Chapter IV: Part 4

Niels Lyhne was bent upon being a poet, and there was much in the external circumstances of his life to lead his thoughts in that direction and stimulate his faculties for the task. So far, however, he had little but his dreams to write about, and nowhere is there more sameness and monotony than in the world of imagination; for in that dreamland, which seems so boundless and so infinitely varied, there are, in fact, only a few short beaten paths where everybody walks and from which no one ever strays. People may differ, but in their dreams they do not differ; there they always attain the three or four things that they desire—it may be with more or less speed and completeness, but they always attain them in the end. No one seriously dreams of himself as empty-handed. Therefore no one ever discovers himself in his dreams or becomes conscious through them of his individuality. Our dreams tell nothing of how we are satisfied when we win the treasure, how we relinquish it when lost, how we feast on it while it is ours, where we turn when it is taken from us.

Niels Lyhne’s poetry had hitherto been nothing but the expression of an esthetic personality which, in a general way, found spring teeming, the ocean wide, love erotic, and death melancholy. He himself was not in his poems; he merely put the verses together. But now a change came over him. Now that he wooed a woman and wanted her to love him,—him, 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, wanted her to love him and not the idealized Nicolaus of his dreams, who had a proud bearing and confident manners, and was a little older,—now he began to take a vital interest in this Niels whom he had hitherto walked about with as a slightly unpresentable friend. He had been so busy decking himself with the qualities he lacked that he had not had time to take note of those he possessed, but now he began to piece his own self together from scattered memories and impressions of his childhood and from the most vivid moments of his life. He saw with pleased surprise how it all fitted together, bit by bit, and was welded into a much more familiar personality than the one he had chased after in his dreams. This figure was far more genuine, far stronger, and more richly endowed. It was no mere dead stump of an ideal, but a living thing, full of infinite shifting possibilities playing through it and shaping it to a thousandfold unity. Good God, he _had_ powers that could be used just as they were! He _was_ Aladdin, and there was not a thing he had been storming the clouds for but it had fallen right down into his turban.

Now came a happy time for Niels, the glorious time when the mighty impulse of growth sweeps us jubilantly past the dead points in our own nature; when we are filled to bursting with a strength that makes us eager to put our shoulders to mountains if need be, while we build away bravely on the Tower of Babel, which is meant to pierce the sky, but ends in being just a squatty structure that we go on all our lives adding to—now a timid spire, now a freakish bay window.

Everything was changed; his nature, his faculties, and his work fitted into one another like cogged wheels. He could never think of stopping to rejoice in his art, for a thing was no sooner finished than it was cast aside: he had outgrown it even while he worked on it, and it became a mere step that led upward to an ever-receding goal, one of many steps on a road he had left behind him and forgotten even while it resounded with his footfall.

While he felt himself borne along by new impulses and new thoughts to greater power and wider vision, he grew more and more solitary. One after another of his old friends and comrades fell back and vanished from his ken, for he lost interest in them when he saw less and less difference between these men of the opposition and that majority which they attacked. Everything seemed to him to melt together in one great hostile mass of boredom. What did they write when they gave the call to battle? Pessimistic verses in which they declared that dogs were often more faithful than men and jailbirds more honest than those who walked freely about, eloquent odes to the effect that green woods and brown heath were preferable to dusty cities, stories of peasant virtue and rich men’s vice, of red-blooded nature and anemic civilization, the narrowness of age and the divine right of youth. What modest demands they made when they wrote! They were at least bolder when they talked within four safe walls.

No, when his time came, he would give them music—a clarion call!

His older friendships suffered too, especially that with Frithjof. The fact was that Frithjof, who had a very positive nature, a good head for systems, and a broad back for dogmas, had read a little too much Heiberg, and had taken it all for gospel truth, never suspecting that the makers of systems are clever folk who fashion their systems from their books and not their books from their systems. It is a well-known fact that young people who have committed themselves to a system generally become great dogmatists, because of the praiseworthy affection youth often bears to what is finished and finite. And when you have become the possessor of the whole truth, it would be unpardonable to keep it for yourself alone and to allow less fortunate fellow creatures to go their own misguided way, instead of leading and instructing them, pruning away their wild shoots with loving severity, forcing them up against the wall with gentle coercion, and pointing out to them the lines along which they must grow, in order that they may sometime, when they have been formed into correct and artistic espaliers, thank you, even if tardily, for the trouble you have taken.

Niels was fond of saying that he liked nothing better than criticism, but the truth was that he preferred admiration, and he certainly would not brook criticism from Frithjof, whom he had always regarded as his serf, and who had always been delighted to wear the livery of his opinions and his principles. And here he was trying to play the equal and to masquerade in a self-chosen mantle! Of course he must be snubbed, and Niels first tried, in a tone of good-natured superiority, to make Frithjof ridiculous in his own eyes, but when that would not work he had recourse to insolent paradoxes, which he would scorn to discuss, simply throwing them out in all their grotesque hideousness and then retiring behind a teasing silence.

In this way they grew apart.

With Erik he got on better. Their boyish friendship had always kept a certain reserve, a kind of spiritual modesty, and this had saved them from the too great familiarity that is so dangerous to friendship. They had been enthusiastic together in the festival hall of their souls and had chatted intimately in the drawing-room, but they had never made free with each other’s bed-rooms, bath-rooms, and other private places in the mansion of their souls.

It was the same now; indeed, the reserve was, if anything, stricter, at least on Niels’s part, but that did not lessen their friendship, the cornerstone of which, now as of old, was Niels Lyhne’s admiration for Erik’s spirit and audacity, his way of seeming at home with life, and his readiness to grasp and hold. Yet Niels could not conceal from himself that the friendship was extremely one-sided. Not that Erik was wanting in real affection or faith in him—far from it. No one could think more highly of Niels than Erik did; he considered him so vastly his own superior in intellect that he never dreamed of criticizing, but this blind admiration led him to place Niels and his work and interests too far beyond the horizon his own eyes could scan. He was sure that Niels would go far along the road he had chosen, but he was equally sure that his own feet had nothing to do on that path, nor did he ever attempt to set them there.

Niels felt that this was rather hard; for though Erik’s ideals were not his, and though Erik in his art tried to express a romanticism or a romantic sentimentalism with which he was not in accord, he could still feel a broader sympathy by virtue of which he faithfully followed his friend’s development, rejoiced with him when he gained a step, and helped him to hope when he stood still.

In this way their friendship was one-sided, and it was not strange that Niels should have his eyes opened to the lack in it just at the time when his own mind was struggling with new ideas, and he felt the need of pouring out his thoughts to a sympathetic listener. It made him bitter, and he began to examine more closely this friend whom he had always judged so leniently. A dreary sense of loneliness came over him as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and from the old days seemed to fall away from him and let him go his own way, forgotten and forsaken. The door to the past was barred, and he stood outside, empty-handed and alone; whatever he needed and desired he must win for himself—new friends and new shelter, new affections and new memories.

* * * * *

For more than a year, Mrs. Boye had been Niels’s only real companion, when a letter from his mother, telling him that his father was dangerously ill, called him back to Lönborggaard.

When he arrived, his father was dead.

The consciousness that for several years he had longed very little for his home weighed on Niels almost like a crime. He had often enough visited it in his thoughts, but always as a guest with the dust of other lands on his clothes and the memories of other places in his heart: he had never longed for it in passionate homesickness as for the fair sanctuary of his life, nor pined to kiss its soil and rest under its roof. Now he repented that he had been faithless to his home, and, oppressed as he was by his grief, he felt his remorse darkened by a sense that in some mysterious way he was an accessory to what had happened, as though his faithlessness had called death in. He wondered how he could ever have lived contentedly away from this home which now drew him with such strange power. With every fibre of his being he clung to it, in an infinite, desolate longing, uneasy because he could not become one with it as fully as he would, miserable because the thousand memories that called from every corner and every bush, from sounds and myriad scents, from the play of light and from the silence itself,—because all these things called with such distant voices that he could not grasp them in the strength and fullness he craved; they seemed only to whisper in his soul like the rustling of leaves that fall to the ground and the lapping of waves that flow on and ever on....

Happy in his sorrow is he who at the death of one dear to him can weep all his tears over the emptiness, the desolation, and the loneliness. Sorer and bitterer are the tears with which you try to atone for the past when you have failed in love toward one who is gone and to whom you can never make amends for what you have sinned. For now they come back to you: not only the hard words, the subtly poisoned retorts, the harsh censure, and the unreasoning anger, but even unkind thoughts that were not put into words, hasty judgments that merely passed through your mind, unseen shruggings of the shoulder, and hidden smiles full of contempt and impatience, they all come back like malign arrows, sinking their barb deep in your own breast, their dull barb, for the point has been broken off in the heart that is no more. There is nothing you can expiate any more, nothing. Now there is abundance of love in your heart, now that it is too late. Go now to the cold grave with your full heart! Does it bring you any nearer? Plant flowers and bind wreaths—does that help you?

At Lönborggaard they were binding wreaths; there, too, they were haunted by memories of hours when love had been silenced by harsher voices; to them, too, the stern lines about the closed mouth of the grave spoke of remorse.

It was a dark, sad time, but it held a ray of light in that it brought mother and son more closely together than they had been for many, many years; for in spite of the great love they bore to each other, they had always been, as it were, on their guard each toward the other, and there had been a certain reserve in their intercourse, from the time when Niels grew too large to sit on his mother’s knee. He had shrunk from the excitable and high-strung side of her nature, while she had felt something alien in the timidity and hesitation of his. But now life itself, which keys up and tones down and harmonizes, had prepared their hearts, and would soon give them wholly to each other.

Scarcely two months after the funeral, Mrs. Lyhne fell violently ill, and for a long time her life was in danger. The anxiety that filled these weeks seemed to force their earlier grief into the background, and when Mrs. Lyhne began to get better, it seemed to both her and Niels that years had been thrust in between them and the freshly made grave. Especially to Mrs. Lyhne the time seemed long. While she was ill she had been sure that she was going to die and had been very much afraid of death. Even now that she had begun to recover, and the doctor had declared the danger to be past, she could not rid herself of her gloomy thoughts.

It was a dreary convalescence, in which her strength returned as it seemed reluctantly, drop by drop. She felt no gentle and healing drowsiness, but rather a restless languor with a depressing sense of weakness and an incessant, impotent longing for strength.

After a while there was a change; her recovery was more rapid, and her strength came back. Still the idea that she and life were soon to part did not leave her, but lay like a shadow over her and held her captive in a perturbed and yearning melancholy.

One evening she was sitting alone in the summer parlor, gazing out through the wide-open doors. The trees of the garden hid the gold and crimson of the sunset, but in one spot the trunks parted to reveal a bit of fiery sky, from which a sunburst of long, deep golden rays shot out, waking green tints and bronze-brown reflections in the dark leafy masses.

High above the restless tree-tops, the clouds drifted dark against a smoke-red sky, and as they hurried on, they left behind them little loosened tufts, tiny little strips of cloud which the sunlight steeped in a wine-colored glow.

Mrs. Lyhne sat listening to the wind in the trees. Her head moved very slightly in time with the uneven swelling and sinking of each gust, as it came rushing, swept on boisterously, and died away. But her eyes were far away, farther even than the clouds they gazed on. Pale in her black widow’s garb, she sat there with a piteous expression of unrest about her faintly colored lips, while her hands fidgeted with the thick little book on her lap. It was Rousseau’s _Héloïse_. Other books were piled up around her: Schiller, Staffeldt, Evald, and Novalis, and large portfolios with prints of old churches and ruins and mountain lakes.

Now she heard doors opening and shutting, then steps that seemed to seek some one in the inner rooms, and presently Niels came in. He had been for a long walk by the fjord. His cheeks were ruddy from the fresh air, and the wind was still in his hair.

Outside, the blue-gray colors had prevailed in the sky, and a few heavy drops of rain splashed against the windows.

Niels told of how high the waves came rolling in and how they had washed the seaweed up on the beach, and about what he had seen and whom he had met. As he talked, he gathered up the books, closed the doors to the garden, and fastened the windows. Then he sat down on the low stool at his mother’s feet, took her hand in his, and laid his cheek on her knee.

It had grown quite black outside; the rain beat like hail and ran in streams down casements and panes.

“Do you remember,” said Niels after a long silence,—“do you remember how often we sat like this in the dusk and went out in search of adventures, while father was talking to Jens Overseer in his office, and Duysen was rattling the teacups in the dining-room? And when the lamp was brought in, we both woke up from our strange adventures to the sheltered comfort around us, yet I can well remember that I always thought the story did not stop when we did, but went on unfolding somewhere under the hills on the way to Ringkjöbing.”

He did not see his mother’s wistful smile, but he felt her hand passing gently over his hair.

“Do you remember,” she said after a while, “how often you promised me that when you grew up you would sail out in a big ship and bring me back all the treasures of the world?”

“Do I remember! I was to bring hyacinths, because you loved hyacinths so much, and a palm like the one that died, and pillars of gold and marble. There were so many pillars in your stories, always. Do you remember?”

“I have been waiting for that ship—no, sit still, dear, you don’t understand me—it was not for myself, it was the ship of your fortune.... I hoped your life would be full and glorious, that you would travel on shining paths.... Fame—everything—No, not that, if you would only be one of those who fight for the greatest. I don’t know how it is, but I am so tired of commonplace happiness and commonplace goals. Do you understand me?”

“You wanted me to be a Sunday child, mother dear, one of those who do not pull in harness with others, but have their own heaven to be saved in, and their own place of damnation all to themselves, too.—We wanted to have flowers on board, didn’t we? Gorgeous flowers to strew over a bleak world; but the ship did not come, and they were poor birds, Niels and his mother, were they not?”

“Have I hurt you, dear? Why, it was nothing but dreams; don’t mind them!”

Niels was silent a long time, for he felt a shyness about what he wanted to say. “Mother,” he said, “we are not so poor as you think. Some day the ship will come in.—If you would only believe that and believe in me.... Mother—I am a poet—really—through my whole soul. Don’t imagine this is childish dreams or dreams fed by vanity. If you could feel my grateful pride in what’s best in me—my humble joy in saying this, so little personal, so far from vainglory, you would believe it just as I want you to believe it. Dearest, dearest! 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 myself and my gift. Nothing but the best shall be good enough. No compromise, mother! When I weigh what I have 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! Do you see why I have to promise? It’s my gratitude for my riches that drives me to make vows, and you must receive them. Then if I fail, it will be a sin against you, for it’s all owing to you that my soul is like a high-vaulted room—your dreams and longings have given me the impulse to growth, and your sympathies and your unsatisfied thirst for beauty have consecrated me to my life-work.”

Mrs. Lyhne wept silently. She felt herself growing pale with rapture. Softly she laid both hands on her son’s head, but he drew them gently to his lips and kissed them.

“You have made me so happy, Niels! Then my life has not been one long, useless sigh, if I have helped to lead you on as I hoped and dreamed so ardently—good heavens! how often I have dreamed it!—And yet there is so much sadness mixed in my joy, Niels! To think that my fondest wish should be fulfilled, the thing I have longed for so many years.... Such things happen only when life is almost done.”

“You mustn’t talk like that, you mustn’t! Why, everything is going on well, and you are getting stronger every day, mother dear, are you not?”

“It is so hard to die,” she said under her breath. “Do you know what I was thinking of in those long sleepless nights, when death seemed so terribly near? I thought the bitterest of all was to know that there were so many great and beautiful things out in the world which I should have to leave behind without ever having seen them. I thought of the thousands and thousands of souls they had lifted up and filled with life and joy, while for me they had not existed. It seemed to me that my soul would fly away poverty-stricken on feeble wings, without any golden memories to carry with it as a reflection from the glories of its homeland, because it had only been sitting in the chimney-corner listening to stories about the wonderful world.—Niels, no one can imagine what agony it is to lie imprisoned in a dull, dark sick-room and struggle, in your feverish fancies, to call up before you the beauties of lands you have never seen—snowy Alpine peaks above blue-black mountain lakes, and sparkling rivers between vine-clad banks, and long lines of mountains with ruins peeping out of the woods, and then lofty halls with marble gods—and never to get it quite, but always to give up and start over again, because it seems so terribly hard to leave it without having had the slightest part in it.... O God, Niels, to long for it with your whole soul, while you feel that you are being slowly carried to the threshold of another world, to stand on the threshold and look back with a long, long gaze, while all the time you are being forced through that door where none of your longings have gone before you.... Niels, take me along in your thoughts, dear, when the time comes for you to share in all that glory which I shall never, never see!”

She wept.

Niels tried to comfort her. He laid bold plans for the journey they would take together as soon as she was quite well. He meant to go to the city to consult a doctor, and he was sure the doctor would agree with him that it was the best thing they could do; So-and-so had travelled and had recovered from his illness completely, simply through the change; a change often worked wonders. He began to trace their route in every detail, spoke of how warmly he would wrap her up, what short trips they would take at first, what a delightful journal they would keep, how they would notice even the smallest trifles, how amusing it would be to eat the queerest things in the loveliest spots, and what awful sins against grammar they would commit in the beginning.

He went on in this strain all that evening and on the days that followed, never wearying. She entered into his plan as into a pleasant fancy, but she was plainly convinced that it would never come to pass.

Nevertheless Niels, acting on the doctor’s advice, went on making all the necessary preparations for the trip, and she let him do as he pleased, even fix the day of departure—sure that _that_ would happen which would bring all his plans to naught. But when, finally, there were only a few days left, and when her youngest brother, who was to manage the farm in their absence, had really arrived, she grew uncertain, and now it was she who was most eager to be off, for there still lurked in her mind a fear that the obstacle would leap out and stand in their way at the very last moment.

So they set off.

The first day she was still nervous and uneasy with a lingering trace of her fear, and only when the day was happily ended could she begin to grasp the fact that she was actually on her way to all the glory she had longed for so sorely. Then a feverish joy came over her; her every thought and word was colored by extravagant anticipation, and her thoughts circled unceasingly around what the coming days would bring, one after the other.

And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own.

She yearned to go on and ever on, still hoping to find a spot she might recognize as a bit of the world she had dreamed, that world which, with every step she took to approach it, seemed to extinguish the magic glamor that had suffused it and to lie spread before her disappointed eyes in the commonplace light of everybody’s sun and everybody’s moon. But she sought in vain, and as the year was already far advanced, they hastened to Clarens, where the doctor had advised them to spend the winter, and where, moreover, a last faintly gleaming hope lured the tired, dream-wrapped soul; for was it not the Clarens of Rousseau, the Paradise of Julie!

There they remained, but it was of no avail that Winter made himself gentle and held his cold breath from touching her; against the fever in her blood he had no healing. And Spring, when he came on his triumphal march through the valley with the miracle of sprouting seeds and the gospel of budding leaves, he too had to pass her by and let her stand withering in the midst of all this exuberant renascence. The strength that welled out to her from light and air and earth and water could not be transformed to strength within her; it could not make her blood drunk with health nor force it to sing exultantly in the great hymn to the omnipotence of Spring. No, she could but wither, for the last dream that had appeared before her in the dimness of her home as a new reddening dawn, the dream of the glories of the distant world, had not been followed by day. Its colors seemed paler the nearer she came, and she felt that they were pale to her because she had longed for colors that life does not hold and for a beauty that earth cannot ripen. But her longing was not quenched; silent and strong it burned in her heart, hotter in its unstilled thirst, hot and consuming.

Round about her, Spring celebrated his feast pregnant with beauty. Snowdrops rang it in with their white bells, and crocuses welcomed it joyfully holding up their veined chalices. Hundreds of tiny mountain streams tumbled headlong down into the valley to report that Spring had come, but they were all too late, for when they trickled between green banks, primroses in yellow and violets in blue stood there and nodded: We know it, we know it; we knew it before you! The willows unfurled their yellow banners, and the curly ferns and the velvety moss hung green garlands over the naked walls of the vineyards, while down below dry nettles hid the stones with long borders of brown and green and faint purple. The grass spread its mantle of green far and wide, and no end of pretty flowers sat down upon it: there were hyacinths with blossoms like stars and blossoms like pearls, legions of daisies, gentians, anemones, dandelions, with a hundred others. And high above this bloom on the ground there floated in the air, borne up by the hoary trunks of aged cherry-trees, a thousand shining flower islands, where the light foamed against white shores dotted by blue and red butterflies bringing a message from the flower continent below.

Every day brought new flowers, forcing them out of the ground in motley patterns in the gardens by the sea, pouring them out over the branches of the trees down there—paullinias like giant violets and magnolias like huge purple-stained tulips. Along the paths the flowers advanced in blue and white phalanxes. They filled the meadows with yellow swarms, but nowhere was there such a maze of bloom as in the little sheltered valleys up among the hills, where the larch stood with glittering ruby cones amidst pale green needles, for there the narcissus blossomed in dazzling myriads, filling the air far and wide with the drowsy fragrance from their white orgies.

With all this beauty round about her, she still sat there with the old unanswered longing for beauty in her heart. It was only now and then, when the sun sank behind the gentle slopes of Savoy, and the mountains beyond the sea seemed made of brown opaque glass, as if their precipitous sides had drunk the light, that nature could hold her senses spellbound. Then, when the bright yellow mists of evening veiled the distant Jura Mountains, and the lake, like a copper mirror from which tongues of golden flame shot into the red sunset glow, seemed to melt with the sky into one vast, shining infinity,—then it would seem, once in a great while, as though the longing were silenced, and the soul had found the land it sought.

As spring advanced, her strength failed more and more. Soon she did not leave her bed, but she was no longer afraid of death; she awaited it eagerly, for she cherished the hope that beyond the grave she would be face to face with all the glory, be one in soul with the fullness of beauty which here on earth had drawn her in hope and yearning,—a yearning which had been clarified and transfigured by the increasing pain of long empty years and thus prepared to attain its goal. She dreamed many a gentle, wistful dream of how she would return in memory to what earth had given her, return from the land of immortality, where all the beauty of the earth would be always beyond the sea.

So she died, and Niels buried her in the friendly churchyard at Clarens, where the brown vineyard mould covers the children of so many lands, and where broken columns and veiled urns repeat the same words of mourning in so many languages.

They gleam white under dark cypresses and among the winter bloom of the viburnum; early roses strew their petals over many of them, and often the ground at their base is blue with violets, but over every mound and every stone creep the glossy-leaved vines of the gentle periwinkle, Rousseau’s favorite flower, sky blue as never a sky was blue.

_Chapter IX_

Niels Lyhne hurried home. He could not bear his loneliness among so many strangers, but the nearer he came to Copenhagen, the oftener he asked himself what he wanted there, and the more he regretted that he had not stayed abroad. For whom did he have in Copenhagen? Not Frithjof, and Erik was travelling in Italy on a scholarship, so he was not there. Mrs. Boye? It was a queer affair, this relation with Mrs. Boye. Now that he came straight from his mother’s grave, it seemed to him, not exactly a desecration or anything like that, and yet out of tune with the key in which his present moods were pitched. It was a discord. If he had been going to meet his fiancée, his young blushing bride, now that his soul had so long been bent on filial duties, it would not have conflicted with his feeling. It was of no use that he tried to take a superior tone with himself and call the change in his conception of his intimacy with Mrs. Boye Philistine and provincial. The word “Bohemian” formed itself subconsciously as an expression of a distaste that he could not reason away, and it was in line with this mood that his first visit, after he had engaged his old rooms at the embankment, was to the Neergaards and not to Mrs. Boye.

The following day he called on her, but did not find her in. The janitor said she had taken a villa at Emiliekilde, which surprised Niels, for he knew that her father’s country house was in that neighborhood.

Well, he would have to go out there in a day or two.

But the very next day he received a note from Mrs. Boye asking him to meet her in her apartment in town. The pale niece had seen him in the street. A quarter before one he was to come—he _must_ come. She would tell him why, _if he did not know it_. Did he know it? He must not misjudge her, and not be unreasonable. He knew her too well, and why should he take it as a plebeian nature would? He must not—please! After all, they were not like other people. Oh, if he only _would_ understand her! Niels, Niels!

This letter made him strangely excited, and he suddenly remembered with a sense of uneasiness that Mrs. Neergaard had looked at him with a sarcastic pitying expression and had smiled and said nothing in a curious meaning way. What could it be? What in the world could have happened?

The mood that had kept him away from Mrs. Boye had vanished so completely that he could not understand how he had ever felt it. He was alarmed. If they had only written to each other like sensible people! _Why_ had they not written? He certainly had not been so busy. It was queer how he would allow himself to be so absorbed in the place where he happened to be that he forgot what was far away, or if he did not forget it, at least pushed it into the distant background, where it was buried by the present—as under mountains. No one would think he had imagination.

At last! Mrs. Boye herself opened the door to the ante-room before he had time to ring. She said nothing, but gave him her hand in a long, sympathetic clasp; the newspapers had announced his bereavement. Niels said nothing either, and so they walked silently through the parlor, between the two rows of chairs in red-striped covers. The chandelier was wrapped in paper, and the window-panes were whitened. In the sitting-room everything was as usual, except that the Venetian blinds were rolled down before the opened windows, and as they moved to and fro in the slight breeze, they struck the casement with a faint, monotonous tapping. Rays of light reflected from the sunlit canal outside filtered in between the yellow slats and made squares of tremulous wavy lines in the ceiling, which quivered with the rippling of the waves outside. Otherwise all was hushed and still, silently waiting with bated breath....

Mrs. Boye could not make up her mind where she wanted to sit: finally she decided on the rocking-chair, and dusted it assiduously with her handkerchief, but instead of sitting down she stood behind the chair, resting her hands on its back. She still wore her gloves and had only drawn one arm out of her half-fitting black mantilla. Her dress was of silk tartan in a very tiny check matching the broad ribbons on the wide, round Pamela hat of light straw which half hid her face as she stood looking down and rocking the chair nervously.

Niels seated himself on the piano-stool at a distance from her, as if he expected something unpleasant.

“Then you know it, Niels?”

“No, but what is it I don’t know?”

The chair stopped. “I am engaged.”

“Are you engaged? But how—why—Mrs. Boye?”

“Oh, don’t call me Mrs. Boye, and don’t begin to be unreasonable right away!” She leaned against the back of the rocking-chair with a little air of defiance. “Surely you can understand that it isn’t the pleasantest thing in the world for me to stand here and explain to you. I will do it, but you might at least help me.”

“What do you mean? Are you engaged, or are you not?”

“I have just told you that I am,” she replied with gentle impatience, looking up.

“Then may I be allowed to wish you joy, Mrs. Boye, and to thank you very much for the time we have known each other.” He had risen to his feet and bowed sarcastically several times.

“And you can part from me like this, quite calmly? I am engaged, and then we are done, and everything that has been between us two is just a stupid old story which mustn’t be brought to mind any more. Past is past, and that is all—Niels, all the precious days—will the memory of them be silent from now on? Will you never, never think of me, never miss me? Won’t you call the dream forth again, on many a quiet evening, and give it the colors it might have glowed with? Can you keep from loving it all back to life again in your thoughts and ripening it to the fullness it might have had? Can you? Can you put your foot on it and crush it all out of existence, every bit of it? Niels!”

“I hope so; you have shown me that it can be done.—But this is nonsense, pure, unmitigated nonsense from beginning to end. Why did you arrange this comedy? I have no shadow of a right to reproach you. You have never loved me, never said that you loved me. You have given me leave to love you, that is all, and now you withdraw your permission. Or perhaps you will allow me to go on, though you have given yourself to another? I don’t understand you, if you can imagine that to be possible. We are not children. Or are you afraid I shall forget you too soon? Never fear. You are not one to be blotted easily out of a man’s life. But take care! A love like mine does not come to a woman twice in her life; take care that you do not bring misfortune upon yourself by casting me off! I don’t wish you any harm, no, no! May you never know want and sickness, and may you have all the happiness that comes with wealth, admiration, and social success, in measure full and overflowing, that is my wish for you. May all the world stand open to you, all but one little door, one single little door, however much you knock and try to open it—but otherwise everything as fully and widely as it is possible to wish it.”

He spoke slowly, almost sadly, not bitterly, but with a strangely tremulous note in his voice, a note that was new to her and moved her. She had grown a little pale and stood leaning stiffly against the chair. “Niels,” she said, “don’t predict misfortune! Remember you were not here, Niels, and my love—I did not know how real it was; it seemed more like something that just interested me. It breathed through my life like a delicate spiritual poem, it never caught me in strong arms; it had wings—only wings. At least I thought so. I did not know better until now, or until the moment I had done it—said Yes and all that. Everything was so difficult, there were so many things all at once and so many people to consider.... It began with my brother, Hardenskjold, the one who was in the West Indies, you know. He had been rather wild when he was here, but over there he settled down and became so sensible and went into partnership with some one and made a lot of money, and married a rich widow, a sweet little thing, I assure you, and he and father made up, for Hardie was so changed, oh, he is so respectable there is no end to it, and so susceptible to what people say—terribly bourgeoise, oh! Of course, he thought I ought to be taken up in the bosom of the family again, and every time he came here he lectured me and pleaded and palavered, and you see father is an old man now, and so at last I did it, and everything was just as in the old days.”

She paused for a moment and began to take off first her mantilla and then her hat and gloves, and, busy with all this, she turned a little away from Niels, while she went on talking.

“And then Hardie had a friend who is very highly respected—oh, extremely so, and they all thought I ought to do it and wished it so much, and then you see I could take my position in society just as before, or really better than before, because he is so very highly respected in every way, and after all that is what I have been wishing for a long time. I suppose you can’t understand that? You would never have thought it of me? Quite the contrary. Because I was always making fun of conventional society with its banalities and its stereotyped morality, its thermometer of virtue and its compass of womanliness—you remember how witty we were! It is to weep, Niels, for it wasn’t true, at least not all the time. I will tell you something: we women can break away for a while, when something in our lives has opened our eyes to the love of freedom that after all is in us, but we can’t keep it up. It is in our blood, this passion for the quintessence of propriety and the pinnacle of gentility up to its most punctilious point. We can’t bear to be at war with the established order that is accepted by all commonplace people. In our inmost selves we really think these people are right, because they are the ones that sit in judgment, and in our hearts we bow to their judgments and suffer from them, no matter how brave a face we wear. It is not natural for us women to be exceptional, not really, Niels, it makes us so queer, more interesting, perhaps, but still—Can you understand it? It is silly, don’t you think so? But at least you can comprehend that it made a strange impression on me to return to the old surroundings. So many things came back to me, memories of my mother and of her standards. It seemed as though I had come into a safe haven again; everything was so peaceful and well ordered, and I had only to bind myself to it to be properly happy ever after. And so I let them bind me, Niels.”

Niels could not help smiling; he felt so superior, and was so sorry for her, as she stood there, girlishly unhappy in the midst of all this confession. He was softened and could not find any hard words.

He went over to her.

Meanwhile she had turned the chair toward her and had sunk down on it, and now she was sitting there quite forlorn and pathetic, leaning back with arms hanging and face lifted, gazing out under lowered eyelids through the darkened parlor with its two rows of chairs into the dim ante-room.

Niels laid his arm along the back of the chair and rested his hand on its arm, as he bent over her. “And you had quite forgotten—me?“ he whispered.

She seemed not to hear him and did not even lift her eyes, but at last she shook her head, very faintly, and, after another long pause, shook it again, very faintly.

Round about them everything was very still at first. Then a maid came clattering along the halls and singing, as she polished the door-locks; the noise of the knobs turning cut brutally into the silence and made it seem deeper than before when it suddenly came back. After a while, nothing was heard except the drowsy, monotonous tapping of the blinds.

The silence seemed to rob them of the power of speech, almost of thought. She sat as before with her eyes fixed on the dim ante-room, while he remained standing, bending over her, gazing at the pattern of her silk dress, and, unconsciously, lured by the enveloping stillness, he began to rock her in the chair—very—softly—very—softly....

She lifted her eyelids for a look at his shadowed profile, and lowered them again in quiet content. It was like a long embrace; it was as though she gave herself into his arms when the chair went back, and when it swung forward again, and her feet touched the floor, there was something of him in the pressure of the boards against her foot. He felt it too; the process began to interest him, and he rocked more and more vigorously. It was as though he came nearer and nearer to taking her as he drew the chair farther back; there was anticipation in the instant when it was about to plunge forward again, and when it came down there was a strange satisfaction in the soft tap of her passive feet against the floor; then when he pushed it down yet a little farther there was complete possession in the action which pressed her sole gently against the floor and forced her to raise her knee ever so slightly.

“Let us not dream!” said Niels at last with a sigh and relinquished the chair.

“Yes, let us!” she said almost pleadingly, and looked innocently at him with great wistful eyes.

She had risen slowly.

“No dreams!” said Niels nervously, putting his arm around her waist. “Too many dreams have passed between you and me. Have you never felt them? Have they never touched you like a light breath caressing your cheek or stirring your hair? Is it possible that the night has never been tremulous with sigh upon sigh that dropped and died on your lips?”

He kissed her, and it seemed to him that she grew less young under his kisses, less young, but lovelier, more glowing in her beauty, more alluring.

“I want you to know it,” he said. “You don’t know how I love you, how I have suffered and longed. Oh, if those rooms at the embankment could speak, Tema!”

He kissed her again and again, and she threw her arms around his neck with such abandon that her wide silk sleeves fell back above the billowing lace of the white undersleeves, above the gray elastic that held them together over the elbow.

“What could those rooms say, Niels?”

“Tema, they could say, ten thousand times and more; they could pray in that name, rage in that name, sigh and sob in it; they could threaten Tema, too.”

“Could they?”

From the street below came a conversation floating in through the open window complete and unabridged, the most commonplace worldly wisdom drawled in shopworn phrases, welded together by two untemperamental, gossipy voices. All this prose made it more wonderful yet to stand there, heart to heart, sheltered in the soft, dim light.

“How I love you, sweetheart, sweetheart—in my arms you are so dear; are you so dear, so dear? And your hair—I can hardly speak, and all my memories—so dear—all my memories of how I cried and was wretched and longed so miserably, they press on and force their way in as if they too would be happy with me in my happiness—do you understand?—Do you remember, Tema, the moonlight last year? Are you fond of it?—Oh, you don’t know how cruel it can be. Such a clear, moonlight night, when the air seems to have stiffened in cold light, and the clouds lie there in long layers—Tema, flowers and leaves hold their fragrance so close around them it is like a frost of scents covering them, and all sounds seem so far away and die so suddenly and do not linger at all—Such a night is so merciless, for it makes longing grow so strangely intense; the silence draws it out from every corner of your soul, sucks it out with hard lips, and there is no glimmering hope, no slumbering promise in all that clearness. Oh, how I cried, Tema! Tema, have you never cried through a moonlight night? Sweetheart, it would be a shame if you should cry; you shall never cry, there shall always be sunshine for you and nights of roses—a night of roses—”

She had given herself entirely to his embrace, and with her gaze lost in his, her lips murmured strangely sweet words of love, half muted by her breath, words repeated after him, as if she were whispering them to her own heart.

The cessation of the voices in the street made her stir restlessly. Then they came back to the firm, rhythmic accompaniment of a cane striking against the cobble-stones, crossed over to the other side, lingered long in the distance, sank to a murmur—died away.

And the silence again welled up around them, flamed up around them, throbbing with heartbeats, heavy with breath, yielding. Speech had been seared away between them, and lingering kisses fell from their lips fraught with unspoken questions, but giving no solace nor any present bliss. They held each other’s gaze and dared not take their eyes away, but neither did they dare to put meaning into their look; they veiled it rather; withdrew behind it, silently hiding, brooding over secret dreams.

A quiver passed through his clasping arms and woke her. She thrust him from her with both hands and set herself free.

“Go, Niels, go! You must not be here, you must not. Do you hear?”

He tried to draw her to him again, but she broke away, wild and pale. She was trembling from head to foot and stood holding her arms out from her body as if she were afraid to touch herself.

Niels would have knelt and caught her hand.

“Don’t touch me!” There was desperation in her look. “Why don’t you go when I am begging you to? Good heavens, why can’t you go? No, no, don’t speak to me, go away, you—Can’t you see I am shaking before you? Look, look! Oh, it’s wicked the way you are treating me! And when I’m begging you to go!”

It was impossible to say a word; she would not listen. She was quite beside herself. Tears streamed from her eyes; her face was almost distorted and seemed to give out light in its pallor.

“Oh, do go! Can’t you see that you are humiliating me by staying? You are brutal to me, that’s what you are! What have I done to you that you ill-treat me this way? Do go! Have you no pity?”

Pity? He was cold with rage. This was madness! Still he could do nothing but go, and he went. He did not like the two rows of chairs, but he walked slowly between them, looking at them with a fixed gaze of defiance.

“Exit Niels Lyhne,” he said, when he heard the latch of the hall-door click behind him.