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Dreaming Child
by
"What an absurd person you are, Jakob," she said, "you will believe everything that these people tell you—not because you cannot help it, but because you do really wish to believe them. "
"Do you not wish to believe them?" he asked her.
"I cannot see," she replied, "how one can well wish to believe or notto believe. I wish to find out the truth. Once a thing is not true,"she added, "it matters little to me whatever else it may be. "
A short time after his wedding, Jakob one day had a letter from a rejected supplicant, a former maid in his father-in-law’s house, who informed him that while he was away in China, his wife had a liaison with Charlie Dreyer. He knew it to be a lie, tore up the letter, and did not give it another thought.
They had no children. This to Emilie was a grave affliction, she feltthat she was lacking in her duties. When they had been married forfive years, Jakob vexed by his mother’s constant concern, and with thefuture of the firm on his mind, suggested to his wife that they shouldadopt a child, to carry on the house. Emilie at once, and with muchenergy and indignation, repudiated the idea, it had to her all thelook of a comedy, and she would not see her father’s firm encumberedwith a sham heir. Jakob held forth to her upon the Antonines with butlittle effect. But when six months later he again took up the subject,to her own surprise, she found that it was no longer repellent. Unknowingly she must have given it room in her thought, and let ittake root there, for by now it seemed familiar to her. She listened toher husband, looked at him, and felt kindly towards him.
"If this is what he has been looking for," she thought, "I must not oppose it. " But in her heart she knew, clearly and coldly, and with dread of her own coldness, the true reason for her indulgence: the deep apprehension, that when a child had been adopted there would be no more obligation on her of producing an heir to the firm, a grandson to her father, a child to her husband.
It was indeed their little divergencies in regard to the deserving orundeserving poor, which brought upon the young couple of Bredgade, theevents recounted in this tale. In summer time, they lived within Emilie’s father’s villa on the Strandvej, and Jakob would drive in to town, and out, in a small gig. One day he decided to profit by his wife’s absence to visit an unquestionably unworthy mendicant, an old sea captain from one of his ships. He took the way through the ancient town, where it was difficult to get a carriage along, and where it was such an exceptional sight that people came up from the cellars to stare at it. In the narrow lane of Adelgade, a drunken man waved his arms in front of the horse, it shied, and knocked down a small boy with a heavy wheelbarrow piled high with washing,—the wheelbarrow and the washing ended sadly in the gutter. A crowd immediately collected round the spot, but expressed neither indignation nor sympathy. Jakob made his groom lift the little boy on to the seat. The child was smeared with blood and dirt, but he was not badly hurt, nor in the least scared, he seemed to take his accident as an adventure in general, or as if it happened to somebody else.