Dagmar responded rather badly to his expectations. At first she looked a little embarrassed, almost like a child when its parents speak of something it should not understand. Then she looked at the door and mumbled:
“Pray excuse your slave, but I am afraid the sausages will be burnt....”
“Let them burn then, idiot,” shouted Tord. After which he continued his reading in a more threatening voice.
Dagmar listened again. She sat quite still and good for a long while. Then her mouth began to twitch quite irresistibly, though she looked frightened.
Tord then hissed out the following lines:
“In a blue flash of lightning With a blue hissing sound Creaking Manly Zig-zag I saw it suddenly The filth The original filth In the recesses of your body ... Damnation Unclean one!”
“Splendid,” Dagmar snorted. “Thunder and filth!”
Whereupon she burst out laughing just as when Tord came home with his teeth knocked out, a thoughtless irrepressible feminine laugh, cruel without malice, pitiless though with no ill-will. But Tord hated her at this moment, hated her. She laughed! When she ought to have sunk at his feet, and adored his genius, saved him from doubt! Oh! the weakling’s dream of power is often far more intense than that of the strong man. It is not the bad poets who are the least devoted to their verses. Just the line that most challenges the ridicule of the world is often aglow with the most intense passion. Just the very wretchedness of the form often reflects a seriousness from which there has been no deliverance. Yes, the bad poets are the unborn children of emotion. Their sufferings are cruel. People seem to them empty, blind, perverse, malevolent. How can anyone laugh at red, flowing blood? How can anyone help trembling in the presence of a volcano in eruption?
Tord ran to the door and tore it open. His eyes shrank and his beard shook when he looked at his wife:
“Get out,” he shouted. “Out with you into the kitchen. That’s your place!”
And Dagmar went, without any such refinement as injured pride, but with her heart suddenly filled with compassion, a sort of slovenly, annoyed pity.
For several weeks Tord did not open his mouth. He strolled about alone along his shores or locked himself in to file away at his verse. His ambition soon discovered the usual solace for the wounds and doubts of the hermit. “I am too singular, too wildly original and deep,” he thought. “They can’t understand me. I must fill out my voids, if I want any followers. I must soften down, moderate and chasten my verse.” So he sat down with intense suffering to convert his poems to a more human note: a process which really consisted in his striking out a few oaths and putting in a few “ands” and “buts” instead of a simple comma.