Niels Lyhne

by J. P. Jacobsen

Then he awoke, but not pleasantly.

Her song agitated him uncomfortably. She was no longer the little country girl when she gave herself up to the spell of her own voice. Strange how she let herself be carried away by the tones, how freely and unreservedly she poured herself into them! He felt it almost as something immodest, as though she were singing herself naked before him. There was a burning around his heart; his temples throbbed, and he cast his eyes down. Did none of the others see it? No, they saw nothing. Why, she had flown out of herself, away from Fjordby, from Fjordby poetry and Fjordby sentiments! She was in another and a bolder world, where the passions grew on high mountains and flung their red blossoms to the storm.

Could it be his lack of musical sense that made him read so much meaning into her song? He could hardly persuade himself that it was so, and yet he wished it, for he would much rather have her as she usually appeared. When she sat at her sewing, talking in her quiet, tranquil voice, or looking up with her clear, kind eyes, his whole being was drawn to her with the irresistible strength of a deep, calm longing for home. He wanted to humble himself before her, to bend the knee and call her holy. He always felt a strange yearning to come close to her, not only to her present self, but to her childhood and all the days he had not known her. When they were alone, he would lead her to talk of the past, of her little troubles and mistakes and the vagaries that every childhood is full of. He lived in these memories and clung to them with a restless jealousy and a languishing desire to possess and be one with these pale foreshadowings of a life which was even now glowing in richer, riper colors. And then came this song so strangely powerful! It startled him very much like a wide sweep of horizon suddenly revealed by a turn of the path, reducing the forest dell which had been his home to a mere corner in the landscape, and making its little rippling lines seem insignificant beside the grandeur of the hills and distant moors.—Oh, but the landscape was a fata morgana, and what he thought he heard in her song only a fantasy; for now she spoke just as she always did and was her blessed self again. Moreover, he knew from a thousand little things that she was like still water, without storm or waves, reflecting the starry blue heavens.

It was thus he loved her, and thus he saw her; and when she was with him she gradually formed herself upon his image of her, not with any conscious dissembling, for after all his conception was partly true, and it was only natural—when his every word and look, his every thought and dream, appealed to that side of her nature and did homage to it—that she should assume the guise he almost forced upon her. Besides, how could she bother about giving each and every one a correct impression of herself when all her thoughts centred around the one, Erik, the only one, her chosen lord, whom she loved with a passion that was not of herself and with an idolatrous worship that terrified her. She had imagined love to be a sweet dignity, not this consuming unrest, full of fear and humiliation and doubt. Many a time when the declaration seemed trembling on Erik’s lips, she had felt as if it were her duty to put her hand on his mouth and warn him against speaking, accusing herself and telling him how she had deceived him and how unworthy of his love she was, how earthly and small and impure, so far from noble, so wretchedly low and common and wicked! She felt herself dishonest under his admiring gaze; calculating, when she failed to avoid him; criminal, when she could not bring herself to beg God in her evening prayer that He would turn Erik’s heart from her in order that his life might be all sunlight and honor and glory. For she knew that her low-born passion would drag him down.

It was almost in spite of himself that Erik loved her. His ideal had always been high, proud, and noble, with quiet melancholy suffusing her pale features and coolness of temple air lingering in the severe folds of her garment. But Fennimore’s sweetness conquered him. He could not resist her beauty. There was such a fresh, innocent sensuousness about her whole form. When she walked her gait whispered of her body; there was a nakedness in her movements and a dreamy eloquence in her repose, neither of which she could help, for she could not conceal the one or silence the other, even had she been in the slightest degree conscious of their existence. No one saw this better than Erik, and he was fully aware of what a large part her purely physical beauty played in her attraction for him. He struggled against it, for there were exalted ideals of love in his soul, ideals which had their source, perhaps, not only in tradition and poetry, but in deeper strata of his nature than those that appeared on the surface. But whatever their source, they had to yield.

He had not yet confessed his love to Fennimore, when it happened that the good ship Berendt Claudi came in. Inasmuch as it was going to unload farther up the fjord, it did not enter the harbor, but lay out in the stream, and as the Consul was very proud of his schooner and wanted to show it to his guests, they rowed out there one afternoon to drink tea on board.

It was a glorious day without a breath of wind, and all were intent on a merry time. The hours passed quickly. They drank English porter, set their teeth in English hardtack as large as moons, and ate salted mackerel caught on the voyage across the North Sea. They pumped with the ship’s pump till the water frothed, tipped the compass, drew water from the casks with the large tin siphon, and listened to the mate playing his octagonal hand harmonica.

It was quite dark before they were ready to return.

They separated into two parties. Erik and Fennimore and two of the older people went in the ship’s yawl, which was to make a detour around the harbor and then row slowly to land, while the rest of the party went in the Consul’s own boat, which was to steer directly for the pier. This arrangement was made in order to hear how the song would sound over the water on such a quiet night. Erik and Fennimore therefore sat together in the stern of the yawl and had the mandolin between them, but the singing was forgotten when the oars were dipped in the water and revealed an unusually bright phosphorescence which absorbed their attention.

Silently the boat glided onward, and behind it the dull, glassy surface was fluted with shifting lines and rings of a tender white light too faint to penetrate the darkness beyond its own groove, except now and then when it seemed to give out a luminous mist. It frothed white where the oars cut into it and slid backward in tremulous rings growing fainter and fainter; it was scattered from the blades in bright drops falling like a phosphorescent rain, which was extinguished in the air but lighted the water drop by drop. There was such quiet over the fjord that the sound of the oars seemed only to measure the stillness in pauses of equal length. Hushed and soft, the gray twilight brooded over the soundless deep; the boat and its occupants melted together in one dark mass, from which the phosphorescence freed the plying oars and sometimes a trailing rope’s end, or perhaps the brown impassive face of the oarsman. No one spoke. Fennimore was cooling her hand in the water; she and Erik sat turning back to look at the network of light that trailed silently after the boat and held their thoughts in its fair meshes.