Niels Lyhne

by J. P. Jacobsen

As the autumn advanced, Erik’s drinking-bouts became more frequent. What was the use, he said to Niels, of sitting at home waiting for ideas that never came, until his thoughts turned to stone in his head? Moreover, he did not get much comfort from Niels’s society; he needed people with some grit in them, people of lusty flesh and blood, not a whim-wham of delicate nerves. Niels and Fennimore were therefore left much alone, for Niels came over to Marianelund every day.

The covenant of friendship they had made and the talk they had had on that Sunday afternoon put them at their ease with each other, and, lonely as they both were, they drew closer together in a warm and tender friendship, which soon gained a strong hold over both. It absorbed them so that their thoughts, whether they were together or apart, always turned to this bond, as birds building the same nest look on everything they gather or pass by with the one pleasant goal of making the nest snug and comfortable for each other and themselves.

If Niels came while Erik was away, they nearly always, even on rainy and stormy days, took long walks in the woods behind the garden. They had fallen in love with that forest, and grew fonder of it as they watched the summer life die out. There were a thousand things to see. First, how the leaves turned yellow and red and brown, then how they fell off, whirling on a windy day in yellow swarms, or softly rustling in still air, single leaf after leaf, down against the stiff boughs and between the pliant brown twigs. And when the leaves fell from trees and bushes, the hidden secrets of summer were revealed in nest upon nest. What treasures on the ground and on the branches, dainty seeds and bright-colored berries, brown nuts, shining acorns and exquisite acorn cups, tassels of coral on the barberry, polished black berries on the buckthorn, and scarlet urns on the dog-rose. The bare beeches were finely dotted with prickly beechnuts, and the roan bent under the weight of its red clusters, acid in fragrance like apple cider. Late brambleberries lay black and brown among the wet leaves at the wayside; red whortleberries grew among the heather, and the wild raspberries brought forth their dull crimson fruit for the second time. The ferns turned all colors as they faded, and the moss was a revelation, not only the deep, luscious moss in the hollows and on the slopes, but the faint, delicate growth on the tree-trunks, resembling what one might imagine the cornfields of the elves to be as it sent forth the finest of stalks with dark brown buds like ears of corn at the tip.

They scoured the forest from end to end, eager to find all its treasures and marvels. They had divided it between them as children do; the part on one side of the road was Fennimore’s property, and that on the other side was Niels’s, and they would compare their realms and quarrel about which was the more glorious. Everything there had names—clefts and hillocks, paths and stiles, ditches and pools; and when they found a particularly magnificent tree, they gave that too a name. In this way they took complete possession and created a little world of their own which no one else knew and no one else was at home in, and yet they had no secret which all the world might not have heard.

As yet they had not.

But love was in their hearts, and was not there, as the crystals are present in a saturated solution, and yet are not present, not until a splinter or the merest particle of the right matter is thrown into the solution, releasing the slumbering atoms as if by magic, and they rush to meet one another, joining and riveting themselves together according to unsearchable laws, and in the same instant there is crystal—crystal.

So it was a trifle that made them feel they loved.

There is nothing to tell. It was a day like all other days, when they were alone together in the sitting-room, as they had been a hundred times before; their conversation was about things of no moment, and that which happened was outwardly as common and as every-day-like as possible. It was nothing except that Niels stood looking out of the window, and Fennimore came over to him and looked out too. That was all, but it was enough, for in a flash like lightning, the past and present and future were transformed for Niels Lyhne by the consciousness that he loved the woman standing by his side, not as anything bright and sweet and happy and beautiful that would lift him to ecstasy or rapture—such was not the nature of his love—but he loved her as something he could no more do without than the breath of life itself, and he reached out, as a drowning man clutches, and pressed her hand to his heart.

She understood him. With almost a scream, in a voice full of terror and agony, she cried out to him an answer and a confession: “Oh, yes, Niels!” and snatched away her hand in the same instant. A moment she stood, pale and shrinking, then sank down with one knee in an upholstered chair, hiding her face against the harsh velvet of the back, and sobbed aloud.

Niels stood a few seconds as though blinded, groping around among the bulb-glasses for support. It was only for a very few seconds; then he stepped over to the chair where she was lying, and bent over without touching her, resting one hand on the back of the chair.