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lawn and nun’s veiling and white wool to knit from Matthew Rose’s big department story in Mare Street. I shall be able to pay the doctor if I have to send for him when the baby comes. But I hope I don’t have to. The others came fast, especially poor little Mads, without difficulties though with much pain. We shall call the doctor if there are problems but Hansine will be here to help me, as she did with Mads. She knows about making the afterbirth come out and how to deal with the cord. (It’s a good thing I’m writing in Danish. Just think of someone reading that!)
    Rasmus is back in Aarhus and has given me an address to write to, though he says he doesn’t expect to be there long. I can’t imagine what he’s doing. He’s an engineer, so-called, and I don’t know what else to call him. The fact is I don’t exactly know what it is he does. He’s been a blacksmith, at any rate he can shoe a horse, and he can do anything with animals. He boasts that the most savage dog is quiet when he speaks to it and the funny thing is it’s true. He makes animals love him. It’s a pity he isn’t as good with a wife.
    Another thing he can do is make things out of wood. He could earn a living as a cabinet-maker but he won’t. He despises that sort of thing. Motors are what he likes. He once told me—he hardly ever tells me things or talks to me much but he did tell me this—that he wanted to ‘bring motor cars to England’. I thought there were motor cars here already, in fact I’ve often seen them, you see a few every day even in this place, but he means motor cars for everyone. Imagine a day when every man has his own motor car! What would happen to the horses, I said, and the trains and omnibuses come to that, but he didn’t answer. He never answers the questions I ask.
    One thing is certain and that’s that there are no motor cars in Aarhus. I wonder if he’s there to try and borrow money? He’s supposed to have a rich uncle in Hjørring at the ends of the earth, though I only half-believe in this man’s existence. I suppose I should be thankful Rasmus isn’t a Mahometan, otherwise I’m sure he’d be finding another wife up there to marry for 5,000 kroner.
    July 18th, 1905
    This evening Hansine came into the drawing room and stood there twisting her apron in her fingers. It must have been the money making me feel good, or better than I have been, for I told her to sit down for a bit and talk to me. When I was a child I read a book translated into Danish from the English about a man stranded on a desert island, I can’t remember what it was called. But this man was very lonely and when another man came along he was so happy to have someone, anyone, to talk to and be with at last that he didn’t mind its being a Negro savage. I feel a bit like that with Hansine. I have no one else to talk to except a seven-year-old child and a five-year-old and even the conversation of an illiterate servant is preferable sometimes to their nonsense and their everlasting questions.
    I had the impression Hansine was trying to tell me something. She kept stuttering and turning her head about to avoid looking at me. Our Karoline was stupid and ignorant but I sometimes think she was a genius compared to this one. At last I said, ‘Come on, out with it, what is it you want to tell me?’ I was thinking by this time that she’d broken something, not that we have anything valuable to break, or else it was about the sweetheart she had in Copenhagen, but it was only this old man that fell down in the street.
    She is now firm friends with the servant from the lodging house that she calls ‘Miss Fisher’. Apparently, she found out where the house is, in Navarino Road, north of London Fields, and went there, if you please, ‘to ask about the poor old gentleman’. It turned out he was dead on arrival at the German Hospital. I suppose she was interested because he was a foreigner too. ‘Like us’, she said, only he was a Pole called