Autumn had come; there were no flowers any more on the graves up there in the churchyard, and the fallen leaves lay brown and moldering in the wet under the trees of Lönborggaard.
Niels Lyhne went about in the empty rooms in bitter despondency. Something had given way in him the night the child died. He had lost faith in himself, lost his belief in the power of human beings to bear the life they had to live. Existence had sprung a leak, and its contents were seeping out through all the cracks without plan or purpose.
It was of no avail that he called the prayer he had prayed a father’s frenzied cry for help for his child, even though he knew none could hear his cry. He had known well what he did even in the depths of his despair. He had been tempted and had fallen; for it was a fall, a betrayal of himself and his ideal. No doubt tradition had been too strong in his blood. Humanity had cried to heaven in its agony for many thousands of years, and he had yielded to an inherited instinct. But he ought to have resisted it, for he knew with the innermost fibres of his brain that gods were dreams, and he knew that when he prayed he was taking refuge in a dream, just as surely as he knew in the old days, when he threw himself into the arms of his fancies, that they were fancies. He had not been able to bear life as it was. He had taken part in the battle for the highest, and in the stress of the fight he had deserted the banner to which he had sworn allegiance; for after all, the new ideal, atheism, the sacred cause of truth—what did it all mean, what was it all but tinsel names for the one simple thing: to bear life as it was! To bear life as it was and allow life to shape itself according to its own laws!
It seemed to him as though his life had ended in that night of agony. What came after was no more than meaningless scenes tacked on after the fifth act when the action was already finished. He could, of course, take up his old principles again, if he felt so inclined, but he had once fallen the fall, and whether or not he would fall again mattered absolutely nothing.
This was the mood that possessed him most frequently.
Then came the November day when the King died, and war seemed more and more imminent.
He soon arranged his affairs in Lönborggaard and enlisted as a volunteer.
The monotony of training was easy to bear, for it seemed wonderful only to know that he was no longer superfluous, and when he was assigned to active service, the everlasting fight against cold, vermin, and discomforts of every kind drove his thoughts home and kept them from going farther afield than to what was right before his door. He grew almost cheerful over it, and his health, which had suffered under the griefs of the past year, was fully restored.
On a gloomy day in March he was shot in the chest.