora set off home along the street as if on a wild hunt, pursued by all the young gentlemen. The entire town was permitted to hear it when Thora Berg went home from a party.

  Katinka liked Thora Berg most of all. She admired her and watched her attentively when they were together. At home, she would say “Thora said that” twenty times a day.

  They did not actually spend a great deal of time in each other’s company. But in the afternoons, when they were taking a walk, or out at the pavilion, where they had season tickets for the concerts the military band gave every other Wednesday, then they talked together. Tinka always became quite flushed when they met.

  It was also at the pavilion she had first made the acquaintance of Bai. And on that very first evening he had danced most with her.

  And when they were out skating, he always invited her to skate with him. It was as though they were flying, almost as though he was carrying her. And he also visited them at home.

  All her friends teased her, and she always had him as a partner when they were playing party games or had guessing games. It was always Bai, and everyone laughed.

  And mother was always talking about him at home.

  Then came the engagement, and she always had someone to go with to church on Sundays; and in the winter, when there was a play on, to the theatre. And when Bai got his position there was that busy time with her trousseau and arranging the house and all that. Her friends helped her with all the names that had to be sewn and all the things that had to be hemmed.

  They were summer days, and they all sat up in the summerhouse. The sewing machine whirred, making hems and fixing ends.

  And they would tease her and laugh and suddenly bounce up and fly out into the garden, running around the lawn and making a noise and laughing, as wild as a group of foals.

  Tinka was the quietest of them.

  There was whispering with friends in every corner and sewing get-togethers at the Levys, where they sewed the rug that Tinka was to stand on as a bride before the altar, and there were the rehearsals for the hymns they were to sing in the choir.

  Then came the day, and the wedding in the decorated church. It was quite full, even crowded. All the girls were up by the organ. Tinka nodded to them and thanked them and wept again. She had shed tears all the time as though a tap had been turned on.

  And then they moved over here, to the silence.

  At the beginning of her marriage, Tinka was frightened and always on edge, as though scared of being attacked.

  There was so much she had not imagined, and Bai was so rough in many things that she simply suffered and put up with it, frightened and insecure as she was.

  And she was also a stranger here and knew no one.

  Then came a time when she became more acquiescent, more indolent and clingy, as was her nature.

  She would sit with her crocheting in her husband’s office, looking at him as he sat bent over his desk, her curly hair falling a little down over her forehead.

  She would rise and go across to him and put her arm round his neck, wanting to stand close to him, silent, to be close to him like this for a long time.

  “I’m trying to write, you know, dear,” Bai would say.

  She would bend her neck down to his mouth and he would kiss it.

  “Can I get on with my writing now,” he would say, kissing her once more.

  “You’re always writing,” she would say.

  The years passed. Katinka adapted to life with the trains coming and going and the local people who went away and returned home; they brought news and they asked for news.

  They established a social circle with such people as there were in the area. Mainly Bai’s Hombre friends, accompanied every other time by their wives.

  Then there was the dog and the pigeons and the garden. And Mrs Bai was not actually one of the most efficient of people. She rarely had time on her hands as she lingered for a long time over everything she did. Bai called her “I’ll do it tomorrow”.

  There were no children.

  When Katinka’s mother died, they received her inheritance. As a couple on whom no calls were made they were well off and had everything in plenty.

  Bai liked to eat well, and he ordered an abundance of good wine from Aalborg. He put on a little weight, living a life of some indolence and leaving his assistant to do most of the work. He only looked the “lieutenant” when he was outdoors.

  He had a child up in town.

  “What the hell,” he said to Kiær, who was a bachelor, “I used to be in the cavalry and the girl was as sweet as a baby sparrow.”

  The girl went to Aalborg after the damage was done. The child was fostered in the village.

  And so time passed.

  Katinka no longer read as she used to do as a girl. Books were just made up stories, after all.

  Mrs Bai had in her escritoire a large cardboard box containing a host of withered flowers, ribbons, and bits and pieces of gauze adorned with gold lettering. They were her old mementoes from the cotillions in the club and the last dances in the pavilion balls.

  She would often take all this out during the winter evenings and rearrange it and try to remember who had given her this and who that.

  She worked it all out and she wrote the gentleman’s name on the back of each cotillion card.

  Bai sat at the table drinking his toddy.

  “All that old rubbish,” he said.

  “Leave it alone, Bai,” she would say, “Now I’ve just arranged it.”

  And she continued to write her gentlemen’s names.

  Occasionally, she would take out her album and read the verses she had copied into it in those days.

  Her bridal veil and the withered myrtle wreath were kept in the top drawer below the silver cupboard in the escritoire.

  She took that out as well and smoothed it down and put it together again.

  And she would sit for half an hour over the open drawer and do nothing at all, as was her wont.

  Occasionally she would simply smooth the veil out with her hands.

  That bridal veil had started to turn quite yellow.

  But time was passing as well. It was already ten years ago.

  Aye – she would so
on be an old woman. She was thirty-two now.

  The Bais were well liked in the district. Known as kind and hospitable people who were quick to put on the coffee pot when any of their acquaintances came to the station.

  Bai was a hospitable man, and he had everything under control in the station despite his not being particular about his dress.

  His wife was rather quiet, but it was always good to see her kind face. She looked just like a young girl when sitting among the other ladies at the big Hombre evenings.

  “But they ought to have a couple of children,” said Mrs Linde as she walked home with the vicar from the Bais. “Well-to-do people, they can afford it. It is a great pity that they should be there on their own.”

  “God gives life according to His will, my dear,” said the vicar.

  “Yes, God’s will be done,” said his wife.

  The vicar and his wife had had ten children.

  God had taken seven of them into His care when small. The old vicar remembered the seven every time there were children to be buried in the parish.

  Mrs Bai had stopped playing the piano. She sat thinking that she really ought to get up and light the lamp. But then she called the maid and told her to light it and remained seated.

  Marie came in with the lamp. She put a cloth on the table and laid it for tea.

  “What time is it?” asked Mrs Bai.

  “The eight o’clock train is signalled,” said Marie.

  “I hadn’t heard that.”

  Mrs Bai put on a coat and went out: “Is the train here?” she asked at the office.

  “It’ll be here in a moment,” said Bai. He was standing by the telegraph desk.

  “Is there a telegram?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who for?”

  “Oh, up in town.”

  “That means Ane will have to be off.”

  Mrs Bai went out onto the platform. She was so fond of seeing the trains come and go in the dark.

  The sound, at first far away, and then the rumbling as the train went over the bridge across the river and the great light at the head of it and finally the heavy swaying bulk emerging from the dark. It twisted its way forward and turned into distinct carriages that drew to a halt before her with guards, lighted post wagons and compartments.