When Niels came back in the late afternoon, after being detained by the sanitary police in Limone, she had long since reached Mori and taken the train.
He was not surprised, only sorry, and not at all angry. He could even smile resignedly at this new hostile thrust of fate. But in the evening, when he sat in the empty moonlit garden telling the innkeeper’s little boy the story about the princess who found her wings again and flew away from her lover back to the land of fairies, he was seized with an intolerable longing for Lönborggaard. He yearned to feel something closing around him like a home and holding him fast, no matter how. He could not bear the indifference of life any longer, could not endure being cast off and thrown back on himself again and again. No home on earth, no God in heaven, no goal out there in the future! He would at least have a home. He would make it his own by loving everything there, big and little, every rock, every tree, the animate and the inanimate; he would portion out his heart to it all so that it could never cast him off any more.
Chapter XIII
For about a year, Niels Lyhne had lived at Lönborggaard, managing the farm as well as he knew how and as much as his old steward would let him. He had taken down his shield, blotted out his ’scutcheon, and resigned. Humanity would have to get along without him; he had learned to know the joy found in purely physical labor, in seeing the pile growing under his hand, in being able to get through with what he was doing so that he really was through, in knowing that when he went away tired the strength that he had used up lay behind him in his work, and the work would stand and not be eaten up by doubt in the night or dispersed by the breath of criticism on the morning after. There were no Sisyphus stones in agriculture.
What a joy it was, too, when he had worked till he was tired, to go to bed and gather strength in sleep and to spend it again, as regularly as day and night follow one upon the other, never hindered by the caprices of his brain, never having to handle himself gingerly like a tuned guitar with loose pegs.
He was really happy in a quiet way, and often he would sit, as his father had sat, on a stile or a boundary stone, staring out over the golden wheat or the top-heavy oats, in a strange, vegetative trance.
As yet he had not begun to seek the society of the neighboring families, except Councillor Skinnerup’s in Varde, whom he visited quite frequently.
The Skinnerups had come to town while his father was still living, and as the Councillor was an old university friend of Lyhne’s, the two families had seen much of each other. Skinnerup, a mild, bald-headed man with sharp features and kind eyes, was now a widower, but his house was more than filled by his four daughters, the eldest seventeen, the youngest twelve years old.
The Councillor had read much, and Niels enjoyed a chat with him on various esthetic subjects, for though he had learned to use his hands, that, of course, did not turn him into a country bumpkin all at once. He was rather amused sometimes at the almost absurd care he had to exercise whenever the conversation turned to a comparison between Danish and foreign literature and, in fact, whenever Denmark was measured against something not Danish. Caution was absolutely necessary, however, for the mild-mannered Councillor was one of the fierce patriots, occasionally met with in those days, who might grudgingly admit that Denmark was not the greatest of the world powers, but when so much was said would not subscribe to a jot or a tittle more that might place his country or anything pertaining to it anywhere but in the lead.