The Project Gutenberg eBook, Niels Lyhne, by J. P. (Jens Peter) Jacobsen, Translated by Hanna Astrup Larsen

This series of Scandinavian Classics is published by The American-Scandinavian Foundation in the belief that greater familiarity with the chief literary monuments of the North will help Americans to a better understanding of Scandinavians, and thus serve to stimulate their sympathetic coöperation to good ends.

SCANDINAVIAN CLASSICS
VOLUME XIII

NIELS LYHNE
BY
J. P. JACOBSEN

ESTABLISHED BY
NIELS POULSON

NIELS LYHNE

BY

J. P. JACOBSEN

TRANSLATED FROM THE DANISH
BY HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN

NEW YORK
THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1919

Copyright, 1919, by The American-Scandinavian Foundation

D. B. Updike · The Merrymount Press · Boston · U. S. A.

Introduction

To the student of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s life and works, Niels Lyhne has a value apart from its greatness as literature from the fact that it is the book in which the author recorded his own spiritual struggles and embodied the faith on which he came, finally, to rest his soul in death as in life. It tells of his early dreams and ideals, his efforts to know and to achieve, his revolt against the dream-swathed dogmas in which people take refuge from harsh reality, and his brave acceptance of what he conceived to be the truth, however dreary and bitter.

The person of the hero is marked for a self-portrait by the description, “Niels Lyhne of Lönborggaard, who was twenty-three years old, walked with a slight stoop, had beautiful hands and small ears, and was a little timid,”—though friends of Jacobsen’s youth declare that “a little timid” was far from describing the excessive shyness from which he suffered. He himself would sometimes joke about his “North Cimbrian heaviness,” for like Niels Lyhne he was a native of Jutland, where the people are more sluggish than the sprightly islanders. Like him, again, he had a mother who kept alive her romantic spirit in rather humdrum, prosaic surroundings, and who instilled into her son’s mind from childhood the idea that he was to be a poet. It is Jacobsen’s own youthful ideal speaking through Niels Lyhne’s mouth when he says: “Mother—I am a poet—really—through my whole soul. Don’t imagine it’s childish dreams or dreams fed by vanity.... I shall be one of those who fight for the greatest, and I promise you that I shall not fail, that I shall always be faithful to you and to my gift. Nothing but the best shall be good enough. No compromise, mother! When I weigh what I’ve done and feel that it isn’t sterling, or when I hear that it’s got a crack or a flaw—into the melting-pot it goes! Every single work must be my best!”

Niels Lyhne never wrote the poems he had fashioned in his mind. On the intellectual side of his nature he remained always a dreamer, floundering around in a slough of doubt and self-analysis. Edvard Brandes, in his introduction to J. P. Jacobsen’s letters,[A] calls attention to “the place dreams occupy in this book, which begins with the childish fancies of the three boys, in which the mother dreams with her son of the future and of distant lands, while Edele dreams her love, and Bigum dreams his genius and his passion—he who is put into the novel as a tragic caricature of Niels Lyhne himself, as he goes about dreaming, in the midst of people and yet far away from them. In his youth, Niels Lyhne never attained to anything but dreams of great deeds and of love.... Read Niels Lyhne, and on almost every page you will find the word dream! Read about Niels Lyhne’s mother who ‘dreamed a thousand dreams of those sunlit regions, and was consumed with longing for this other and richer self, forgetting—what is so easily forgotten—that even the fairest dreams and the deepest longings do not add an inch to the stature of the human soul,’ and who goes on dreaming because ‘a life soberly lived, without the fair vice of dreams, was no life at all.’”

In his strictures on dreams and dreamers Jacobsen scourged his own sluggish temperament, and the story of Niels Lyhne’s futile efforts is in part the record of the author’s own youth. From the time he was ten years old, he tells us, his one sure dogma was that he was to be a poet, and there must have been years of his boyhood and early manhood when he was haunted by visions of what he wanted to write without being able to frame it in a form satisfactory to himself. He was almost twenty-five years old when his first story, Mogens, appeared, in 1872, and after that his other short stories followed only at intervals of years. It is true, he was by no means idle. He won distinction as a botanist; he introduced Darwin to the Scandinavian reading public by translations and magazine articles, and he familiarized himself with the literature not only of Denmark, but of England, France, Germany, and Italy. He had a theory that any one aspiring to produce creative literature ought to know what had been written by great minds before him, and we recognize himself in the picture of Niels Lyhne restlessly trying to absorb all the knowledge and wisdom of the ages while he felt like a child trying to dip out the ocean in his hollow hand.

Unlike Niels Lyhne, who never formed in his own image the clay he had carted together for his Adam, Jacobsen shaped his material in the image of the vision that had taken possession of him at the inception of his idea. Though execution always cost him an agonizing effort, he did not shirk it, and though he worked four years on each of his two novels, Marie Grubbe and Niels Lyhne, he never lost sight of his goal. The truth is that, however much he might abuse his own slothfulness—which was due largely to failing health—Jacobsen had a slow, deep strength by virtue of which he managed to write his immortal works.

Niels Lyhne, too, had a kind of strength and was essentially sound though a dreamer. So we see him, when every relation of life was dissolved, when friend and mistress had thrown him back upon himself, gathering himself together in a resolve to find a place in his old home and make it a fixed point in his hitherto aimless existence. There, at last, he tasted life in its fullness, and by an effort of the finest, purest will made his short married life an experience of such beauty that the description, so moving in its simplicity, is one of the most exquisite things Jacobsen ever wrote. He, too, mastered life, though not in the sense of which he had dreamed. The solution of his hero’s problem is perhaps a compromise on Jacobsen’s part; he did not want to drop his other self as a mere failure, but shrank from picturing him as the fêted and admired author he himself became in the latter years of his life.

In this connection, it may not be out of place to state briefly that Niels Lyhne’s love affairs are drawn entirely from the imagination. On this point we have the positive evidence of Edvard Brandes and the negative testimony of Jacobsen’s own letters. Even if he had experienced the great love for which he longed at the same time as he shrank from it, poverty and ill health would have prevented his marriage. His fine rectitude and horror of doing anything that might hurt another human being kept him from questionable adventures.

The revolt of his hero from the accepted religion of his day is in accord with Jacobsen’s own development. The word “atheism,” which falls on our ears with a dead sound, meant to him a revolt against fallacious dreams. He believed that the evangelical religion as taught in Denmark at the time had become a soft mantle in which people wrapped themselves against the bracing winds of truth. As a scientist he refused to accept the facile theory that a Providence outside of man would somehow juggle away the consequences of wrongdoing. The doctrine that immunity could be bought by repentance seemed to him a cheap attempt to escape the bitter and wholesome fruit of experience. To our modern consciousness, there is no reason why his sense of the sacredness of law should have driven him away from all religion—it might rather have driven him to a truer conception of Him who said of Himself that He came to fulfil the law—but in this respect he was the child of his day.

For himself, Jacobsen resolved that illness, suffering, and death should not make him accept in weakness the religion that his sober judgement in the fullness of his strength had rejected. Niels Lyhne’s death “in armor” foreshadowed his own, and was perhaps written to steel himself for the ordeal he knew to be approaching. His refusal to lean on any spiritual power outside of his own soul lends an added sadness to the stoicism of his death, which took place in his home in Thisted, in 1885.

In the above paragraphs I have attempted only to sketch the relation of Niels Lyhne to Jacobsen’s own life. For a brief estimate of his position in Northern literature I will refer the reader to my introduction to Marie Grubbe, Scandinavian Classics, VII.

The translation of an author who, as Edvard Brandes says, “worshipped the word,” and who believed that there never was more than one word or one phrase in all the world that could exactly express what he meant in any given instance, is naturally fraught with more than usual difficulty. I have striven, above all, to be faithful, and very often, where my first impulse has been to simplify a paragraph, my second, and I hope better, thought has been to leave it as the master chose to write it, with only such slight changes as the new medium absolutely required. I wish to express my sincere thanks to Professor W. H. Schofield, chairman of the Publication Committee, who has been so good as to read the proof and has helped to solve many problems of language.

H. A. L.

[A] Breve fra J. P. Jacobsen. Med et Forord udgivne af Edvard Brandes.

NIELS LYHNE

Chapter I

She had the black, luminous eyes of the Blid family with delicate, straight eyebrows; she had their boldly shaped nose, their strong chin, and full lips. The curious line of mingled pain and sensuousness about the corners of her mouth was likewise an inheritance from them, and so were the restless movements of her head; but her cheek was pale; her hair was soft as silk, and was wound smoothly around her head.

Not so the Blids; their coloring was of roses and bronze. Their hair was rough and curly, heavy as a mane, and their full, deep, resonant voices bore out the tales told of their forefathers, whose noisy hunting-parties, solemn morning prayers, and thousand and one amorous adventures were matters of family tradition.

Her voice was languid and colorless. I am describing her as she was at seventeen. A few years later, after she had been married, her voice gained fullness, her cheek took on a fresher tint, and her eye lost some of its lustre, but seemed even larger and more intensely black.

At seventeen she did not at all resemble her brothers and sisters; nor was there any great intimacy between herself and her parents. The Blid family were practical folk who accepted things as they were; they did their work, slept their sleep, and never thought of demanding any diversions beyond the harvest home and three or four Christmas parties. They never passed through any religious experiences, but they would no more have dreamed of not rendering unto God what was God’s than they would have neglected to pay their taxes. Therefore they said their evening prayers, went to church at Easter and Whitsun, sang their hymns on Christmas Eve, and partook of the Lord’s Supper twice a year. They had no particular thirst for knowledge. As for their love of beauty, they were by no means insensible to the charm of little sentimental ditties, and when summer came with thick, luscious grass in the meadows and grain sprouting in broad fields, they would sometimes say to one another that this was a fine time for travelling about the country, but their natures had nothing of the poetic; beauty never stirred any raptures in them, and they were never visited by vague longings or day-dreams.

Bartholine was not of their kind. She had no interest in the affairs of the fields and the stables, no taste for the dairy and the kitchen—none whatever.

She loved poetry.

She lived on poems, dreamed poems, and put her faith in them above everything else in the world. Parents, sisters and brothers, neighbors and friends—none of them ever said a word that was worth listening to. Their thoughts never rose above their land and their business; their eyes never sought anything beyond the conditions and affairs that were right before them.

But the poems! They teemed with new ideas and profound truths about life in the great outside world, where grief was black, and joy was red; they glowed with images, foamed and sparkled with rhythm and rhyme. They were all about young girls, and the girls were noble and beautiful—how noble and beautiful they never knew themselves. Their hearts and their love meant more than the wealth of all the earth; men bore them up in their hands, lifted them high in the sunshine of joy, honored and worshipped them, and were delighted to share with them their thoughts and plans, their triumphs and renown. They would even say that these same fortunate girls had inspired all the plans and achieved all the triumphs.

Why might not she herself be such a girl? They were thus and so—and they never knew it themselves. How was she to know what she really was? And the poets all said very plainly that this was life, and that it was not life to sit and sew, work about the house, and make stupid calls.

When all this was sifted down, it meant little beyond a slightly morbid desire to realize herself, a longing to find herself, which she had in common with many other young girls with talents a little above the ordinary. It was only a pity that there was not in her circle a single individual of sufficient distinction to give her the measure of her own powers. There was not even a kindred nature. So she came to look upon herself as something wonderful, unique, a sort of exotic plant that had grown in these ungentle climes and had barely strength enough to unfold its leaves; though in more genial warmth, under a more powerful sun, it might have shot up, straight and tall, with a gloriously rich and brilliant bloom. Such was the image of her real self that she carried in her mind. She dreamed a thousand dreams of those sunlit regions and was consumed with longing for this other and richer self, forgetting—what is so easily forgotten—that even the fairest dreams and the deepest longings do not add an inch to the stature of the human soul.

One fine day a suitor came to her.

Young Lyhne of Lönborggaard was the man, and he was the last male scion of a family whose members had for three generations been among the most distinguished people in the county. As burgomasters, revenue-collectors, or royal commissioners, often rewarded with the title of councillor of justice, the Lyhnes in their maturer years had served king and country with diligence and honor. In their younger days they had travelled in France and Germany, and these trips, carefully planned and carried out with great thoroughness, had enriched their receptive minds with all the scenes of beauty and the knowledge of life that foreign lands had to offer. Nor were these years of travel pushed into the background, after their return, as mere reminiscences, like the memory of a feast after the last candle has burned down and the last note of music has died away. No, life in their homes was built on these years; the tastes awakened in this manner were not allowed to languish, but were nourished and developed by every means at their command. Rare copper plates, costly bronzes, German poetry, French juridical works, and French philosophy were every-day matters and common topics in the Lyhne households.

Their bearing had an old-fashioned ease, a courtly graciousness, which contrasted oddly with the heavy majesty and awkward pomposity of the other county families. Their speech was well rounded, delicately precise, a little marred, perhaps, by rhetorical affectation, yet it somehow went well with those large, broad figures with their domelike foreheads, their bushy hair growing far back on their temples, their calm, smiling eyes, and slightly aquiline noses. The lower part of the face was too heavy, however, the mouth too wide, and the lips much too full.

Young Lyhne showed all these physical traits, but more faintly, and, in the same manner, the family intelligence seemed to have grown weary in him. None of the mental problems or finer artistic enjoyments that he encountered stirred him to any zeal or desire whatsoever. He had simply striven with them in a painstaking effort which was never brightened by joy in feeling his own powers unfold or pride in finding them adequate. Mere satisfaction in a task accomplished was the only reward that came to him.

His estate, Lönborggaard, had been left him by an uncle who had recently died, and he had returned from the traditional trip abroad in order to take over the management. As the Blid family were the nearest neighbors of his own rank, and his uncle had been intimate with them, he called, met Bartholine, and fell in love with her.

That she should fall in love with him was almost a foregone conclusion.

Here at last was some one from the outside world, some one who had lived in great, distant cities, where forests of spires were etched on a sunlit sky, where the air was vibrant with the chimes of bells, the pealing of organs, and the twanging of mandolins, while festal processions, resplendent with gold and colors, wound their way through broad streets; where marble mansions shone, where noble families flaunted bright escutcheons hung two by two over wide portals, while fans flashed, and veils fluttered over the sculptured vines of curving balconies. Here was one who had sojourned where victorious armies had tramped the roads, where tremendous battles had invested the names of villages and fields with immortal fame, where smoke rising from gipsy fires trailed over the leafy masses of the forest, where red ruins looked down from vine-wreathed hills into the smiling valley, while water surged over the mill-wheel, and cow-bells tinkled as the herds came home over wide-arched bridges.

All these things he told about, not as the poems did, but in a matter-of-fact way, as familiarly as the people at home talked about the villages in their own county or the next parish. He talked of painters and poets, too, and sometimes he would laud to the skies a name that she had never even heard. He showed her their pictures and read their poems to her in the garden or on the hill where they could look out over the bright waters of the fjord and the brown, billowing heath. Love made him poetic; the view took on beauty, the clouds seemed like those drifting through the poems, and the trees were clothed in the leaves rustling so mournfully in the ballads.

Bartholine was happy; for her love enabled her to dissolve the twenty-four hours into a string of romantic episodes. It was romance when she went down the road to meet him; their meeting was romance, and so was their parting. It was romance when she stood on the hilltop in the light of the setting sun and waved him one last farewell before going up to her quiet little chamber, wistfully happy, to give herself up to thoughts of him; and when she included his name in her evening prayer, that was romance, too.

She no longer felt the old vague desires and longings. The new life with its shifting moods gave her all she craved, and moreover her thoughts and ideas had been clarified through having some one to whom she could speak freely without fear of being misunderstood.

She was changed in another way, too. Happiness had made her more amiable toward her parents and sisters and brothers. She discovered that, after all, they had more intelligence than she had supposed and more feeling.

And so they were married.

The first year passed very much as their courtship; but when their wedded life had lost its newness, Lyhne could no longer conceal from himself that he wearied of always seeking new expressions for his love. He was tired of donning the plumage of romance and eternally spreading his wings to fly through all the heavens of sentiment and all the abysses of thought. He longed to settle peacefully on his own quiet perch and drowse, with his tired head under the soft, feathery shelter of a wing. He had never conceived of love as an ever-wakeful, restless flame, casting its strong, flickering light into every nook and corner of existence, making everything seem fantastically large and strange. Love to him was more like the quiet glow of embers on their bed of ashes, spreading a gentle warmth, while the faint dusk wraps all distant things in forgetfulness and makes the near seem nearer and more intimate.

He was tired, worn out. He could not stand all this romance. He longed for the firm support of the commonplace under his feet, as a fish, suffocating in hot air, languishes for the clear, fresh coolness of the waves. It must end sometime, when it had run its course. Bartholine was no longer inexperienced either in life or books. She knew them as well as he. He had given her all he had—and now he was expected to go on giving. It was impossible; he had nothing more. There was only one comfort: Bartholine was with child.

Bartholine had long realized with sorrow that her conception of Lyhne was changing little by little, and that he no longer stood on the dizzy pinnacle to which she had raised him in the days of their courtship. While she did not yet doubt that he was at bottom what she called a poetic nature, she had begun to feel a little uneasy; for the cloven hoof of prose had shown itself once and again. This only made her pursue romance the more ardently, and she tried to bring back the old state of things by lavishing on him a still greater wealth of sentiment and a still greater rapture, but she met so little response that she almost felt as if she were stilted and unnatural. For awhile she tried to drag Lyhne with her, in spite of his resistance; she refused to accept what she suspected; but when, at last, the failure of her efforts made her begin to doubt whether her own mind and heart really possessed the treasures she had imagined, then she suddenly left him alone, became cool, silent, and reserved, and often went off by herself to grieve over her lost illusions. For she saw it all now, and was bitterly disappointed to find that Lyhne, in his inmost self, was no whit different from the people she used to live among. She had merely been deceived by the very ordinary fact that his love, for a brief moment, had invested him with a fleeting glamor of soulfulness and exaltation—a very common occurrence with persons of a lower nature.

Lyhne was grieved and anxious, too, over the change in their relationship, and he tried to mend matters by unlucky attempts at the old romantic flights, but it all availed nothing except to show Bartholine yet more clearly how great had been her mistake.

Such was the state of things between man and wife when Bartholine brought forth her first child. It was a boy, and they called him Niels.

Chapter II

In a way, the child brought the parents together again. Over his little cradle they would meet in a common hope, a common joy, and a common fear; of him they would think, and of him they would talk, each as often and as readily as the other, and each was grateful to the other for the child and for all the happiness and love he brought.

Yet they were still far apart.

Lyhne was quite absorbed in his farming and the affairs of the parish. Not that he took the position of a leader or even of a reformer, but he gave scrupulous attention to the existing order of things, looked on as an interested spectator, and carried out the cautious improvements recommended, after deliberate—very deliberate—consideration, by his old head servant or the elders of the parish.

It never occurred to him to make any use of the knowledge he had acquired in earlier days. He had too little faith in what he called theories and far too great respect for the time-hallowed, venerable dogmas of experience which other people called practical. In fact, there was nothing about him to indicate that he had not lived here and lived thus all his life—except one little trait. He had a habit of sitting for half hours at a time, quite motionless, on a stile or a boundary stone, looking out over the luscious green rye or the golden top-heavy oats, in a strange, vegetative trance. This was of the old Lyhne, the young Lyhne.

Bartholine, in her world, was by no means so ready to adapt herself quickly and with a good grace. No, she first had to voice her sorrow through the verses of a hundred poets, lamenting, in all the broad generalities of the period, the thousands of barriers and fetters that oppress humanity. Sometimes her lament would be clothed in lofty indignation, flinging its wordy froth against the thrones of emperors and the dungeons of tyrants; sometimes it would take the form of a calm, pitying sorrow, looking on as the effulgent light of beauty faded from a blind and slavish generation cowed and broken by the soulless bustle of the day; then again it would appear only as a gentle sigh for the freedom of the bird in its flight and of the cloud drifting lightly into the distance.

At last she grew tired of lamenting, and the impotence of her grief goaded her into doubt and bitterness. Like worshippers who beat their saint and tread him under foot when he refuses to show his power, she would scoff at the romance she once idolized, and scornfully ask herself whether she did not expect the bird Roc to appear presently in the cucumber bed, or Aladdin’s cave to open under the floor of the milk cellar. She would answer herself in a sort of childish cynicism, pretending that the world was excessively prosaic, calling the moon green cheese and the roses potpourri, all with a sense of taking revenge and at the same time with a half uneasy, half fascinated feeling that she was committing blasphemy.

These attempts at setting herself free were futile. She sank back into the dreams of her girlhood, but with the difference that now they were no longer illumined by hope. Moreover, she had learned that they were only dreams—distant, illusive dreams, which no longing in the world could ever draw down to her earth. When she abandoned herself to them now, it was with a sense of weariness, while an accusing inner voice told her that she was like the drunkard who knows that his passion is destroying him, that every debauch means strength taken from his weakness and added to the power of his desire. But the voice sounded in vain, for a life soberly lived, without the fair vice of dreams, was no life at all—life had exactly the value that dreams gave it and no more.

So widely different, then, were Niels Lyhne’s father and mother, the two friendly powers that struggled unconsciously for mastery over his young soul from the moment the first gleam of intelligence in him gave them something to work on. As the child grew older, the struggle became more intense and was waged with a greater variety of weapons.

The faculty in the boy through which the mother tried to influence him was his imagination. He had plenty of imagination, but even when he was a very small boy, it was evident that he felt a great difference between the fairy world his mother’s words conjured up and the world that really existed. Often his mother would tell him stories and describe the woeful plight of the hero, until Niels could not see any way out of all this trouble, and could not understand how the misery closing like an impenetrable wall tighter and tighter around him and the hero could be overcome. Then it happened more than eleven times that he would suddenly press his cheek against his mother’s and whisper, with eyes full of tears and lips trembling, “But it isn’t really true?” And when he had received the comforting answer he wanted, he would heave a deep sigh of relief and settle down contentedly to listen to the end.

His mother did not quite like this defection.

When he grew too old for fairy tales, and she tired of inventing them, she would tell him, with some embroideries of her own, about the heroes of war and peace, choosing those that lent themselves to pointing a moral about the power dwelling in a human soul when it wills one thing only and neither allows itself to be discouraged by the short-sighted doubts of the moment nor to be enticed into a soft, enervating peace.

All her stories went to this tune, and when history had no more heroes that suited her, she chose an imaginary hero, one whose deeds and fate she could shape as she pleased—a hero after her own heart, spirit of her spirit, ay, flesh of her flesh and blood of hers too.

A few years after Niels was born, she had brought forth a still-born boy child, and him she chose. All that he might have been and done she served up before his brother in a confused medley of Promethean longings, Messianic courage, and Herculean might, with a naïve travesty, a monstrous distortion, a world of cheap fantasies, having no more body of reality than had the tiny little skeleton mouldering in the earth of Lönborg graveyard.

Niels was not deceived about the moral of all these tales. He realized perfectly that it was contemptible to be like ordinary people, and he was quite ready to submit to the hard fate that belonged to heroes. In imagination he willingly suffered the wearisome struggles, the ill fortune, the martyrdom of being misjudged, and the victories without peace; but at the same time he felt a wondrous relief in thinking that it was so far away, that nothing of all this would happen before he was grown up.

As the dream-figures and dream-tones of night may walk abroad in the wakeful day like vapory forms, mere shadows of sound, calling on thought and holding it for a fleeting second, as it listens and wonders whether any one really called—so the images of that dream-born future whispered softly through Niels Lyhne’s childhood, reminding him gently but ceaselessly of the fact that there was a limit set to this happy time, and that presently one day it would be no more.

This consciousness roused in him a craving to enjoy his childhood to the full, to suck it up through every sense, not to spill a drop, not a single one. Therefore his play had an intensity, sometimes lashed into a passion, under the pressure of an uneasy sense that time was flowing away from him before he could gather from its treasure-laden waters all they brought, as one wave broke upon another. He would sometimes throw himself down on the ground and sob with despair when a holiday hung heavy on his hands for the lack of one thing or another—playmates, inventiveness, or fair weather—and he hated to go to bed, because sleep was empty of events and devoid of sensation.

Yet it was not always so.

It would sometimes happen that he grew weary, and his imagination ran out of colors. Then he would be quite wretched and feel that he was too small and insignificant for these ambitious dreams. He seemed to himself a mean liar, who had brazenly pretended to love and understand what was great, though, if the truth were told, he cared only for the petty, loved only the commonplace, and carried all, all low-born wishes and desires fully alive within him. Sometimes he would even feel that he had the class-hatred of the rabble against everything exalted, and that he would joyfully have helped to stone these heroes who were of a better blood than he and knew that they were.

On such days, he would shun his mother, and, with a sense of following an ignoble instinct, would seek his father, turning a willing ear and receptive mind to the latter’s earth-bound thoughts and matter-of-fact explanations. He felt at home with his father and rejoiced in the likeness between them, well-nigh forgetting that it was the same father whom he was wont to look down upon with pity from the pinnacles of his dream-castle. Of course this was not present in his childish mind with the clearness and definiteness given it by the spoken word, but it was all there, though unformed, unborn, in a vague and intangible embryo form. It was like the curious vegetation at the bottom of the sea when seen through layers of ice. Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech—what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness, the shadowy thing that was.

Chapter III

The years passed. One Christmas trod upon the heels of another, leaving the air bright with its festive glow till long after Epiphany. Whitsun after Whitsun scampered over flower-decked meadows. One summer holiday after another drew near, celebrated its orgie of fresh air and sunshine, poured out its fiery wine from brimming goblets, and then vanished, one day, in a sinking sun; only memory lingered with sunburnt cheek and wondering eyes and blood that danced.

The years had passed, and the world was no longer the realm of wonder that it had been. The dim recesses behind the mouldering elder-bushes, the mysterious attic rooms, the gloomy stone passage under the Klastrup road—fancied terrors that once thrilled him no longer lurked there. The hillside that bloomed at the first trill of the lark, hiding the grass under starry, purple-rimmed daisies and yellow buttercups, the fantastic wealth of animals and plants in the river, the wild precipices of the sand-pit, its black rocks and bits of silvery granite—all these were just flowers, animals, and stones; the shining fairy gold had turned into withered leaves again.

One game after another grew old and silly, stupid and tiresome like the pictures in the A B C, and yet they had once been new, inexhaustibly new. Here they used to roll a barrel-hoop—Niels and the pastor’s Frithjof—and the hoop was a ship, which was wrecked when it toppled over, but if you caught it before it fell, then it was casting anchor. The narrow passage between the outhouses, where you could hardly squeeze through, was Bab-el-Mandeb or the Portal of Death. On the stable door “England” was written in chalk, and on the barn door “France.” The garden gate was Rio Janeiro, but the smithy was Brazil. Another game was to play Holger the Dane: you could play it among the tall burs behind the barn; but if you went up in the miller’s pasture, there were two sink-holes known as the gorges, and there were the haunts of the veritable Prince Burmand and his wild Saracens, with reddish gray turbans and yellow plumes in their helmets—burdocks and Aaron’s rod of the tallest. That was the only real Mauretania. That rank, succulent growth, that teeming mass of exuberant plant-life, excited their lust of destruction and intoxicated them with the voluptuous joy of demolishing. The wooden swords gleamed with the brightness of steel; the green sap stained the blade with red gore, and the cut stalks squashing under their feet were Turks’ bodies trampled under horses’ hoofs with a sound as of bones crunched in flesh.

Sometimes they played down by the fjord: mussel-shells were launched as ships, and when the vessel got stuck in a clump of seaweed, or went aground on a sand-bank, it was Columbus in the Sargasso Sea or the discovery of America. Harbors and mighty embankments were built; the Nile was dug out in the firm beach sand, and once they made Gurre Castle out of pebbles—a tiny dead fish in an oyster-shell was the corpse of Tove, and they were King Valdemar who sat sorrowing by her side.

But this was all past.

Niels was quite a lad now, twelve years old, nearing thirteen, and he no longer needed to hack thistles and burdocks in order to feed his knightly fancies, any more than he had to launch his explorer’s dreams in a mussel-shell. A book and a corner of the sofa were enough for him now, and if the book refused to bear him to the coast of his desires, he would hunt up Frithjof and tell him the tale which the book would not yield. Arm in arm, they would saunter down the road, one telling, both listening; but when they wanted to revel to the full and really give their imagination free play, they would hide in the fragrant dimness of the hayloft. After a while, these stories, which always ended just when you had really entered into them, grew into a single long story that never ended, but lived and died with one generation after the other; for when the hero had grown old, or you had been careless enough to let him die, you could always give him a son, who would inherit everything from the father, and whom, in addition, you could dower with any other virtues that you happened to value particularly just at the moment.

Whatever stamped itself on Niels’s mind, what he saw, what he understood and what he misunderstood, what he admired and what he knew he ought to admire—all was woven into the story. As running water is colored by every passing picture, sometimes holding the image with perfect clearness, sometimes distorting it or throwing it back in wavering, uncertain lines, then again drowning it completely in the color and play of its own ripples, so the lad’s story reflected feelings and thoughts, his own and those of other people, mirrored human beings and events, life and books, as well as it could. It was a play life, running side by side with real life. It was a snug retreat, where you could abandon yourself to dreams of the wildest adventures. It was a fairy garden that opened at your slightest nod, and received you in all its glory, shutting out everybody else. Whispering palms closed overhead; flowers of sunshine and leaves like stars on vines of coral spread at your feet, and among them a thousand paths led to all the ages and the climes. If you followed one, it would lead you to one place, and if you followed another, it would lead you to another place, to Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe, to Vaulunder and Henrik Magnard, to Niels Klim and Mungo Park, to Peter Simple and Odysseus—and the moment you wished it, you were home again.

About a month after Niels’s twelfth birthday, two new faces appeared at Lönborggaard.

One was that of the new tutor; the other was that of Edele Lyhne.

The tutor, Mr. Bigum, was a candidate for orders and was at the threshold of the forties. He was rather small, but with a stocky strength like that of a work-horse, broad-chested, high-shouldered, and slightly stooping. He walked with a heavy, slow, deliberate tread, and moved his arms in a vague, expressionless way that seemed to require a great deal of room. His high, wide forehead was flat as a wall, with two perpendicular lines between the eyebrows; the nose was short and blunt, the mouth large with thick, fresh lips. His eyes were his best feature, light in color, mild, and clear. The movements of his eye-balls showed that he was slightly deaf. Nevertheless, he loved music and played his violin with passionate devotion; for the notes, he said, were not heard only with the ears, but with the whole body, eyes, fingers, and feet; if the ear failed sometimes, the hand would find the right note without its aid, by a strange, intuitive genius of its own. Besides, the audible tones were, after all, false, but he who possessed the divine gift of music carried within him an invisible instrument compared to which the most wonderful Cremona was like the stringed calabash of the savage. On this instrument the soul played; its strings gave forth ideal notes, and upon it the great tone-poets had composed their immortal works.

The external music, which was borne on the air of reality and heard with the ears, was nothing but a wretched simulation, a stammering attempt to say the unutterable. It resembled the music of the soul as the statue modelled by hands, carved with a chisel, and meted with a measure resembled the wondrous marble dream of the sculptor which no eye ever beheld and no lip ever praised.

Music, however, was by no means Mr. Bigum’s chief interest. He was first of all a philosopher, but not one of the productive philosophers who find new laws and build new systems. He laughed at their systems, the snail-shells in which they dragged themselves across the illimitable field of thought, fondly imagining that the field was within the snail-shell! And these laws—laws of thought, laws of nature! Why, the discovery of a law meant nothing but the fixing of your own limitations: I can see so far and no farther—as if there were not another horizon beyond the first, and another and yet another, horizon beyond horizon, law beyond law, in an unending vista! No, he was not that kind of a philosopher. He did not think he was vain, or that he overvalued himself, but he could not close his eyes to the fact that his intellect had a wider span than that of other mortals. When he meditated upon the works of the great thinkers, it seemed to him that he strode forward through a region peopled by slumbering thought-giants, who awoke, bathed in the light of his spirit, to consciousness of their own strength. And so it was always; every thought, mood, or sentiment of another person which was vouchsafed the privilege of awakening within him rose up with his sign on its forehead, ennobled, purified, with wings strengthened, endowed with a power and a might that its creator had never dreamed of.

How often had he gazed with an almost humble amazement on the marvellous wealth of his soul and the divine assurance of his spirit! For it would often happen that different days would find him judging the world and the things of the world from entirely divergent points of view, looking at them through hypotheses that were as far apart as night and morning; yet these points of view and hypotheses, which he chose to make his own, never even for one second made him theirs, any more than the god who has taken on the semblance of a bull or a swan becomes a bull or a swan and ceases to be a god.

And no one suspected what dwelt within him—all passed him by unseeing. But he rejoiced in their blindness and felt his contempt for humanity growing. A day would come when the light of his eye would go out, and the magnificent structure of his mind would crumble to its foundations and become as that which had never been, but no work from his hand, no, not a line, would he leave to tell the tale of what had been lost in him. His genius should not be crowned with thorns by the world’s misjudgment, neither should it wear the defiling purple cloak of the world’s admiration. He exulted at the thought that generation after generation would be born and die, and the greatest men of all ages would spend years of their life in the attempt to gain what he could have given them if he had chosen to open his hand.

The fact that he lived in such a humble fashion gave him a curious pleasure, simply because there was such a magnificent extravagance in using his mind to teach children, such a wild incongruity in paying for his time with mere daily bread, and such a colossal absurdity in allowing him to earn this bread upon the recommendation of poor, ordinary mortals, who had vouched for him that he knew enough to take upon himself the miserable task of a tutor. And they had given him non in his examination for a degree!

Oh, there was rapture in feeling the brutal stupidity of an existence that cast him aside as poor chaff and valued as golden grain the empty husks, while he knew in his own mind that his lightest thought was worth a world!

Yet there were other times when the solitude of his greatness weighed upon him and depressed him.

Ah, how often, when he had communed with himself in sacred silence, hour after hour, and then returned again to consciousness of the audible, visible life round about him, had he not felt himself a stranger to its paltriness and corruptibility. Then he had often been like the monk who listened in the monastery woods to a single trill of the paradise bird and, when he came back, found that a century had died. Ah, if the monk was lonely with the generation that lived among the groves he knew, how much more lonely was the man whose contemporaries had not yet been born.

In such desolate moments he would sometimes be seized with a cowardly longing to sink down to the level of the common herd, to share their low-born happiness, to become a native of their great earth and a citizen of their little heaven. But soon he would be himself again.

The other newcomer was Edele Lyhne, Lyhne’s twenty-six-year-old sister. She had lived many years in Copenhagen, first with her mother, who had moved to the city when she became a widow, and, after her mother’s death, in the home of a wealthy uncle, Councillor of State Neergaard. The Neergaards entertained on a large scale and went out a great deal, so Edele lived in a whirl of balls and festivities.

She was admired wherever she went, and envy, the faithful shadow of admiration, also followed her. She was talked about as much as one can be without having done anything scandalous, and whenever men discussed the three reigning beauties of the town there were always many voices in favor of striking out one name and substituting that of Edele Lyhne, but they could never agree on which of two others should yield to her—as for the third, it was out of the question.

Yet very young men did not admire her. They were abashed in her presence, and felt twice as stupid as usual when she listened to them with her look of mild toleration—a maliciously emphasized toleration which crushed them with a sense that she had heard it all before and knew it by heart. They made efforts to shine in her eyes and their own by assuming blasés airs, by inventing wild paradoxes, or, when their desperation reached a climax, by making bold declarations; but all these attempts, jostling and crowding one upon the other in the abrupt transitions of youth, were met with the faint shadow of a smile, a deadly smile of boredom, which made the victim redden and feel that he was the one hundred and eleventh fly in the same merciless spider’s web.

Moreover, her beauty had neither the softness nor the fire to ensnare young hearts. On older hearts and cooler heads she exercised a peculiar fascination.

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.

Niels didn’t care.

Then came a Sunday in the early part of August, when Lyhne and his wife had gone out in the carriage to pay a visit, and Niels and Miss Edele were home alone. In the morning Edele had asked Niels to pick some corn-flowers for her, but he had forgotten it. Suddenly, in the afternoon, as he was walking with Frithjof, he remembered, gathered a bouquet, and ran up to the house with it.

Everything was so still that he imagined his aunt must be asleep, and crept silently through the house. At the threshold of the sitting-room he stopped, with bated breath, preparing to approach Edele’s door. The sitting-room was flooded with sunshine, and a blossoming oleander made the air heavy with its sweet fragrance. There was no sound except a muffled splash from the flower-stand whenever the goldfish moved in their glass dish.

Niels crossed the room, balancing himself with outstretched arms, his tongue between his teeth. Cautiously he grasped the door-knob, which was so hot with the sun that it burned his hand, and turned it slowly and carefully, knitting his brows and half closing his eyes. He pulled the door toward him, bent in through the narrow opening, and laid the flowers on a chair just within. The room was dark as if the shades were down, and the air seemed moist with fragrance, the fragrance of attar of roses. As he stooped, he saw only the light straw matting on the floor, the wainscoting under the window, and the lacquered foot of a Gueridon; but when he straightened himself to back out of the door, he caught sight of his aunt.

She was stretched full-length on a couch of sea-green satin, dressed in a fanciful gypsy costume. As she lay on her back, chin up, throat tense, and forehead low, her loosened hair flowed down over the end of the couch and along the rug. An artificial pomegranate flower looked as if it had been washed ashore on an island made by a little bronze-colored shoe in the midst of the dull golden stream.

The motley colors of her dress were rich and mellow. Dull blue, pale rose, gray, and orange were blended in the pattern of a little low-cut bodice of a thick, lustreless stuff. Underneath, she wore a white silk chemise with wide sleeves falling to the elbow. The white had a faint pinkish tone, and was shot with threads of reddish gold. Her skirt of pansy-colored velvet without any border was gathered loosely around her, and slid down over the side of the couch in slanting folds. Her feet and legs were bare, and around her crossed ankles she had wound a necklace of pale corals. An open fan was lying on the floor, showing its pattern of playing-cards arranged in a wheel, and a little farther away a pair of leaf-brown silk stockings had been thrown, one partly rolled up, the other spread out and revealing the red clock.

At the same moment that Niels caught sight of her, she saw him. Involuntarily she made a slight movement as if to rise, but checked herself and lay still as before, only turning her head a little to look at the boy with a questioning smile.

“I brought these,” he said, and went over to her with the flowers.

She held out her hand, glanced at them and then at her costume, comparing the colors, and dropped them with a wearily murmured “Impossible!”

Niels would have picked them up, but she stopped him with a motion of her hand.

“Give me that!” she said, pointing to a red flask that lay on a crumpled handkerchief at her feet.

Niels went to take it. His face was crimson, as he bent over the milk-white, gently rounded legs and the long, slender feet, which had almost the intelligence of a hand in their fine flexible curves. He felt dizzy, and when one foot suddenly turned and bent downward with a quick movement, he almost fell.

“Where did you pick the flowers?” Edele asked.

Niels pulled himself together and turned toward her. “I picked them in the pastor’s rye-field,” he said, in a voice that sounded strange to himself. He handed her the flask without looking up.

Edele noticed his emotion and looked at him astonished. Suddenly she blushed, raised herself on one arm, and drew her feet under her petticoat. “Go, go, go, go!” she said, half peevishly, half shyly, and at every word she sprayed him with the attar of roses.

Niels went. When he was out of the room, she let her feet glide slowly down from the couch and looked at them curiously.

Running with unsteady steps, he hurried through the house to his own room. He felt quite stunned; there was a strange weakness in his knees and a choking sensation in his throat. He threw himself down on the couch and closed his eyes, but it was of no avail, a strange restlessness possessed him; his breath came heavily as in fear, and the light tortured him in spite of his closed eyelids.

Little by little a change came over him. A hot, heavy breath seemed to blow on him and make him helplessly weak. He felt as one in a dream who hears some one calling and tries to go, but cannot move a foot, and is tortured by his weakness, sickens with his longing to get away, is lashed to madness by this calling which does not know one is bound. And he sighed impatiently as if he were ill and looked around quite lost. Never had he felt so miserable, so lonely, so forsaken, and so forlorn.

He sat down in the flood of sunlight from the window, and wept.

From that day Niels felt a timid happiness in Edele’s presence. She was no more a human being like any one else, but an exalted creature, divine by virtue of her strange, mystic beauty. His heart throbbed with rapture in merely looking at her, kneeling to her in his heart, crawling to her feet in abject self-effacement. Yet there were moments when his adoration had to have vent in outward signs of subjection. At such times he would lie in wait for a chance to steal into Edele’s room and go through a fixed rite of a certain interminable number of kisses lavished on the little rug in front of her bed, her shoe, or any other object that presented itself to his idolatry.

He regarded it as a piece of great good fortune that his Sunday jacket happened to be degraded, just then, to every-day use; for the lingering scent of attar of roses was like a mighty talisman with which he could conjure up in a magic mirror the image of Edele as he had seen her lying on the green couch wearing her masquerade costume. In the story he and Frithjof were telling each other, this image was ever present, and from now on the wretched Frithjof was never safe from bare-footed princesses. If he dragged himself through the dense primeval forest, they would call to him from hammocks of vines. If he sought shelter from the storm in a mountain cave, they would rise from their couches of velvety moss to welcome him, and when he dashed, bloody and smoke-blackened, into the pirate’s cabin, shivering the door with a tremendous blow of his sabre, he found them there too, resting on the captain’s green sofa. They bored him terribly, and he could not see why they should suddenly have become so necessary to their beloved heroes.

No matter in how exalted a place a human being may set his throne, no matter how firmly he may press the tiara of the exceptional, that is genius, upon his brow, he can never be sure that he may not, like Nebuchadnezzar, be seized with a sudden desire to go on all-fours and eat grass and herd with the common beasts of the field.

That was what happened to Mr. Bigum when he quite simply fell in love with Miss Edele, and it availed him nothing that he distorted history to find an excuse for his love by calling Edele Beatrice or Laura or Vittoria Colonna, for all the artificial halos with which he tried to crown his love were blown out as fast as he could light them by the stubborn fact that it was Edele’s beauty he was in love with; nor was it the graces of her mind and heart that had captivated him, but her elegance, her air of fashion, her easy assurance, even her graceful insolence. It was a kind of love that might well fill him with shamed surprise at the inconstancy of the children of men.

And what did it all matter! Those eternal truths and makeshift lies that were woven ring in ring to form the heavy armor he called his principles, what were they against his love? If they really were the strength and marrow and kernel of life, then let them show their strength; if they were weaker, let them break; if stronger—But they were already broken, plucked to pieces like the mesh of rotten threads they were. What did she care about eternal truths? And the mighty visions, how did they help him? Thoughts that plumbed the unfathomable, could they win her? All that he possessed was worthless. Even though his soul shone with the radiance of a hundred suns, what did it avail, when his light was hidden under the ugly fustian of a Diogenes’ mantle? Oh, for beauty! Take my soul and give me my thirty pieces of silver—Alcibiades’ body, Don Juan’s mantle, and a court chamberlain’s rank!

But, alas, he had none of these graces, and Edele was by no means attracted to his heavy, philosophic nature. His habit of seeing life in barbarously naked abstractions gave him a noisy dogmaticism, an unpleasant positiveness that jarred her like a misplaced drum in a concert of soft music. The strained quality of his mind, which always seemed to knit its muscles and strike an attitude before every little question like a strong man about to play with iron balls, seemed to her ridiculous. He irritated her by his censorious morality, which pounced on every lightly sketched feeling, indiscreetly tearing away its incognito, rudely calling it by name, just as it was about to flit past him in the course of conversation.

Bigum knew very well what an unfavorable impression he made and how hopeless his love was, but he knew it as we know a thing when we hope with all the strength of our soul that our knowledge is false. There is always the miracle left; and though miracles do not happen, they might happen. Who knows? Perhaps our intelligence, our instinct, our senses, in spite of their daylight clearness, are leading us astray. Perhaps the one thing needful is just that unreasoning courage which follows hope’s will-o’-the-wisp as it burns over seething passions pregnant with desire! It is only when we have heard the door of destiny slam shut that we begin to feel the iron-cold talons of certainty digging into our breast, gathering slowly, slowly around our heart, and fastening their clutches upon the fine thread of hope on which our world of happiness hangs: then the thread is severed; then all that it held falls and is shattered; then the shriek of despair sounds through the emptiness.

In doubt, no one despairs.

On a sunny afternoon in September, Edele was sitting on the landing of the half-dozen broad, old-fashioned steps that led down from the summer parlor into the garden. Behind her, the French windows were wide open, flung back against the motley wall-covering of bright red and bright green vines. She leaned her head against a chair piled high with large black portfolios, and held an etching up before her with both hands. Color prints of Byzantine mozaics in blue and gold were scattered on the pale green rush matting that covered the boards of the landing, on the threshold, and on the oak-brown parquet floor of the summer parlor. At the foot of the steps lay a white shade hat; for Edele’s hair was uncovered, with no ornament but a flower of gold filigree in a pattern to match the gold bracelet she wore high on her arm. Her white dress was of semi-transparent stuff with narrow silky stripes; it had an edging of twisted orange and black chenille and tiny rosettes in the same two colors. Light silk mitts covered her hands and reached to the elbow. They were pearl gray like her shoes.

The yellow sunlight was filtered through the drooping branches of an ancient ash. It pierced the cool dimness, forming distinct lines of light, powdering the air with gold dust, and painting the steps, the wall, and the doors with spots of light, spot of sun upon spot of sun, like a perforated shade. Through the tracery of shadow, each color rose to meet the light: white from Edele’s dress, blood-red from crimson lips, amber from yellow-blonde hair, and a hundred other tints round about, blue and gold, oak-brown, glitter of glass, red and green.

Edele dropped the etching and looked up despondently, her eyes expressing the silent plaint she was too weary to give vent to in a sigh. Then she settled down again as if to shut out her surroundings and withdraw within herself.

Just then Mr. Bigum appeared.

Edele looked at him with a drowsy blinking like that of a child who is too sleepy and comfortable to stir, but too curious to shut its eyes.

Mr. Bigum wore his new beaver hat. He was absorbed in his own thoughts, and gesticulated with his tombac watch in his hand, until the thin silver chain threatened to snap. With a sudden, almost vicious movement, he thrust the watch deep down into his pocket, threw back his head impatiently, caught the lapel of his coat in a peevish grasp, and would have gone on with an angry jerk of his whole body, his face darkened by all the hopeless rage that boils in a man when he is running away from his own torturing thoughts, and knows that he runs in vain.

Edele’s hat, lying at the foot of the steps and shining white against the black earth of the walk, stopped him in his flight. He picked it up with both hands, then caught sight of Edele, and as he stood trying to think of something to say, he held it instead of giving it to her. Not an idea could he find in his brain; not a word would be born on his tongue, and he looked straight ahead with a stupid expression of arrested profundity.

“It is a hat, Mr. Bigum,” said Edele carelessly, to break the embarrassed silence.

“Yes,” said the tutor eagerly, delighted to hear her confirm a likeness that had struck him also; but the next moment he blushed at his clumsy answer.

“It was lying here,” he added hurriedly, “here on the ground like this—just like this,” and he bent down to show where it had lain with an inconsequential minuteness born of his confusion. He felt almost happy in his relief at having given some sign of life, however futile. He was still standing with the hat in his hand.

“Do you intend to keep it?” asked Edele.

Bigum had no answer to that.

“I mean will you give it to me?” she explained.

Bigum came a few steps nearer and handed her the hat. “Miss Lyhne,” he said, “you think—you must not think—I beg you to let me speak; that is—I am not saying anything, but be patient with me!—I love you, Miss Lyhne, unutterably, unutterably, beyond all words I love you. Oh, if language held a word that combined the cringing admiration of the slave, the ecstatic smile of the martyr, and the gnawing homesickness of the exile, with that word I could tell you my love. Oh, listen to me, do not thrust me away yet! Do not think that I am insulting you with an insane hope! I know how insignificant I seem in your eyes, how clumsy and repulsive, yes, repulsive. I am not forgetting that I am poor,—you must know it,—so poor that I have to let my mother live in a charitable institution, and I can’t help it, can’t help it. I am so miserably poor. Yes, Miss Lyhne, I am only a poor servant in your brother’s house, and yet there is a world where I am ruler, powerful, proud, rich, with the crown of victory, noble by virtue of the passion that drove Prometheus to steal the fire from the heaven of the gods. There I am brother to all the great in spirit, whom the earth has borne, and who bear the earth. I understand them as none but equals understand one another; no flight that they have flown is too high for the strength of my wings. Do you understand me? Do you believe me? Oh, don’t believe me! It isn’t true, I am nothing but the Kobold figure you see before you. It is all past; for this terrible madness of love has paralyzed my wings, the eyes of my spirit have lost their sight, my heart is dried up, my soul is drained to bloodless poltroonery. Oh, save me from myself, Miss Lyhne, don’t turn away in scorn! Weep over me, weep, it is Rome burning!”

He had fallen to his knees on the steps, wringing his hands. His face was blanched and distorted, his teeth were clinched in agony, his eyes drowned in tears; his whole body shook under the suppressed sobs that were heard only as a gasping for breath.

“Control yourself, Mr. Bigum,” she said in a slightly too compassionate tone. “Control yourself; don’t give way so, be a man! Please get up and go down into the garden a little while and try to pull yourself together.”

“And you can’t love me at all?” groaned Mr. Bigum almost inaudibly. “Oh, it’s terrible! There is not a thing in my soul that I wouldn’t murder and degrade if I could win you thereby. No, no, even if any one offered me madness and I could possess you in my hallucinations, possess you, then I would say: Take my brain, tear down its wonderful structure with rude hands, break all the fine threads that bind my spirit to the resplendent triumphal chariot of the human mind, and let me sink in the mire of the physical, under the wheels of the chariot, and let others follow the shining paths that lead to the light! Do you understand me? Can you comprehend that even if your love came to me robbed of its glory, debased, befouled, as a caricature of love, as a diseased phantom, I would receive it kneeling as if it were the Sacred Host? But the best in me is useless, the worst in me is useless, too. I cry to the sun, but it does not shine; to the statue, but it does not answer—answer!... What is there to answer except that I suffer? No, these unutterable torments that rend my whole being down to its deepest roots, this anguish is nothing to you but an impertinence. You feel nothing but a little cold offence; in your heart you laugh scornfully at the poor tutor and his impossible passion.”

“You do me an injustice, Mr. Bigum,” said Edele, rising, while Mr. Bigum rose too. “I am not laughing. You ask me if there is no hope, and I answer: No, there is no hope. That is surely nothing to laugh at. But there is one thing I want to say to you. From the first moment you began to think of me, you must have known what my answer would be, and you did know it, did you not? You knew it all the time, and yet you have been lashing all your thoughts and desires on toward the goal which you knew you could not reach. I am not offended by your love, Mr. Bigum, but I condemn it. You have done what so many people do: they close their eyes to the realities and stop their ears when life cries ‘No’ to their wishes. They want to forget the deep chasm fate has placed between them and the object of their ardent longing. They want their dream to be fulfilled. But life takes no account of dreams. There isn’t a single obstacle that can be dreamed out of the world, and in the end we lie there crying at the edge of the chasm, which hasn’t changed and is just where it always was. But we have changed, for we have let our dreams goad all our thoughts and spur all our longings to the very highest tension. The chasm is no narrower, and everything in us cries out with longing to reach the other side, but no, always no, never anything else. If we had only kept a watch on ourselves in time! But now it is too late, now we are unhappy.”

She paused almost as if she woke from a trance. Her voice had been quiet, groping, as if she were speaking to herself, but now it hardened into a cold aloofness.

“I cannot help you, Mr. Bigum. You are nothing to me of what you wish to be. If that makes you unhappy, you must be unhappy; if you suffer, you must suffer—there are always some who have to suffer. If you make a human being your God and the ruler of your fate, you must bow to the will of your divinity, but it is never wise to make yourself gods, or to give your soul over to another; for there are gods who will not step down from their pedestals. Be sensible, Mr. Bigum! Your god is so small and so little worth your worship; turn from it and be happy with one of the daughters of the land.”

With a faint little smile, she went in through the summer parlor, while Mr. Bigum looked after her, crestfallen. For another fifteen minutes he walked up and down before the steps. All the words that had been spoken seemed to be still vibrating through the air; she had so lately gone, it seemed that her shadow must still linger there; it seemed that she could not yet be out of reach of his prayers, and everything could not be inexorably ended. But after a while the chambermaid came out and gathered up the engravings, carried in the chair, the portfolios, the rush matting—everything.

Then he could go too.

In the open gable window up above, Niels sat gazing after him. He had heard the whole conversation from beginning to end. His face had a frightened look, and a nervous trembling passed through his body. For the first time he was afraid of life. For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvellous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream.

He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror.

Edele did not have a good autumn, and the winter drained her strength completely. Spring, when it came, did not find one poor little life-germ that it could warm and coax into growth; it found only a withering, which no gentleness and no warmth could arrest or even retard. But it could at least pour a flood of light over the paling life and caress the ebbing strength with fragrant, balmy air, as the evening crimson follows slowly in the wake of dying day.

The end came in May, on a day flooded with sunshine, one of the days when the lark is never silent, and you can almost see the rye grow. The great cherry-trees outside of her window were white with flowers—nosegays of snow, wreaths of snow, cupolas, arches, garlands, a fairy architecture against the bluest of skies.

She was very weak that day, and withal she felt a strange sense of lightness. She knew what was coming, for that morning she had sent for Bigum and said good-by to him.

Her uncle had come over from Copenhagen, and all that afternoon the handsome, white-haired man sat by her bedside with his hand folded in her hands. He did not speak, but once in a while he would move his hand, and she would press it; she would look up, and he would smile to her. Her brother, too, was in the room, gave her medicine, and helped her in other ways.

She lay very still with closed eyes, while familiar pictures from life over there flitted past her. Sorgenfri with hanging birches, the red church at Lyngby standing on a foundation of graves, and the white country house with the bit of sunken road leading down to the sea, where the paling always was green as if painted by the water,—the images took shape before her, grew clear, melted away, and vanished. And other pictures came. There was Bredgade when the sun went down, and the darkness closed in around the houses. There was the queer Copenhagen you found when you came in from the country in the forenoon. It seemed so weird with its hurry and bustle in the sunlight, with the whitened window-panes and the streets smelling of fruit. There was something unreal about the houses in the strong light; the noise and rattle of wheels could not chase away the silence that seemed to enfold them.... Then came the dim, quiet drawing-room in the autumn evenings, when she was dressed for the theatre, and the others were not down yet—the smell of incense, the wood fire from the stove lighting up the carpet—the rain whipping the windows—the horses stamping at the door—the melancholy cry of the mussel-venders ... and back of all this the theatre awaiting her with light and music and festive glow.

With such pictures the afternoon wore away.

Niels and his mother were in the parlor. Niels knelt by the sofa with his face pressed down against its brown velvet and his hands clasped over his head. He wept and wailed aloud, giving himself up to his grief without any attempt at self-control. Mrs. Lyhne sat beside him. The hymn-book lay on the table in front of her, open at the hymns usually sung at funerals. Now and then she read a few verses, and sometimes she would bend down over her son to speak a word of soothing or chiding, but Niels would not be comforted, and she could not stop his weeping or the wild prayers born of his despair.

Presently Lyhne appeared in the door of the sick-room. He made no sign, but looked at them so solemnly that both rose and followed him in to his sister. He took them by the hand and led them to the bed. Edele looked up and gazed at each one in turn, while her lips motioned for words. Then Lyhne took his wife over to the window and sat down there with her. Niels threw himself on his knees at the foot of the bed.

He wept softly and prayed with clasped hands, eagerly and incessantly, in a low, passionate whisper. He told God that he would not stop hoping. “I won’t let You go, Lord, I won’t let You go before You have said ‘Yes’! You mustn’t take her away from us; for You know how we love her—You mustn’t, You mustn’t! Oh, I can’t say, ‘Thy will be done;’ for Your will is to let her die, but, oh, let her live! I will thank You and obey You. I will do everything I know You want me to do. I’ll be so good and never offend You, if You will only let her live! Do You hear, God? Oh, stop, stop, and make her well before it’s too late! I will, I will, oh, what can I promise You?—Oh, I’ll thank You, never, never, forget You; oh, but hear me! Don’t You see she’s dying, don’t You see she’s dying? Do You hear? Take Your hand away! I can’t lose her, God, I can’t! Let her live, won’t You please, won’t You please? Oh, it’s wicked of You—”

Outside, beyond the window, the white flowers flushed to pink in the light of the setting sun. Arch upon arch, the blossoming sprays built of their gossamer bloom a rose-castle, a vaulted choir of roses, and through this airy dome the azure sky shone with a softened twilight blue, while golden lights and lights of gold flaming to crimson shot like the rays of a nimbus from every garlanded line of the ethereal temple.

White and still, Edele lay there with the old man’s hand between both of hers. Slowly she breathed out her life, breath by breath; fainter and fainter was the rising of her breast; heavier and heavier fell the eyelids.

“My love to Copenhagen!” was her last low whisper.

But her last message was heard by no one. It did not come from her lips even as a breath—her message to him, the great artist whom she had loved secretly with her whole soul, but to whom she had been nothing, only a name that his ear knew, only one unrecognized figure in the great admiring public.

The light faded into blue dusk, and her hands fell weakly apart. The shadows grew—shadows of night and of death.

The old man bent down over her bed and laid his hands on her pulse, waiting quietly, and when the last throb of life had ebbed away, when the last feeble pulse-beat was stilled, he lifted the pale hand to his lips.

“Little Edele!”

Chapter IV

There are those who can take up their grief and bear it, strong natures who feel their own powers through the very heaviness of their burden. Weaker people give themselves up to their sorrow passively, as they would submit to a sickness; and like a sickness their sorrow pervades them, drinks itself into their innermost being and becomes a part of them, is assimilated in them through a slow struggle, and finally loses itself in them, as they return to perfect health.

But there are yet others to whom sorrow is a violence done them, a cruelty which they never learn to accept as a trial or chastisement or as simple fate. It is to them an act of tyranny, an expression of personal hate, and it always leaves a sting in their hearts.

Children do not often grieve in this way, but Niels Lyhne did. For had he not been face to face with God in the fervor of his prayers? Had he not crawled on his knees to the foot of the throne, full of hope, tremulous with fear, and yet firm in his faith in the omnipotence of prayer, with courage to plead until he should be heard? And he had been forced to rise from the dust and go away with his hope put to shame. His faith had not been able to bring the miracle down from heaven, no God had answered his cry, death had marched straight on and seized its prey, as if no sheltering wall of prayers had been lifted toward the sky.

A stillness fell upon him. His faith had flung itself blindly against the gates of heaven, and now it lay on Edele’s grave with broken wings. For he had believed with the crude, implicit fairy-tale faith that children so often feel. The complex, subtly shaded figure of the Catechism is not the God children believe in; their God is the mighty one in the Old Testament, He who loved Adam and Eve so much, and to whom the whole generation of men, kings, prophets, Pharaohs, are nothing but good and bad children, this tremendous, fatherly God, Who is wrathful with the anger of a giant and bountiful with the generosity of a giant, Who has hardly created life before He lets death loose upon it, Who drowns His earth in the waters from His heaven, who thunders down laws too heavy for the race He made, and who, finally, in the days of the Emperor Augustus, has pity upon men and sends His Son to death in order that the law may be broken while it is fulfilled. This God, Who always answers with a miracle, is the one to whom children speak when they pray. By and by, a day comes when they understand that they have heard His voice for the last time in the earthquake that shook Golgotha and opened the graves, and that now, since the veil of His Holy of Holies has been rent in twain, it is the God Jesus who reigns; and from that day on they pray differently.

But Niels had not yet attained to this. It is true, he had followed Jesus on His earthly pilgrimage with a believing heart, but when he saw Him subjecting Himself to the Father, going about so bereft of power and suffering so humanly, all this had hidden the godhead from him. He had seen in Him only the one Who did the will of the Father, the Son of God, not God Himself: therefore, it was to God the Father he had prayed, and it was God the Father who had failed him in his bitter need. But if God had turned from him, he could turn from God. If God had no ears, he had no lips; if God had no compassion, he had no worship, and he defied and cast God out of his heart.

On the day Edele was buried, he spurned the earth of the grave with his foot, whenever the pastor spoke the name of the Lord, and when he met it afterwards in books or on the lips of people, a rebellious frown would wrinkle his youthful forehead. When he lay down to sleep at night, a sense of forsaken greatness came over him, as he thought that now all the others, children and grown people, were praying to the Lord and closing their eyes in His name, while he alone held his hands from clasping in prayer, he alone refused to do God homage. He was shut out from the sheltering care of Heaven. No angel watched by his side; alone and unprotected, he drifted on the strangely murmuring waters of darkness, and loneliness enfolded him, spreading out from his bed in ever widening and receding circles. Still he did not pray; though he longed till tears came, he did not call.

And it was so all his life. He had freed himself defiantly from the point of view imposed upon him by his teachers, and he fled with his sympathy to the side of those who had wasted their strength in vainly kicking against the pricks. In the books he had been given to read and in what he had been taught, God and His chosen people and ideas marched on in an endless triumphal procession, and he had joined in the jubilant shouting, had exulted in the sense of being counted with the proud legions of the conqueror; for is not victory always righteous, and is not the victor a liberator, a reformer, a light bringer?

But now the shouting had died down. Now he was silent, and he began to enter into the thoughts of the defeated and feel with the hearts of the vanquished. He understood that even when that which prevails is good, that which yields is not therefore bad. He went over to the losing side and told himself that this was finer and greater. The power of the victor he called mere brute force and violence. He took sides—as whole-heartedly as he could—against God, but as a vassal who takes up arms against his liege lord; for he still believed, and could not drive out his faith by defiance.

His tutor, Mr. Bigum, was not one who could lead a soul back to the old paths. Indeed, his temperamental philosophy, by virtue of which he could be fired and enraptured by each and every side of the question—to-day, one; to-morrow, another—set all dogmas adrift in the minds of his pupils. At bottom he was really a man of Christian principles, and if any one could have pinned him down to saying what was the fixed point in all this fluid matter, he would most likely have replied that it was the creed of the Evangelical Lutheran Church or something akin to that, but he himself had very little inclination to drive his pupils along the straight road of orthodoxy or to warn them at every step that the least deviation from the beaten track meant straying into lies and darkness, likely to end in perdition and hell; for he had none of the passionate concern of the orthodox for jots and tittles. He was, in fact, religious in the slightly artistic, superior manner such talented people affect, not afraid of a little harmonizing, easily enticed into half unconscious rearrangements and adaptations, because, whatever they do, they must assert their own personality, and, in whatever spheres they fly, must hear the whirring of their own wings.

Such people do not guide, but their instruction has a fullness, a copiousness, and a wobbly many-sidedness which, provided they do not utterly confuse a pupil, tend to develop his independence in a high degree, since they almost force him to make up his mind for himself. For children can never rest upon anything vague or indefinite; their very instinct of self-preservation demands a plain Yes or a plain No, a for or against, to show them where to turn with their hate and where with their love.

Hence there was no firm and immutable authority that might have guided Niels with its constant clinching of arguments and pointing of ways. He had taken the bit in his teeth, and plunged headlong on any path that opened before him, provided only that it led him away from what had been the home of his feelings and of his thoughts.

He felt a new sense of power in thus seeing with his own eyes and choosing with his own heart and forming himself by his own will. Many new things came to his mind; traits of his own nature that he had never thought of and that seemed unrelated one to the other, fitted themselves together wonderfully and were fused into a rational whole. It was a fascinating time of discovery. Little by little, in fear and uncertain exultation, in incredulous joy, he found himself. He began to realize that he was not like others, and a new spiritual modesty made him shy, awkward, and taciturn. He grew suspicious of questions, and imagined he found hints of his own most hidden thoughts in everything that was said. Having learned to read in his own heart, he supposed everybody else could read what was written there, and he shunned his elders, preferring to roam about alone. It seemed to him that people had suddenly become very intrusive; he developed a slightly hostile feeling toward them as to creatures of another race, and in his loneliness he began to hold them up for scrutiny and judgment. Formerly the names of father, mother, the pastor, the miller, sufficed to characterize, and the name had quite hidden the person from him. But now he saw that the pastor was a jolly little man, who made himself as meek and demure as he could at home to escape the notice of his wife, while abroad he tried to forget the domestic yoke by talking himself into a frenzy of rebellion and loud-voiced thirst for liberty. That was the pastor as he saw him now.

And Mr. Bigum?

He had seen him ready to throw everything overboard for Edele’s love, had heard him deny himself and the soul within him in that hour of passion in the garden, and now he was always talking about the philosopher rising in Olympic calm above the vague whirlwinds and mist-born rainbows of life. It roused a painful contempt in the lad and made his doubts sleep but lightly, ready to wake in a moment. For how could he know that the very things in human nature which Mr. Bigum called by belittling names were otherwise christened when they appeared in himself, and that his Olympic calm toward that which moves common mortals was but a Titan’s disdainful smile, quick with memories of a Titan’s longing and a Titan’s passions.

Chapter V

Six months had passed since Edele’s death, when one of Lyhne’s cousins, Mrs. Refstrup, became a widow. Her husband had been a potter, but the business had never been flourishing, and during his long illness it had quite run to seed, so there was scarcely anything between the widow and actual want. Seven children were more than she could provide for. The two youngest and also the oldest, who could help her in the factory, remained with her, but the others were distributed among the family. The Lyhnes took the second boy, Erik, who was fourteen, and had been studying at the Latin school in the nearest town, where he had free tuition. Now he was to share Mr. Bigum’s instruction with Niels and Frithjof Petersen, the pastor’s boy.

It was very much against his will that he was kept at his books, for he wanted to be a sculptor. His father had called this nonsense, but Lyhne had nothing against it; he said the boy had talent. Still he thought he ought to take his bachelor’s degree first, in order to have something to fall back upon; and besides a classical education was necessary to a sculptor, or was, at least, very desirable. That settled the matter for the time being. Erik had to console himself with the fairly large collection of good engravings and neat bronzes that Lönborggaard had to offer. This meant a great deal to one who had seen nothing but the rubbish bequeathed the local library by a bone-carver more freakish than artistic in taste, and Erik was soon busy with pencil and modelling-stick. No one attracted him as did Guido Reni, who in those days was more famous than Raphael and the greatest; nor is there anything that can open young eyes to the beauty of a work of art better than the certainty that their admiration is authorized up to the highest pinnacle. Andrea del Sarto, Parmigianino, and Luini, who were to mean so much to him later when he and his talent had found each other, left him quite indifferent, while the boldness of Tintoretto and the bitterness of Salvator Rosa and Caravaggio filled him with delight. For sweetness in art has no appeal for the very young; the daintiest of miniature painters begins his career in the footsteps of Buonarotti, and the pleasantest of lyrists sets out on his first voyage under the black sail of bloody tragedy.

Still Erik’s art was to him only a game, only a little better than other games, and he was no more proud of a well-modelled head or a cleverly carved horse than of hitting the weather vane on the church steeple with a stone, or of swimming out to Sönderhagen and back again without resting. These were the games in which he excelled, games requiring physical prowess, strength, endurance, a sure hand, and a practised eye. He cared nothing for the kind of sport Niels and Frithjof liked, where fancy plays the leading rôle, and all the events and triumphs are imagined. The result was that the other two soon left their old pastime to follow Erik’s lead. Their romance books were laid aside, and the interminable story came to a rather violent end one day at a secret session in the hayloft. Silence brooded over its newly filled grave. In fact, they shrank from mentioning it to Erik, for he had not been with them many days before they suspected that he would make fun of them and their story, that he would shame them and lower them in their own eyes. He had the power to do this because he himself was so free from all day-dreams and fancies and enthusiasms. His clear, boyish common sense was as merciless in its perfect healthfulness and as contemptuous of mental idiosyncrasies as children generally are of physical blemishes. For that reason Niels and Frithjof were afraid of him. They formed themselves after him, denied much and concealed more. Niels was especially quick to suppress in himself anything that was not of Erik’s world, and with the burning zeal of the renegade, he scoffed at Frithjof, whose slower, more faithful nature could not instantly throw over the old for the new. His unkind mockery really sprang from jealousy, for he had fallen in love with Erik on the very first day, while the latter, in shy aloofness, half reluctant, half supercilious, just barely and grudgingly allowed himself to be loved.

Among all the emotional relations of life is there any that is finer, more sensitive, and more fervent than the exquisitely modest love of one boy for another boy? It is a love that never speaks and never dares to vent itself in a caress or a look, a seeing love that grieves bitterly over every fault in the loved one, a love made up of longing and admiration and self-forgetfulness, of pride and humility and calmly breathing happiness.

Erik stayed at Lönborggaard only a little over a year. It happened that Lyhne, on a visit to Copenhagen, took occasion to speak about the boy to one of the leading sculptors there, and showed him some of Erik’s sketches, whereupon Mikkelsen, the sculptor, declared that this was talent, and further studying was a waste of time. It did not require much classical education to find a Greek name for a nude figure. So it was settled that Erik was to be sent at once to the city to attend the Academy and work in Mikkelsen’s studio.

On the last afternoon, Niels and Erik were sitting in their room, Niels looking at the pictures in a penny magazine, Erik deep in Spengler’s critical catalogue of the art collection at Christiansborg. How often he had turned the leaves of this book and tried to form a conception of the pictures from its naïve description! Sometimes he would get almost sick with longing to behold all this art and beauty with his own eyes, to grasp it in very truth and make that glory of line and color his own by the mere strength of his enthusiasm. And how often, too, he had closed the book, weary of gazing into that drifting, fantastic mist of words which refused to solidify and take shape, refused to give forth anything, but went on in a vague and confused shifting—flowing and slipping away—flowing and slipping away.

But to-day it was all different. Now he had the certainty that the shapes he read about would not be shadows from dreamland much longer, and he felt rich in the promise of the book. The pictures rose before him as never before, flashing out like brilliant, many-colored suns from a mist that was golden and dancing with gold.

“What are you looking at?” he asked Niels.

Niels pointed to a portrait in his book representing Lassen, the hero of the Second of April.

“How ugly he is!” commented Erik.

“Ugly! Why, he was a hero—would you call him ugly, too?” Niels turned the leaves back to the picture of a great poet.

“Awfully ugly!” replied Erik decisively, making a grimace. “What a nose! And look at the mouth, and the eyes, and those tufts around his head!”

Then Niels saw that he was ugly, and he was silenced. It had never occurred to him that greatness was not always cast in a mould of beauty.

“While I think of it,” said Erik, closing his Spengler, “let me give you the key to the deck-house.”

Niels would have brushed him aside gloomily, but Erik hung a small padlock key around his friend’s neck on a broad piece of ribbon. “Shall we go down there?” he asked.

They went. Frithjof they found by the garden fence. He lay there eating green gooseberries, and had tears in his eyes because of the parting. Besides he was hurt that the others had not looked him up; for though he generally came uninvited, he felt that such a day demanded a certain amount of formality. Without speaking, he held out a handful of berries to them, but they had had their favorite dishes for dinner, and turned up their noses.

“Sour!” said Erik with a shudder.

“Indigestible truck!” added Niels, disdainfully looking down at the proffered berries. “How can you eat it? Chuck the stuff, we’re going down to the deck-house,” and he pointed with his chin at the key, for his hands were in his pockets.

At that they all three set forth.

The deck-house was an old green-painted ship’s cabin, which had once been bought at a beach auction. It had been put up by the fjord, and had served as a tool-house when the dam was being built, but now it was no longer in use. So the boys had taken possession of it, and concealed in it their ships, bows and arrows, leaping-poles, and other treasures, particularly such forbidden but indispensable things as powder, tobacco, and matches.

Niels opened the door of the deck-house with an air of gloomy solemnity. They went in and fumbled till they found their things in the dark corners of the empty bunks.

“Do you know,” said Erik, with his head deep in a distant corner, “I’m going to blow mine up.”

“Mine and Frithjof’s too!” cried Niels with a grand, consecrating gesture.

“Not mine, by Joe!” exclaimed Frithjof; “then what’d we have to sail with when Erik’s gone?”

“What indeed!” mocked Niels, turning away contemptuously.

Frithjof felt uncomfortable, but when the others had gone outside, he carefully moved his ship to a safer shelter.

Outside they quickly laid the powder in the ships imbedded in a nest of tarred oakum, set the sails, fixed the fuses, lighted them, and sprang back. Running along the beach, they signalled to the crew on board, loudly explaining to one another every chance turn of the ships as the result of the good captain’s nautical skill. But the ships ran aground at the point without the desired explosion having taken place, and this gave Frithjof an opportunity nobly to sacrifice the wadding of his cap to the manufacture of new and better fuses.

With all sails set, the ships stood in toward Sjaelland reef; the Britisher’s huge frigates came heavily lurching in a closed ring, while the foam blew white around the black bows, and the cannon mounted at the head filled the air with their harsh clamor. Nearer and nearer—glowing with red and blue, glittering with gold, the figure-heads of the Albion and the Conqueror rose fathom-high. Grayish masses of sails hid the horizon; the smoke rolled out in great white clouds, and drifted as a veiling mist low over the sun-bright glitter of the waves. Then the deck of Erik’s ship was splintered with a feeble little puff; the oakum caught fire, a red blaze burst forth, and the nimble flames licked the shrouds and ran along the spars, ate their way smouldering along the bolt-rope, then shot like long flashes of lightning into the sails, while the burning canvas shrivelled up, broke, and flew in large black flakes far out to sea. The Danebrog was still waving high on the slender top of the tall schooner-mast, the flag-staff was burned in two, the flag fluttered wildly like red wings eager for battle,—but the flame caught it, and the smoke-blackened ship drifted without rudder or helmsman, dead and powerless, the sport of the winds and breakers. Niels’s ship did not burn so well; the powder had caught fire and some smoke came out, but that was all, and it was not enough.

“Hey, there!” called Niels from the point, “sink her! Point the starboard cannon down the aft hatch and give her a volley!” He bent down and picked up a stone, “Ready, fire!” and the stone flew from his hand.

Erik and Frithjof followed suit, and soon the hull was in splinters. Then Erik’s ship shared the same fate. The wreckage was hauled ashore to make a bonfire. It was piled up with dry seaweed and grass into a burning heap, from which thick smoke issued, while the crystals that hung on the seaweed burst and crackled with the intense heat.

For a long time the boys sat quietly around the bonfire, but suddenly Niels, still gloomy, jumped up and brought all his things from the deck-house, broke them in little bits, and threw them into the flames. Then Erik brought his, and Frithjof also brought some. The flames of the sacrificial pyre leaped so high that Erik was afraid they might be seen from the pasture, and began to smother them with wet seaweed, but Niels stood still, gazing sorrowfully after the smoke that drifted along the beach. Frithjof kept in the background and hummed to himself a heroic lay, which he accompanied secretly, now and then, with a sweeping, bard-like gesture, as if he were playing on the strings of an invisible harp.

At last the fire died down, and Erik and Frithjof went home, while Niels stayed behind to lock the deck-house. That done, he looked cautiously after the others, and then threw key and ribbon far out into the fjord. Erik happened to look around at that moment and saw them fall, but he quickly turned his head away, and began to run a race with Frithjof.

The next day he left.

For a while they missed him sorely and bitterly, for their life had been gradually formed on the supposition that they were three to share it. Three were company, variety, change; two were boredom and nothing at all.

What in the world could two find to do?

Could two shoot at a target or two play ball? They could play Friday and Robinson Crusoe, to be sure, but then who would be the savages?

Such Sundays! Niels was so weary of existence that he began first to review and afterwards, with the aid of Mr. Bigum’s large atlas, to extend his geographical knowledge far beyond the prescribed bounds. Finally, he started to read the whole Bible through and to keep a diary. But Frithjof, in his utter loneliness, stooped so low as to seek consolation in playing with his sisters.

After a while the past became less vivid to them, the longing less keen. Sometimes on a quiet evening, when the sun reddened the wall in the lonely chamber, and the distant, monotonous calling of the cuckoo died down, making the stillness wider and larger, the longing would come creeping into Niels’s mind, stealing its power; but it no longer tortured, it was a vague thing that lay lightly on him and was half sweet like a pain that is passing.

His letters showed the same trend. In the beginning they were full of regrets, questions, and wishes loosely strung together, but soon they grew longer, dealt more with externals, narrated, and were written throughout in a well-formed style that hid between the lines a certain conscious pleasure in being able to write so well.

As time passed, many things that had not dared to show themselves while Erik was there began to raise their heads. Imagination strewed its bright flowers through the humdrum calm of an eventless life. A dream atmosphere enveloped Niels’s mind, bringing with it the provocative fragrance of life, and, hidden in the fragrance, the insidious poison of life-thirsting fancies.

So Niels grows up, and all the influences of his childhood work on the plastic clay. Everything helps to shape it; everything is significant, the real and the dreamed, what is known and what is foreshadowed—all add their touch, lightly but surely, to that tracery of lines which is destined to be first hollowed out and deepened and afterwards flattened out and smoothed away.

Chapter VI

“Mr. Lyhne—Mrs. Boye; Mr. Frithjof Petersen—Mrs. Boye.”

It was Erik who performed the introduction, and it took place in Mikkelsen’s studio, a light, spacious room with a floor of stamped clay and a ceiling twenty-five feet high. At one end of the room two portals led to the yard; at the other, a series of doors opened into the smaller studios within. Everything was gray with the dust of clay and plaster and marble. It had made the cobweb threads overhead as thick as twine and had drawn river maps on the large window-panes. It filled eyes and nose and mouth and outlined muscles, hair, and draperies on the medley of casts that filled the long shelves running round the room and made them look like a frieze from the destruction of Jerusalem. Even the laurels, high trees planted in big tubs in a corner near one of the portals, were powdered till they became grayer than gray olives.

Erik stood at his modelling in the middle of the studio wearing his blouse and with a paper cap on his dark, wavy hair. He had acquired a moustache and looked quite manly beside his two friends, who had just taken their bachelor’s degree and, still pale and tired from their examinations, looked provincially proper with their too new clothes and their too closely cropped heads in rather large caps.

At a little distance from Erik’s scaffolding, Mrs. Boye sat in a low high-backed chair, holding a richly bound book in one hand and a lump of clay in the other. She was small, quite small, and slightly brunette in coloring, with clear, light brown eyes. Her skin had a luminous whiteness, but in the shadows of the rounded cheek and throat it deepened to a dull golden tone which went well with the burnished hair of a dusky hue changing to a tawny blondness in the high lights.

She was laughing when they came in, as a child laughs—a long, merry peal, gleefully loud, delightfully free. Her eyes, too, had the artless gaze of a child, and the frank smile on her lips seemed all the more childlike because the shortness of her upper lip left the mouth slightly open revealing milk-white teeth.

But she was no child.

Was she a little and thirty? The fullness of the chin did not say “No,” nor the ripe glow of the lower lip. Her figure was well rounded with firm, luxuriant outlines accentuated by the dark blue dress, which fitted snugly as a riding-habit around her waist, arms, and bosom. A dull crimson silk kerchief lay in rich folds around her neck and over her shoulders, its ends tucked into the low pointed neck of her bodice. Carnations of the same color were fastened in her hair.

“I am afraid we interrupted a pleasant reading,” said Frithjof with a glance at the richly bound book.

“No, indeed—not in the least. We had been quarrelling for a full hour about what we read,” replied Mrs. Boye. “Mr. Refstrup is a great idealist in everything that has to do with art, while I think it’s dreadfully tiresome—all this about the crude reality that has to be purified and clarified and regenerated and what not until there is just pure nothingness left. Do me the favor of looking at that Bacchante of Mikkelsen’s—the one which deaf Traffelini over there is cutting in marble. If I were to enter her in a descriptive catalogue.... Good heavens! Number 77. A young lady in negligé is standing thoughtfully on both her feet and doesn’t know what to do with a bunch of grapes. She should crush those grapes if I had my way—crush them till the red juice ran down her breast—now shouldn’t she? Don’t you agree with me?” and she caught Frithjof by the sleeve, almost shaking him in her childlike eagerness.

“Yes,” Frithjof admitted; “yes, I do think there is something lacking—something of freshness—of spontaneity—”

“It’s simply naturalness that’s lacking, and good heavens! why can’t we be natural? Oh, I know perfectly well; it’s because we lack the courage. Neither the artists nor the poets are brave enough to own up to human nature as it is. Shakespeare was, though.”

“Well, you know,” came from Erik behind the figure he was modelling, “I never could get along very well with Shakespeare. It seems to me he does too much of it; he whirls you round till you don’t know where you are.”

“I shouldn’t go so far as to say that,” Frithjof demurred; “but on the other hand,” he added with an indulgent smile, “I cannot call the berserker ragings of the great English poet by the name of conscious and intelligent artistic courage.”

“Really? Gracious, how funny you are!” and she laughed long and heartily, laughed till she was tired. She had risen and was strolling about the studio, but suddenly she turned, held out her arms toward Frithjof, and cried, “God bless you!” and laughed again till she was almost bent double.

Frithjof was on the verge of getting offended, but it seemed too fussy to go away angry, especially as he knew himself to be in the right, and moreover the lady was very pretty. So he stayed and began to talk to Erik, all the while trying for Mrs. Boye’s benefit to infuse a tone of mature tolerance into his voice.

Meanwhile Mrs. Boye was roaming about at the other end of the studio, thoughtfully humming a tune, which sometimes rose in a few quick, laughing trills, then sank again into a slow, solemn recitative.

A head of the young Augustus was standing on a large packing-case. She began to dust it. Then she found some clay and made moustaches, a pointed beard, and finally ear-rings, which she fastened on it.

While she was busy with this, Niels managed to stroll in her direction under cover of examining the casts. She had not glanced toward him once, but she must have sensed that he was there, for, without turning, she held out her hand to him and asked him to bring Erik’s hat.

Niels put the hat into her outstretched hand, and she set it on the head of Augustus.

“Good old Shakespeareson,” she said, patting the cheek of the travestied bust, “stupid old fellow who didn’t know what he was doing! Did he just sit there and daub ink till he turned out a Hamlet head without thinking of it—did he?” She lifted the hat from the bust and passed her hand over the forehead in a motherly way as if she would push back its hair. “Lucky old chap, for all that! More than half lucky old poet boy!—For you must admit that he wasn’t at all bad as a writer, this Shakespeare?”

“I confess I have my own opinion of that man,” replied Niels, slightly vexed and blushing.

“Good gracious! Have you too got your own opinion about Shakespeare? Then what is your opinion? Are you for us or against us?” She struck an attitude by the side of the bust and stood there, smiling, with her arm resting on its neck.

“I am unable to say whether the opinion which you are astonished to learn I possess is so fortunate as to acquire significance from the fact of agreeing with your own, but I do think I may say that it is for you and your protégé. At any rate I hold the opinion that he knew what he was doing, weighed what he was doing, and dared it. Many a time he dared in doubt, and the doubt is still apparent. At other times he only half dared, and then he blurred over with new features that which he did not have courage to leave as he first had it.”

And he went on in this strain.

While he was speaking, Mrs. Boye grew more and more restless. She looked nervously first to one side, then to the other, and drummed impatiently with her fingers, while her face was clouded by a troubled look which finally deepened to one of pain.

At last she could contain herself no longer.

“Don’t forget what you were going to say,” she exclaimed, “but I implore you, Mr. Lyhne, stop doing that with your hand—that gesture as if you were pulling teeth! Please do, and don’t let me interrupt you! Now I am all attention again, and I quite agree with you.”

“But then it’s of no use to say any more.”

“Why not?”

“When we agree?”

“When we agree!”

Neither of them meant anything in particular by these last words, but they said them in a significant tone, as if a world of delicate meanings were hidden in them, and looked at each other with a subtle smile, like an afterglow of the wit that had just flashed between them, while each wondered what the other meant and felt slightly annoyed at being so slow of comprehension.

They strolled back to the other end of the room, and Mrs. Boye took her seat on the low chair again.

Erik and Frithjof had talked till they were beginning to be bored with each other and were glad to be joined by the others. Frithjof approached Mrs. Boye and made himself agreeable, while Erik, with the modesty of the host, kept himself in the background.

“If I were curious,” said Frithjof, “I should inquire what the book was that made you and Refstrup quarrel just as we were coming in.”

“Do you inquire?”

“I do.”

“Ergo?”

“Ergo!” replied Frithjof with a humble, acquiescent bow.

She held up the book and solemnly announced: “Helge, Oehlenschläger’s Helge.—And what canto? It was ‘The Mermaid visits King Helge.’—And what verse? It was the lines telling of how Tangkjaer lay down by Helge’s side, and how he couldn’t control his curiosity any longer, but turned

—and at his side, With white arms soft and round, The greatest beauty he espied That e’er on earth was found.

The maid had doffed her cloak of gray; Her lovely limbs were bare, Save for the robe like silver spray That veiled her form so fair.

That is all he allows us to see of the mermaid’s charms, and that is what I am dissatisfied with. I want a luxuriant, glowing picture there; I want to see something so dazzling that it takes my breath away. I want to be initiated into the mysterious beauty of such a mermaid body, and I ask of you, what can I make of lovely limbs with a piece of gauze spread over them? Good heavens! No, she should have been naked as a wave and with the wild lure of the sea about her. Her skin should have had something of the phosphorescence of the summer ocean and her hair something of the black, tangled horror of the seaweed. Am I not right? Yes, and a thousand tints of the water should come and go in the changeful glitter of her eyes. Her pale breast must be cool with a voluptuous coolness, and her limbs have the flowing lines of the waves. The power of the maelstrom must be in her kiss, and the yielding softness of the foam in the embrace of her arms.”

She had talked herself into a glow, and stood there still animated by her theme, looking at her young listeners with large, inquiring child-eyes.

But they said nothing. Niels had flushed scarlet, and Erik looked extremely embarrassed. Frithjof was absolutely carried away and stared at her with the most open admiration, though of the three he was the one least aware how entrancingly beautiful she was, as she stood there with the glamor of her words about her.

Not many weeks had passed before Niels and Frithjof were as constant visitors in Mrs. Boye’s home as Erik Refstrup. Besides her pale niece, they met a great many young people, coming poets, painters, actors, and architects, all artists by virtue of their youth rather than their talent, all full of hope, valiant, lusting for battle, and easily moved to enthusiasm. It is true, there were among them some of those quiet dreamers who bleat wistfully toward the faded ideals of the past; but most of them were full of ideas that were modern at the time, drunk with the theories of modernity, wild with its powers, dazzled by its clear morning light. They were modern, belligerently modern, modern to excess, and perhaps not least because in their inmost hearts there was a strange, instinctive longing which had to be stifled, a longing which the new spirit could not satisfy—world-wide, all-embracing, all-powerful, and all-enlightening though it was.

But, for all that, the exultation of the storm was in their young souls. They had faith in the light of the great stars of thought; they had hope fathomless as the ocean. Enthusiasm bore them on the wings of the eagle, and their hearts expanded with the courage of thousands.

No doubt life would in time wear it all out, lull most of it to sleep; worldly wisdom would break down much, and cowardice would sweep away the rest—but what of it? The time that has gone with happiness does not come back with grief, and nothing the future may bring can wither a day or wipe out an hour in the life that has been lived.

To Niels the world, in those days, began to wear a different aspect. He heard his own vaguest, most secret thoughts loudly proclaimed by ten different mouths. He saw his own unique ideas, which to him had been a misty landscape, with lines blurred by fog, with unknown depths and muted notes,—he saw this landscape unveiled in the bright, clear, sharp colors of day, revealed in every detail, furrowed everywhere by roads, and with people swarming on the roads. There was something strangely unreal in the very fact that the creations of his fancy had become so real.

He was no longer a lonely child-king, reigning over lands that his own dreams had conjured up. No, he was one of a crowd, a man in an army, a soldier in the service of modern ideas. A sword had been placed in his hand, and a banner waved before him.