IV.
These Danish girls were likely to appeal to a young man just returned from travels abroad, during which his emotions had been doubly stirred, for the first time, by feminine affection and by enthusiasm for a woman. They influenced me the more strongly because they were Danish, and because I, who loved everything Danish, from the language to the monuments, had, since the war, felt something lacking in everyone, man or woman, who was foreign to Denmark.
But in the midst of all these visitations of calf-love, and their vibrations among undefined sensations, I was pulled back with a jerk, as it were, to my earlier and deepest impression, that of the loveliness and exalted person of the young Spaniard. Letters from Paris furrowed my mind like steamers the waters of a lake, made it foam, and the waves run high, left long streaks across its wake. Not that Mlle. Mathilde sent letters to me herself, but her Italian lady and gentlemen friends wrote for her, apparently in her name, loudly lamenting my unreasonable departure, wishing and demanding my return, telling me how she missed me, sometimes how angry she was.
I was too poor to be able to return at once. I did what I could to procure money, wrote to those of my friends whom I thought could best afford it and on whom I relied most, but met with refusals, which made me think of the messages Timon of Athens received in response to similar requests. Then I staked in the lottery and did not win.
Urged from France to return, and under the high pressure of my own romantic imagination, it seemed clear to me all at once that I ought to unite my lot for good to that of this rare and beautiful woman, whom, it is true, I had never spoken to one minute alone, who, moreover, had scarcely anything in common with me, but who, just by the dissimilarity of her having been born of Spanish parents in Rio, and I of a Danish father and mother in Copenhagen, seemed destined by Fate for me, as I for her. The Palm and the Fir-tree had dreamed of one another, and could never meet; but men and women could, however far apart they might have been born. In the middle of the Summer of 1867 I was as though possessed by the thought that she and I ought to be united.
The simplest objection of all, namely, that I, who was scarcely able to support myself, could not possibly support a wife, seemed to me altogether subordinate. My motives were purely chivalric; I could not leave her in the lurch, as the miserable hero of Andersen's Only a Player did Noomi. And a vision of her compelling loveliness hovered before my eyes.
The whole of the month of July and part of the month of August I was on the rack, now passionately desiring a successful issue of my plans, now hoping just as ardently that they would be stranded through the opposition of the foreign family; for I was compelled to admit to myself that the beautiful Spaniard would be very unsuited to Copenhagen, would freeze there, mentally as well as literally. And I said to myself every day that supposing the war expected in Denmark were to break out again, and the young men were summoned to arms, the most insignificant little Danish girl would make me a better Valkyrie; all my feelings would be foreign to her, and possibly she would not even be able to learn Danish. Any other woman would understand more of my mind than she. And yet! Yet she was the only one for me.
Thus I was swayed by opposing wishes the whole of the long time during which the matter was pending and uncertain. I was so exhausted by suspense that I only kept up by taking cold baths twice a day and by brisk rides. The mere sight of a postman made my heart beat fast. The scorn heaped upon me in the Danish newspapers had a curious effect upon me under these circumstances; it seemed to me to be strangely far away, like blows at a person who is somewhere else.
I pondered all day on the painful dilemma in which I was placed; I dreamt of my Dulcinea every night, and began to look as exhausted as I felt. One day that I went to Fredensborg, in response to an invitation from Frederik Paludan-Müller, the poet said to me: "Have you been ill lately? You look so pale and shaken." I pretended not to care; whatever I said or did in company was incessant acting.
I experienced revulsions of feeling similar to those that troubled Don Quixote. Now I saw in my distant Spanish maiden the epitome of perfection, now the picture melted away altogether; even my affection for her then seemed small, artificial, whimsical, half-forgotten. And then again she represented supreme happiness.
When the decision came, when,--as everyone with the least experience of the world could have foretold,--all the beautiful dreams and audacious plans collapsed suddenly, I felt as though this long crisis had thrown me back indescribably; my intellectual development had been at a standstill for months. It was such a feeling as when the death of some loved person puts an end to the long, tormenting anxiety of the foregoing illness. I, who had centred everything round one thought, must now start joylessly along new paths. My outburst,--which astonished myself,--was:
"How I wanted a heart!"