Niels Lyhne

by J. P. Jacobsen

She was tall. Her thick, heavy hair was blonde with the faint reddish sheen of ripening wheat, but fairer and curling where it grew in two points low on the nape of her neck. Under the high, clean-cut forehead, her eyebrows were pale and indefinite. The light gray eyes were large and clear, neither accented by the brows nor borrowing fitful shadows from the thin, delicate lids. There was something indeterminate and indeterminable in their expression. They always met you with a full and open gaze, without any of the changeful play of sidelong glances or lightning flashes, but almost unnaturally wakeful, invincible, inscrutable. The vivacity was all in the lower part of the face, the nostrils, the mouth, and the chin. The eyes merely looked on. The mouth was particularly expressive. The lips met in a lovely bow with deep, gracious curves and flexible lines, but their beauty was a little marred by a hardness of the lower lip, which sometimes melted away in a smile, and then again stiffened into something akin to brutality.

The bold sweep of the back and the luxuriant fullness of the bosom, contrasted with the classic severity of the shoulders and arms, gave her an audacity, an exotic fascination, which was enhanced by the gleaming whiteness of her skin and the morbid redness of her lips. The effect was provocative and disquieting.

Her tall, slender figure had a subtle distinction, which she was clever enough to underscore, especially in her ball dresses, with sure and conscious art. In fact, her artistic sense applied to her own person would sometimes speak so loudly from her costume that it barely escaped a hint of bad taste even when most exquisitely tasteful. To many this seemed an added charm.

Nothing could be more punctiliously correct than her behavior. In what she said, and in what she permitted to be said, she kept within the strictest bounds of prudery. Her coquetry consisted in not being coquettish, in being incurably blind to her own power, and never making the slightest distinction between her admirers. For that very reason, they all dreamed intoxicating dreams of the face that must be hidden behind the mask; they believed in a fire under the snow and scented depravity in her innocence. None of them would have been surprised to hear that she had a secret lover, but neither would they have ventured to guess his name.

This was the way people saw Edele Lyhne.

She had left the city for Lönborggaard, because her health had suffered from the constant round of pleasures, the thousand and one nights of balls and masquerades. Toward the end of the winter, the doctor had declared her lungs to be affected, and had prescribed fresh air, quiet, and milk. All these things she found in abundance in her present abode, but she also found an unceasing boredom, which made her long for Copenhagen before a week had passed. She filled letter after letter with entreaties that she might be allowed to return from her exile, and hinted that homesickness did her more harm than the air did her good. But the doctor had so alarmed her uncle and aunt that they felt it their duty to turn a deaf ear to her lamentations, no matter how pathetic.

It was not so much the social diversions she pined for; it was rather that she craved the sense of feeling her own life mingling with the sound-filled air of the great city, whereas in the country the stillness in thoughts, in words, in eyes—in everything—made her feel as though she heard herself unceasingly and with inescapable distinctness, just as one hears a watch ticking through a sleepless night. And to know that over there they were living exactly as before—it was as if she were lying dead in the quiet night and heard the strains of music from a ballroom stealing on the air over her grave.

There was no one she could talk to. No one of them all ever caught just the shade of meaning that was the essence of what she said. Of course, they understood her after a fashion, inasmuch as she spoke Danish, but it was in a dull, general sort of a way, just as they might have understood a foreign language which they heard only once in a while. They never had the slightest idea of whom or what was meant by a particular intonation of a word, never dreamed that such a little phrase was a quotation, or that another, used in just such a way, was a new variation of a popular witticism. As for their own speech, it had a decent leanness through which one could positively feel the grammatical ribs, and the words were used with a literalness as if they had just come fresh from the columns of the dictionary. Even the way they said Copenhagen! Sometimes with a mysterious emphasis, as if it were a place where people ate little children; then again with a far-away expression, as if they were speaking of a town in central Africa, or in a festive voice tremulous with history, as they might have said Nineveh or Carthage. The pastor always said Axelstead with a reminiscent rapture, as if it had been the name of one of his old sweethearts. Not one of them could say Copenhagen so that it meant the city stretching from Vesterport to the Custom House on both sides of Östergade and Kongens Nytorv. And so it was with all they said and all they did.

There was not a thing at Lönborggaard that did not displease her; these mealtimes regulated by the sun, this smell of lavender in chests and presses, these Spartan chairs, all these provincial pieces of furniture that stood shrinking against the walls as if they were afraid of people! Even the very air was distasteful to her; she could never take a walk without bringing home a robust perfume of meadow-hay and wild flowers, as if she had been locked up in a haymarket.

And then to be called aunt, Aunt Edele. How it grated on her ears! She got used to it after a while, but in the beginning it made the relation between her and Niels rather cool.