Chapter III: Part 3

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.

What a wonderful time full of promise! And how strange to hear with his ears the indistinct, mysterious whisper of his soul now sounding through the air of reality like wild, challenging trumpet-blasts, like the thunder of battering-rams against temple walls, like the whizzing of David’s pebble against Goliath’s brow, like exultant fanfares. It was as though he heard himself speaking with strange tongues, with a clarity and power not his own, about that which belonged to his deepest, innermost self.

This gospel of modernity, with its message of dissolution and perfection, did not sound only from the lips of his contemporaries. There were older men with names that carried weight whose eyes were likewise open to the glories of new ideas. These men used more pompous words and had more magnificent conceptions; the names of past centuries swept along in their train; history was with them—the history of the world and the human mind, the _Odyssey_ of thought. These were men who in their youth had been moved by the very things that now thrilled the young people and had borne witness to the spirit within them; but when they heard in their own voices the sound which tells a man crying in the wilderness that he _is_ alone, they were silenced. The young people, however, remembered only that these men had spoken, not that they had been silent; they were ready to bring laurel wreaths and martyr crowns, willing to admire and happy in their admiration. Nor did the objects of their homage repel this late-born appreciation; they put on the crowns in good faith, looked at themselves in a large and historic light, and poetized out of their past the less heroic features; as for the old conviction, which ill winds had cooled, they soon talked it into a glow again.

Niels Lyhne’s family in Copenhagen, more particularly the old Councillor Neergaards, were not at all pleased with the circle their young relative had entered. It was not the modern ideas that worried them, but rather the fact that some of the young men found long hair, great hunting-boots, and a slight slovenliness favorable to the growth of such ideas, and though Niels himself was not at all fanatical on this point, it was annoying to meet him, and even more annoying to have their friends meet him, in company with youths who could be thus characterized. These things, however, were trifles compared to his intimacy with Mrs. Boye and his frequenting the theatre in company with her and her pale niece.

Not that there was anything in particular to be said against Mrs. Boye, but people talked about her. They said a great many things.

She was well born, a Konneroy, and the Konneroys were among the oldest, most finely patrician families in town. Yet she had broken with them. Some said it was on account of a dissipated brother, whom they had sent off to the colonies to get rid of him. Certain it was that the break was complete, and there were even whispers that old Konneroy had cursed her, and afterwards had had an attack of his bad spring asthma.

All this had happened after she became a widow.

Mr. Boye, her husband, had been a pharmaceutist, an _assessor pharmacia_, and had been knighted. When he died he was sixty and owned a barrel and a half of gold. So far as any one knew, they had lived quite happily together. In the first three years of their marriage, the elderly husband had been very much in love, but later they had each lived their own life, he busy with his garden and with keeping up his reputation as a great man at stag parties, she with theatres, romantic music, and German poetry.

Then he died.

When the year of mourning was over, the widow went to Italy and lived there for two or three years, spending most of the time in Rome. There was nothing in the rumor that she had smoked opium in the French club, nor in the story that she had allowed herself to be modelled in the same manner as Paulina Borghese; and the little Russian prince who shot himself while she was in Naples did not commit suicide for her sake. It was true, however, that German artists never tired of serenading her; and it was true that one morning she had donned the dress of an Albanian peasant girl and had seated herself on the steps of a church high up in the Via Sistina, where a newly arrived artist had engaged her to stand as a model for him with a pitcher on her head and a little brown boy holding her hand. At least there was such a picture hanging on her wall.

On the way home from Italy she met a countryman, a noted clever critic, who would rather have been a poet. A negative, sceptical nature, people called him, a keen mind, one who dealt harshly and pitilessly with others because he dealt harshly and pitilessly with himself and supposed his brutality to be justified by that fact. Nevertheless, he was not quite what they believed him to be; he was not so repellently uncompromising nor so robustly consistent as he appeared. Although he was always in a state of strife against the idealistic tendencies of the age and called them by more disparaging names, still he felt drawn toward these dreamy, ethereal ideals, this blue-blue mysticism, these unattainable heights and evanescent lights; they appealed to him more than the earth-born opinions for which he did battle and in which, most of the time, he believed.

Rather against his will, he fell in love with Mrs. Boye, but he did not tell her so, for his was not a young and open love, nor a hopeful one. He loved her as a creature of another, a finer and happier race than his own, and there was in his love a rancor, an instinctive rage against everything in her that bore the marks of race.

He looked with hostile, jealous eyes upon her sentiments and opinions, her tastes and views of life. He fought with every weapon he possessed, with subtle eloquence, with heartless logic and harsh authority, with derision wrapped in pity, to bring her over to his side, and he won. But when truth had conquered, and she had become like him, he saw that the victory was too complete, that he had loved her as she was, with her illusions and prejudices, her dreams and her errors, and not as she had now become. Dissatisfied with himself, with her, and with everything in his own country, he went away and did not return. But then she had just begun to love him.

This relationship, of course, gave people food for talk, and they made the most of it. The Councillor’s wife told Niels about it in the tone that aged virtue uses in speaking of young error, but Niels took it in a manner that offended and horrified the old lady. He replied in a high strain about the tyranny of society and the freedom of the individual, about the plebeian respectability of the mob and the nobility of passion.

From that day on he went but seldom to the home of his solicitous relatives, but Mrs. Boye saw him all the more frequently.

_Chapter VII_

It was an evening in spring; the sun threw a red light into the room, as it sank toward the horizon. The wings of the windmill on the embankment drew shadows over the window-panes and the walls, coming, going, in a monotonous swinging from darkness to light: a moment of darkness, two moments of light.

At the window, Niels Lyhne sat gazing through the darkly burnished elms on the embankment to the fiery clouds beyond. He had been in the country, walking under blossoming beeches, past green rye-fields, over flower-decked meadows. Everything had been so fair and light, the sky so blue, the Sound so bright, the women he met so wondrously beautiful. Singing, he had followed the forest path, but soon the words had died out of his song, then the rhythm was lost, at last the tones were muted, and silence came over him like a fit of giddiness. He closed his eyes, and still he felt how his body drank the light, and his nerves vibrated with it. Every breath he drew of the cool, intoxicating air sent his blood rushing more wildly through the quivering, helpless veins. He felt as though all the teeming, budding, growing, germinating forces of spring were mysteriously striving to vent themselves through him in a mighty cry, and he thirsted for this cry, listened for it, till his listening grew into a vague, turgid longing.

Now, as he sat there by the window, the longing awoke in him again.

He yearned for a thousand tremulous dreams, for cool and delicate images, transparent tints, fleeting scents, and exquisite music from streams of highly strung, tensely drawn silvery strings—and then silence, the innermost heart of silence, where the waves of air never bore a single stray tone, but where all was rest unto death, steeped in the calm glow of red colors and the languid warmth of fiery fragrance.—This was not what he longed for, but the images glided forth from his mood and submerged all else until he turned from them to follow his own train of thought again.

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain-dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course. This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something—life, love, passion—so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!

Involuntarily he made a gesture as if to ward it off with his hand. After all, he was afraid in his inmost heart of this mighty thing called passion. This storm-wind sweeping away everything settled and authorized and acquired in humanity as if it were dead leaves. He did not like it! This roaring flame squandering itself in its own smoke—no, _he_ wanted to burn slowly.

And yet this living on at half speed in quiet waters, always in sight of land, seemed so paltry. Would that the storm and waves would come! If he only knew how, his sails should fly to the yards for a merry run over the Spanish Main of life! Farewell to the slowly dripping days, farewell to the pleasant little hours! Peace be with you, you dull moods that have to be furbished with poetry before you can shine, you lukewarm emotions that have to be clothed in warm dreams and yet freeze to death! May you go to your own place! I am headed for a coast where sentiments twine themselves like luxuriant vines around every fibre of the heart—a rank forest; for every vine that withers, twenty are in blossom; for each one that blossoms, a hundred are in bud.

Oh, that I were there!

He grew tired of his longing and sick of himself. He needed people. But of course Erik was not in now. Frithjof had been with him all morning, and it was too late for the theatre. Nevertheless he went out and strolled dejectedly through the streets.

Perhaps Mrs. Boye would be in. This was not one of her evenings and it was rather late. Suppose he try, anyway.

Mrs. Boye was in. She was home alone. Too tired from the spring air to go to a dinner party with her niece, she had preferred to lie on the sofa, drinking strong tea and reading Heine; but now she was tired of verses and wanted to play lotto.

So they played lotto. Fifteen, twenty, thirty-seven, a long series of figures, the rattling of dice in a bag, and an irritating sound of balls rolling on the floor in the apartment above them....

“This is not amusing,” said Mrs. Boye, when they had played for a long time without covering any numbers. “Is it?—No!” she answered herself and shook her head disconsolately. “But what else can we play?”

She folded her hands before her on the disks and looked at Niels with a hopeless, inquiring gaze.

Niels really did not know.

“Anything but music!” She bent her face down over her hands and touched her lips to the knuckles, one after the other, the whole row, then back again. “This is the most wretched existence in the world,” she said, looking up. “It isn’t possible to have anything like an adventure, and the small happenings that life has to offer are surely not enough to keep one’s spirits up. Don’t you feel that, too?”

“Well, I can’t suggest anything better than that we act like the Caliph in Arabian Nights. With that silk kimono you are wearing, if you would only wind a white cloth around your head, and let me have your large Indian shawl, we could easily pass for two merchants from Mossul.”

“And what should we two unfortunate merchants do?”

“Go down to Storm Bridge, hire a boat for twenty pieces of gold, and sail up the dark river.”

“Past the sand-chests?”

“Yes, with colored lamps on the masthead.”

“Like Ganem, the Slave of Love.—Oh, I know that line of thought so well! It’s exactly like a man—to get so terribly busy building up scenery and background, forgetting the action itself for the setting. Have you never noticed that women live much less in their imagination than men? We don’t know how to taste pleasure in our fancy or escape from pain with a fanciful consolation. What is, is. Imagination—it is so innocuous. When we get as old as I am now, then sometimes we content ourselves with the poverty-stricken comedy of imagination. But we ought never to do it—never!”

She settled herself languidly on the sofa, half reclining, her hand under her chin, her elbow supported by the cushions. She gazed dreamily out before her, and seemed quite lost in melancholy thoughts.

Niels was silent too, and the room was so quiet that the restless hopping of the canary bird was plainly heard; the great clock ticked and ticked its way through the silence, louder and louder, and a string in the open piano, suddenly vibrating, emitted a long, low, dying note that blended with the softly singing stillness.

She looked very young as she lay there, flooded from head to foot in the soft yellow light of the lamp above her. There was something alluring in the incongruity of her beautiful, strongly moulded throat and matronly Charlotte Corday cap with the frank child-eyes and the little mouth opening over milk-white teeth.

Niels looked at her admiringly.

“How strange it is to long for one’s self!” she said; “and yet I often, so often, long for myself as a young girl. I love her as one whom I had been very close to and shared life and happiness and everything with, and then had lost while I stood helpless. What a wonderful time that was! You cannot conceive the purity and delicacy of such a young girl’s soul when she is just beginning to love for the first time. It can only be told in music, but you can think of it as a festival in a fairy palace, where the air shines like blushing silver. It is filled with cool flowers, and they change color, their tints are slowly shifting. Everything is song, jubilant and yet soft. Dim presentiments gleam and glow like mystic wine in exquisite dream-goblets. It is all song and fragrance; a thousand scents are wafted through the palace. Oh, I could weep when I think of it, and when I think that if it could all come back to me, by a miracle, just as it was, it would no longer bear me up; I should fall through like a cow trying to dance on cobwebs.”

“No, quite the contrary,” said Niels eagerly, and his voice trembled, as he went on: “no, the love you could feel now would be much finer, much more spiritual than that young girl’s.”

“Spiritual! I hate this spiritual love. The flowers growing from that soil are made of cotton cloth; they don’t even grow, they are taken from the head and stuck in the heart, because the heart has no flowers of its own. That is exactly what I envy in the young girl: everything about her is genuine, she does not fill the goblet of her love with the makeshift of imagination. Do not suppose, because her love is shot through and shadowed over by imagined pictures and again pictures in a great, teeming vagueness, that she cares more for those images than for the earth she walks upon. It is only that all her senses and instincts and powers are reaching out for love everywhere—everywhere, without ever feeling weary. But she does not revel in her fancies, nor even so much as rest in them; no, she is very much more genuine, so genuine that in her own unwitting manner she very often becomes innocently cynical. You have no idea, for instance, of what intoxicating pleasure a young girl finds in breathing secretly the odor of cigars that clings to the clothes of the man she loves—that is a thousand times more to her than a whole conflagration of fancies. I despise imagination. What good is it, when our whole being yearns toward the heart of another, to be admitted only to the chilly ante-room of his imagination! And that is what happens so often. How often we have to submit to letting the man we love deck us out with his imagination, put a halo around our head, tie wings on our shoulders, and wrap us in a star-spangled robe! Then at last he finds us worthy of his love, when we masquerade in this costume; but then we can’t be ourselves, because we are too dressed up, and because men confuse us by kneeling in the dust and worshipping us instead of just taking us as we are and simply loving us.”

Niels was quite bewildered. He had picked up the handkerchief she dropped and sat there intoxicating himself with its perfume. He was not at all prepared to have her look at him in that impatient, questioning way, just as he was absorbed in studying her hand, but he managed to answer that he thought a man could not give a finer proof of his love than this—that he had to justify himself to himself for loving a human being so unutterably, and therefore set her so high and surrounded her with a nimbus of divinity.

“But that is just what I find so insulting,” said Mrs. Boye, “as if we were not divine enough in ourselves.”

Niels smiled complacently.

“No, you mustn’t smile, I’m not joking. It is really very serious, for this adoration is at bottom tyrannical in its fanaticism; it cramps us in a mould of man’s ideal. Slash a heel and clip a toe! Anything in us that doesn’t square with man’s conception has to be eliminated, perhaps not by force, but by ignoring it, systematically relegating it to oblivion, and never giving it a chance to develop, while the qualities we don’t possess or that aren’t in the least characteristic of us are forced to the rankest growth by lauding them to the skies, taking for granted that we have them in the fullest measure, and making them the cornerstone on which man builds his love. I say that we are subjected to a drill; man’s love puts us through a drill. And we submit to it, even those who love no one submit to it, contemptible minions that we are!”

She had risen from her reclining posture and looked threateningly at Niels.

“If I were beautiful!—oh, I mean ravishingly beautiful, more alluring than any woman who ever lived, so that all who saw me were struck with unquenchable, agonizing love as by witchcraft—then I would use the power of my beauty to make them adore _me_, not their traditional bloodless ideal, but myself, as I am, every inch, every line of _my_ being, every gleam of _my_ nature!”

She had risen now to her full height, and Niels thought he ought to go, but he stood turning over in his mind a great many audacious words, which, after all, he did not dare to utter. At last, summoning all his courage, he seized her hand and kissed it, but she gave him her other hand to kiss too, and then he could say nothing more than: “Good-night.”

Niels Lyhne had fallen in love with Mrs. Boye, and he was happy because of it.

When he went home through the same streets where he had strolled so dejectedly that same evening, it seemed to him that ages had passed since he walked there. His bearing had acquired a new poise, a grave decorum, and when he carefully buttoned his gloves, he did so with a subconscious sense that he had undergone a great change which somehow demanded that he should button his gloves—carefully.

Too much absorbed to think of sleep, he went up on the embankment.

It seemed to him that his thoughts flowed very quietly. He was surprised at his own calm, but he did not have perfect faith in it. He felt as though something in the very depths of his being were bubbling, very softly, but persistently: welling up, seething, pressing on, but far, far away. He was in a mood as one who waits for something that must come from afar, a distant music that must draw near, little by little, singing, murmuring, frothing, rushing, roaring, and whirling down over him, catching him up he knew not how, carrying him he knew not whither, coming on as a flood, breaking as a surf, and then—

But now he was calm. There was only the tremulous singing in the distance; otherwise all was peace and tranquillity.

He loved—he said it aloud to himself again and again. The words had such a strange ring of dignity, and held such deep meanings. They meant that he was no longer a captive in the imagined world of his childhood, nor was he the sport of aimless longings and misty dreams. He had escaped from the elf-land that had grown up with him and around him, encircling him with a hundred arms, blindfolding him with a hundred hands. He had broken away from its grasp and had become master of himself, and though it reached after him, implored him with dumb appealing eyes, and beckoned him with white fluttering garments, its power was dead as a dream killed by day, a mist dispelled by the sun. Was not his young love day and sun and all the world? He had been strutting about in royal purple not yet spun, and had taken his seat on a throne not yet built; but now he stood on a high mountain, looking out over the world that stretched before him like a plain. In this world thirsting for song he had as yet no existence and was not even awaited. What a rapturous thought it was that, in all this silent, wakeful infinity, not a breath of his spirit had stirred a leaf or raised a ripple. It was all his to win, and he knew that he could win it. He felt strong and all-conquering as only those can feel whose songs are still unsung, throbbing in their own breast.

The soft spring air was full of perfumes, not saturated with them as the summer nights may be, but rather as it were streaked—now with the pungent aroma from resinous young poplars, now with the cool breath of late violets, and again with the sweet almond odor of cherry-trees. The scents came and mingled, were wafted away and dissolved; sometimes one would quicken and free itself from the others, only to die as suddenly or to vanish slowly on a breath of wind. Light moods flitted across his mind like the shadows from this fitful dance of scents, and as the perfumes mocked his senses by coming and going as they listed, so his mind was baffled by his vain longing to be borne aloft, calmly resting in tranquil flight on the slowly gliding wings of a mood. For his moods were not yet birds with wings strong enough to carry him; they were down and feathers only, drifting on the wind, falling like snow, and melting.

He tried to recall the picture of her as she lay on the sofa and talked to him, but it would not come. He saw her vanishing in a lane of trees; or sitting and reading with her hat on, holding one of the large white leaves in her gloved fingers, just on the point of turning it, then turning leaf after leaf. He saw her entering her carriage in the evening after the theatre and nodding to him behind the pane; then the carriage drove away, and he stood looking after it; it kept on driving, and he still followed it with his eyes. Indifferent faces came and spoke to him, figures he had not seen for years passed down the street, turned and looked after him, and still the carriage kept on driving, and he could not get rid of it, could not think of other pictures because of that carriage. Then, just as he was getting nervous with impatience, it came: the yellow light from the lamp, the eyes, the mouth, the hand under the chin, as plainly as if it were all before him there in the darkness.

How lovely she was, how mild, how fair! He loved her with a desire that knelt at her feet, begging for all this seductive beauty. Cast yourself from your throne down to me! Make yourself my slave! Put the chain around your neck with your own hands, but not in sport,—I want to pull the chain, I demand submission in your every limb, bondage in your eyes! Oh, that I could draw you to me with a love-philtre, but, no, a love-philtre would compel you, you would yield to its power without volition, and I want none to be your master but myself. Your will must be broken in your hands, and you must hold it out humbly to me. You shall be my queen, and I your slave, but my slave’s foot must be on your queenly neck. There is no lunacy in this desire, for is it not in the nature of a woman’s love to be proud and strong and to bend? It is love, I know, to be weak and to reign.

He felt that he could never draw to himself the part of her soul that was one with the luxuriant, glowing, sensuous-soft aspect of her beauty; it would never clasp him in those gleaming Juno arms, never in passionate weakness give that voluptuous neck to his kisses—never in all eternity. He saw it all clearly. He could win, perhaps he already had won, the young girl in her, and he was sure that she, the full-blooded beauty, felt this fair young creature who had died within her mysteriously stirring in her living grave to clasp him with slender maiden arms and meet him with timid maiden lips. But his love was not that. He loved the very thing in her that he could not win, loved this neck with its warm, flower-like whiteness gleaming with a dew of gold under the dusky hair. He sobbed with yearning passion and wrung his hands with impotent desire, threw his arms around a tree, leaned his cheek against the bark, and wept.

_Chapter VIII_

There was in Niels Lyhne’s nature a lame reflectiveness, child of an instinctive shrinking from decisive action, grandchild of a subconscious sense that he lacked personality. He was always struggling against this reflectiveness, sometimes goading himself by calling it vile names, then again decking it out as a virtue that was a part of his inmost self and was bound up with all his possibilities and powers. But whatever he made of it, and however he looked upon it, he hated it as a secret infirmity, which he might perhaps hide from the world, but never from himself; it was always there to humiliate him whenever he was alone with himself. How he envied the audacity that rushes confidently into words, never heeding that words bring actions, and actions bring consequences—until those consequences are at its heels. People who possessed it always seemed to him like centaurs—man and horse cast in a single mould. With them impulse and leap were one, whereas he was divided into rider and horse—impulse one thing, leap something very different.

Whenever he pictured himself declaring his love for Mrs. Boye—and he always had to picture everything—he could plainly see himself in the scene, his attitude, his every motion, his whole figure from the front, from the side, and from the back. He could see himself falter with the feverish irresolution that robbed him of his presence of mind and paralyzed him, while he stood there awaiting her answer as if it were a blow forcing him to his knees, instead of a shuttlecock to be thrown back in ever so many ways and returned in as many more.

He thought of speaking, and he thought of writing, but he never managed simply to blurt it out. It was said only in veiled declarations and in a half-feigned lyric passion that made a pose of being carried away into hot words and fantastic hopes. Nevertheless, a certain intimacy of a strange kind grew up between them, born of a youth’s humble love, a dreamer’s ardent longing, and a woman’s pleasure in being the inaccessible object of romantic desire. Their relation took the form of a myth that arose, neither of them knew how, a pale, still myth bred in a drawing-room. Its heroine was a fair woman who had loved in her early youth one of the great men in the world of thought. He had gone away to die in a strange land, forgotten and forsaken. And the fair woman sat sorrowing for many long years, though none knew her suffering; solitude alone was sacred enough to look upon her grief. Then came a youth who called the departed great one master, who was filled with his spirit and enthusiastic for his work. And he loved the sorrowing woman. To her it seemed that the dead happy days rose from their grave and came to life again. A sweet, strange bewilderment came over her; past and present were blurred in the silvery mist of a shadowy dream-day, in which she loved the youth, partly as himself and partly as the image of another, and gave him the half of her soul. But he must tread softly, lest the dream-bubble should burst; he must put a stern bar to all hot earthly longings, lest they should dispel the tender twilight and wake her to sorrow again.

Sheltered by this myth, their intimacy gradually took on a stable form. They called each other by their Christian names and were Niels and Tema to each other when they were alone, while the presence of the niece was reduced to a minimum. To be sure, Niels sometimes tried to break through the accepted barriers, but Mrs. Boye was so much the stronger that she could easily and gently quell all such attempts at insubordination, and Niels had to submit and fall back for a time on this fanciful passion with real tableaux. Their relation never ran out into a platonic flatness; nor did it sink to rest in the monotony of habit. Rest was the word that least of all described it. Niels Lyhne’s hope was never weary, and though it was gently suppressed whenever it would flare up in a demand, that only made it smolder more hotly than ever in secret. And how Mrs. Boye would feed the fire by her thousand and one coquetries, her provocative simplicity, and her naked courage in discussing the most delicate subjects! Besides, the game was not entirely in her hands, for there were times when her blood would dream in its idleness of rewarding this half-tamed devotion by lavishing on it the fullest rapture of love in order to rejoice in its wondering happiness. But such a dream was not easily extinguished, and the next time Niels came she would meet him with the nervousness of conscious sin, a shyness born of wrongdoing, a sweet shame that made the air strangely tremulous with passion.

There was yet another thing that gave their intimacy a certain tension. Niels Lyhne’s love possessed so much virility that he chivalrously held himself back from taking in imagination what the reality denied him, and even in that separate world where everything did his bidding he respected Mrs. Boye as if she were actually present.

Hence their relation was well buttressed from both sides, and there was no immediate danger that it would fall to pieces. Indeed, it seemed made for a nature at once brooding and athirst for life such as Niels Lyhne’s, and though it was only a game, it was a game of realities, sufficient to give him that undercurrent of passion which he needed.