Chapter V: Part 5

He walked down the steps thoughtfully, his hat in his hand. On the landing he stopped and gesticulated to himself: If he could understand the least bit! Why _this_ and why, again, _that_? Then he walked on. There were the open windows. He felt like tearing to pieces that sickly sweet silence up there with a shrill cry. He felt like talking to some one for hours—mercilessly—talking nonsense into that silence, washing it cold in nonsense. He could not get it out of his blood; he could see it, taste it; he walked in it. Suddenly he stopped and blushed fiery red with angry shame. Had she used him to tempt herself with?

In the room above, Mrs. Boye still was weeping. She had gone over to the pier-glass and stood resting both hands on the console, weeping till the tears dripped from her cheeks down into the pink chamber of a huge sea-shell lying there. She looked at her distorted face as it appeared above the misty spot her breath had formed on the mirror, and traced the course of her tears as they welled out over the rim of the eyes and rolled down. Where did they all come from? She had never cried like this before—yes, once, in Frascati, after a runaway.

Presently the tears began to come more sparingly, but a nervous trembling still shook her spasmodically from neck to heel.

The sun now beat directly on the windows. The tremulous reflections from the waves were drawn aslant under the ceiling, and on the sides of the Venetian blinds the parallel rays fell in rows, forming perfect shelves of yellowish light. The heat increased, and mingling with the ripe smell of hot wood and sun-warmed dust, other scents floated out from the bright flowers of the sofa-cushions, from the silken curves of the chair-backs, from books and folded rugs, where the heat released a hundred forgotten perfumes and wafted them through the air, light as wraiths.

Very slowly her trembling subsided, leaving a curious dizziness, in which fantastic emotions that were more than half sensations whirled around on the tracks of her wondering thoughts. She closed her eyes, but remained standing with her face turned to the mirror.

Strange how it had come over her, this piercing terror! Had she cried out? There was the echo of a scream in her ears and a tired feeling in her throat as if she had emitted a long, anguished cry. If he had taken her! She allowed herself to be taken and pressed her arms against her heart as if to ward him off. She struggled, but yet—now: she felt as if she were sinking naked through the air, blushing, burning with shame, impudently caressed by all the winds of heaven—He would not go, and it would soon be too late; all her strength was leaving her like bubbles that burst; bubble after bubble forced its way between her lips and burst unceasingly; in another second it would be too late! Had she begged him on her knees? Too late! She was lifted irresistibly to his embrace, as a bubble that rises through the water—tremulous, so her soul rose up naked before him, with every wish bared to his gaze, every secret dream, every hidden surrender unveiled before his mastering eye. Again in his arms, lingering, sweetly trembling. There was a statue of alabaster surrounded by flames; it glowed transparent in the heat of the fire; little by little its dark centre melted, until all was luminous light.

Slowly she opened her eyes and looked at her image in the mirror with a discreet smile as at a fellow conspirator before whom she did not wish to commit herself too fully. Then she went around the room gathering together her gloves, hat, and mantilla.

Her dizziness seemed blown away, leaving only a rather pleasant sense of weakness in her knees. She walked about to feel it better. Secretly, as if by accident, she gave the rocking-chair a confidential little push with her elbow.

She rather liked scenes.

With one look she said farewell to some invisible thing. Then she rolled up the blinds, and it seemed like another room.

* * * * *

Three weeks later Mrs. Boye was married, and Niels Lyhne was quite alone with himself. He could not quite keep up his indignation over the unworthy manner in which she had thrown herself into the arms of that conventional society at which she had so often scoffed. True, it had only opened the door and beckoned, and she had come. But it was hardly for him to throw stones, for had he not himself felt the magnetic attraction of honest bourgeoisie? If it had not been for that last meeting! If that really was what he accused her of, if it had been intended for a madcap farewell to the old life, one last wanton prank before she withdrew behind “the quintessence of propriety”—could it be possible? Such boundless self-scorn, such a cynical mockery of herself and him and all that they had shared of memories and hopes, of enthusiasm and sacred ideals! It made him blush and rage by turns.—But was he fair to her? After all, what had she done but tell him frankly and honestly: Such and such things draw me to the other side and draw me powerfully, but I recognize your right even more fully than you ask, and here I am. If you can take me, I am yours; if not, I go where the power is greatest.—And if it were so, had she not been entirely within her rights? He had not been able to take her. The final decision _might_ depend on such a little thing, on the shadow of a thought, the vibration of a mood.

If he only knew what she must have known for an instant and probably did not know any longer! He hated to believe that of which he could not help accusing her. Not only for her sake, but even more for his own, because it seemed to put a blot on his ’scutcheon, not logically, of course, and yet—

But, whatever the manner of her leaving him, one thing was certain: he was now alone, and though he felt the emptiness at first, he was soon conscious of a sense of relief. So many things were waiting for him. The year at Lönborggaard and abroad, though absorbing his thoughts, had been in a sense an involuntary rest, and the very fact that this period had given him a clearer conception of his own powers and limitations spurred him on to use his faculties in undisturbed work. He was not anxious to create yet, but rather to collect; there was such an infinite mass of material he wanted to make his own that he began to think dejectedly of the brief span of mortal life. Though he had never wasted his time, it is not easy to emancipate one’s self from the paternal book-case, and it seems simplest to seek the goal along the paths where others have attained it, and therefore he had not set out to seek his own Vineland in the wide world of books, but had followed where the fathers led. Loyally he had closed his eyes to much that lured him, in order to see more clearly in the vast night of the Eddas and sagas; and he had been deaf to many voices that called him, in order to listen more closely to the mystic sounds of nature in the folksongs.

But now he understood, at last, that it was not a law of nature to be either Old Norse or Romantic, that it was simpler to express his own doubts than to put them in the mouth of Gorm, Loki-worshipper, that it was more rational to find words for the mystic stirrings of his own being than to call to the cloister walls of the Middle Ages and hear his own voice come back to him as a faint echo.

He had always had an open mind for the new ideas of his time, but he had been occupied in finding how the New had been foreshadowed in the Old, rather than in listening to what the New said clearly and explicitly for itself. In this he was in no wise remarkable; for never yet has any new gospel been preached but the whole world has become busy with the old prophets.

Yet this did not suffice, and Niels threw himself enthusiastically into his new labors. He was seized with that lust of conquest and thirst for the power of knowledge which every worker in the realm of thought, no matter how humble a drudge he may later become, has surely felt once in his life, though for only one brief hour. Which one of us all, whom a kind fate has given the opportunity to care for the development of our own minds, has not gazed rapturously out over the boundless sea of knowledge, and which of us has not gone down to its clear, cool waters and begun, in the light-hearted arrogance of youth, to dip it out in our hollow hand as the child in the legend? Do you remember how the sun could laugh over the fair summer land, yet you saw neither flower nor sky nor rippling brook? The feasts of life swept past and woke not even a dream in your young blood; even your home seemed far away—do you remember? And do you also remember how a structure rose in your thoughts from the yellowing leaves of books, complete and whole, reposing in itself as a work of art, and it was yours in every detail, and your spirit dwelt in it? When the pillars rose slender and with conscious strength in their bold curves, it was of you that brave aspiring and of you the bold sustaining. And when the vaulted roof seemed to be suspended in air, because it had gathered all its weight, stone upon stone, in mighty drops, and let it down on the neck of the pillars, it was of you that dream of weightless floating, that confident bearing down of the arches; it was you planting your foot on your own.

In this wise your personality grows with your knowledge and is clarified and unified through it. To learn is as beautiful as to live. Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own! Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge! Never fear! The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by the sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great.

* * * * *

Christmas Eve came upon Niels Lyhne unawares. For the past six months, he had not visited any one except now and then the Neergaards. They had invited him to spend the evening with them, but last Christmas Eve had been the memorable one at Clarens, and therefore he preferred to be alone.

There was a high wind. A thin covering of snow not yet trodden into slush spread over the streets and made them seem wider. The layer of white on roofs and window-sills gave a touch of beauty to the houses at the same time as it made them appear more isolated. The street-lamps, flickering in the wind, would now and then, as if absent-mindedly, send a patch of light up a wall and startle from its dreams a merchants sign, making it stare out in large-lettered blankness. The store-windows, too, half lighted as they were and still disarranged from the Christmas shopping, wore an unusual aspect, a curiously abstracted look.

He turned into the side streets, where the celebration seemed to be in full swing. Music sounded from basements and low rooms; sometimes it was a violin, but more often a hand organ, that droned out dance tunes, and something in the hearty goodwill of the performers suggested rather the pleasant toil of the dance than its festive glamor. It brought an illusion of shuffling feet and steaming air—at least so it seemed to him who stood outside and, in his solitude, became polemical against all this sociability. He had much more sympathy for the workingman who stood with his child outside a tiny shop, discussing one of the cheap marvels in the dimly lighted window, evidently determined to have their choice absolutely decided before they ventured into that den of temptation. And he felt sympathy for the poorly clad old gentlewomen who passed him, one by one, almost at every hundred steps—all with the strangest coats and mantillas in the fashion of bygone days, and all with diffident, timorous movements of their old throats, like suspicious birds, walking in the uncertain, hesitating manner of those long unused to the world, as if they had been sitting, day after day, forgotten in the hidden corners of rear flats and attic rooms and only that one evening in the year were included and remembered. It saddened him. His heart shrank with a sick sensation, as he tried to picture to himself the slowly trickling existence of such a lonely old spinster; he seemed to hear sounding in his ears a mantel clock, painfully rhythmic, ticking out its “once-again, once-again,” dropping the empty seconds, one by one, in the chalice of day and filling it full.

Well, he would have to get this Christmas dinner over with. He retraced his steps in a half conscious dread that if he chose other streets they might reveal other kinds of lonely creatures and other forms of forlornness than those he had encountered, which had already left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Out there in the wider streets he breathed more freely. He quickened his pace with a slight sense of defiance, holding himself apart as it were from what he had just seen by telling himself that his loneliness was self-chosen.

He entered one of the larger restaurants. While waiting for his dinner, he observed, from the shelter of an old newspaper supplement, the people who came in. Most of them were young men. Some had a challenging air, as if they would forbid all present to appropriate them as fellow sufferers, while others could not conceal their embarrassment at having no place to go on such an evening, but all showed a marked preference for distant corners and secluded tables. Many came in couples, and most of these were plainly brothers; Niels had never seen so many brothers all at once. Often they were very much unlike each other in dress and manner, and their hands testified even more clearly to their different positions in life. It was almost a rarity to see any particular intimacy between them, either when they came or after they had sat and talked for a while. Here, one was superior and the other full of admiration; there, one was cordial, while the other repelled advances. Others again betrayed a mutual watchfulness, or, worse yet, an unexpressed condemnation of each other’s aims and ambitions and methods. Most of them evidently needed the holiday and a certain amount of loneliness to make them remember their common origin and bring them together.

Niels sat thinking of this and marvelling at the patience all these people exhibited, neither ringing nor calling for the waiters, as if they had tacitly agreed to banish as much as possible of the restaurant atmosphere from the place. While he was engrossed in this, he saw just coming in a man whom he knew, and the sudden sight of a familiar face among all these strangers startled him so that he rose and met him with a pleased, though somewhat surprised, “Good evening.”

“Are you waiting for any one?” asked the other, looking for a place to hang his overcoat.

“No, I am alone.”

“That’s lucky for me!”

The newcomer was a Dr. Hjerrild, a young man whom Niels had met at the Neergaards, and whom he knew—not from anything he had said, but from certain innuendos of Mrs. Neergaard’s—to be very liberal in his religious views, though the political opinions he professed were quite the reverse. People of that type did not often frequent the home of the Neergaards, who were at once religious and liberal. The doctor, however, belonged by inclination as well as through the influence of his dead mother to one of the circles—rather numerous at that time—where the new liberal ideas were looked on with sceptical or even hostile eyes, while in religion their members were rather more than rationalists and rather less than atheists, when they were not mystics or indifferentists. These various circles had many shades of opinion, but, in general, they were agreed in feeling that Holstein was at least as near to their hearts as Slesvig, while the kinship with Sweden was ignored, and Danism in its newest forms was not altogether approved. Moreover, they knew their Molière better than their Holberg, Baggesen better than Oehlenschläger, and in their artistic taste they tended, perhaps, to the sentimental.

In such, or at least kindred influences, Hjerrild had developed. He sat looking a little dubiously at Niels, as the latter recounted his observations of the other diners and especially dwelt on their apparent shame at not having part in any home or semblance of home on such an evening.

“I understand that perfectly,” he said coldly, in a tone almost of rebuff. “People don’t come here on Christmas Eve because they like it, and necessarily they must have a sense of humiliation at being left out, no matter whether it’s other people’s doing or their own. Do you mind telling me why you are here? Don’t answer if you would rather not.”

Niels replied that it was only because he had spent last Christmas Eve with his mother, who had since died.

“I beg your pardon,” said Hjerrild; “it was very good of you to answer me, and you must forgive me for being so suspicious. Do you know, I could very well imagine that you might come here in order to administer a youthful kick to Christmas as an institution, but as for myself, I am really here out of respect for other people’s Christmas. It is the first Christmas Eve since I came here that I have not spent with a very kind family from my native town. It occurred to me, somehow, that I was in the way when they sang their Christmas carols, not that they were ashamed—they have too much character for that—but it made them uneasy to have any one there to whom these hymns were as sung into the empty air. At least that is what I imagined.”

Almost silently they finished their dinner, lighted their cigars, and agreed to go somewhere else for their toddy. Neither of them felt inclined, that evening, to gaze upon the same gilded mirror frames and red sofas that met their eyes on most of the other evenings of the year, and so they sought refuge in a little café which they did not usually frequent.

They soon realized that this was no place to stay in.

The host and the waiters, with a few friends, sat in the rear of the room, playing loo with two trumps. The host’s wife and daughters looked on and brought the refreshments, but not to the strangers; a waiter filled their order. They drank hurriedly, for they noticed that their entrance made an interruption; the conversation was hushed, and the host, who had been sitting in his shirt-sleeves, seemed embarrassed and put on his coat.

“We seem to be rather homeless to-night,” said Niels, as they walked down the street.

“Well, that is as it should be,” was Hjerrild’s rather pathetic answer.

They began to talk about the Christian religion, for the topic was in the air.

Niels argued vehemently, but in rather general terms, against Christianity.

Hjerrild was tired of treading again the beaten track of discussions that were old to him, and suddenly said, without any particular connection with what had gone before: “Take care, Lyhne; Christianity is in power. It is foolish to quarrel with the reigning truth by agitating for a crown prince truth.”

“Foolish or not foolish—what does it matter?”

“Don’t say that so lightly. I did not mean to tell you such a commonplace as that it is foolish in a material way; morally, too, it is foolish and worse. Take care; don’t associate yourself too closely with this particular movement in our time, unless it happens to be absolutely necessary to your own personality. As a poet you must have many other interests.”

“I don’t understand you. I can’t treat myself like a hurdy-gurdy from which I can take out an unpopular piece and put in a tune that everybody is whistling.”

“Can’t you? Many people can. But you can at least say: ‘We are not playing that piece just now.’ We can often do more in that line than we think. A human being is not so closely knit. When you use your right arm constantly in violent exertion, the blood rushes to it, and it grows at the expense of the rest of your body, while your legs, which you are using as little as possible, naturally get a little thin. You can apply the image for yourself. Have you noticed that most of the idealistic forces in our country, and probably the best of them, are entirely absorbed in the cause of political freedom? You can take a lesson from that. Believe me, there is saving grace in fighting for an idea that is gaining ground, but it is very demoralizing to a man to belong to a losing minority, which life, in its inevitable course, puts in the wrong, point by point, step by step. It cannot be otherwise, for it is bitterly disheartening to see that which your inmost soul believes to be right and true, to see this Truth reviled and struck in the face by the meanest camp-follower in the victorious army, to hear her called vile names, while you can do nothing at all except to love her even more faithfully, kneel to her in your heart with even deeper adoration, and see her beautiful face as radiantly beautiful as ever and as full of majesty, shining with the same immortal light, no matter how much dust is whirled up around her white forehead, no matter how thickly the poisonous fog closes in around her halo. It is bitterly disheartening, and your soul suffers injury inevitably, for it is so easy to hate until your heart is weary, or to draw around you the cold shadows of contempt, or to be dulled by pain and let the world go its own way.—Of course, if there is _that_ within you which makes you not choose the easiest way nor evade the whole matter, but walk upright with all your faculties tense and all your sympathies wide awake, taking the blows and stings of defeat as the scourge falls on your back again and again, and still keep your bleeding hope from drooping, while you listen for the distant rumblings that presage revolution, and look for the faint, distant dawn that some day—some time, perhaps.... If you have _that_ within you!—but don’t try it, Lyhne. Imagine what the life of such a man must be, if he is to be true to himself. Never to open his mouth without knowing that whatever he says will be met with scorn and jeers! To have his words distorted, besmirched, wrenched all out of joint, turned into cunning snares for his own feet, and then, before he can pick them up from the mud and straighten them out again, to find all the world suddenly deaf. Then to begin over again at another point and have the same thing happen over and over again. And—what hurts most, perhaps—to be misunderstood and despised by noble men and women, whom he looks up to with admiration and respect in spite of their different principles. Yet it must be so, it cannot be otherwise. Those who are in opposition must not expect to be attacked for what they really are or really want, but for what the party in power is pleased to think they are and want; and besides, power used upon the weaker must be misused—how can it be otherwise? Surely no one can expect the party in power to divest itself of its advantages in order to meet the opposition on equal terms; but that does not make the struggle of the opposition less painful and heart-rending. When you think of all this, Lyhne, do you really suppose a man can fight this battle, with all these vulture-beaks buried in his flesh, unless he has the blind, stubborn enthusiasm which we call fanaticism? And how in the world can he get fanatic about a negation? Fanatic for the idea that there is no God!—But without fanaticism there is no victory. Hush, listen!”

They stopped before a house where a curtain had been rolled up, allowing them to look into a large room, and through the slightly opened window a song floated out to them, borne on the clear voices of women and children:

“_A child is born in Bethlehem,
In Bethlehem.
Therefore rejoice, Jerusalem!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah!_”

They walked on silently. The song and especially the notes of the piano followed them down the quiet street.

“Did you hear?” said Hjerrild. “Did you hear the enthusiasm in that old Hebraic shout of triumph? And those two Jewish names of towns! Jerusalem was not only symbolic: the entire city, Copenhagen, Denmark, it was _Us_, the Christian people within the people.”

“There is no God, and man is his prophet,” replied Niels bitterly and rather sadly.

“Exactly,” scoffed Hjerrild. “After all, atheism is unspeakably tame. Its end and aim is nothing but a disillusioned humanity. The belief in a God who rules everything and judges everything is humanity’s last great illusion, and when that is gone, what then? Then you are wiser; but richer, happier? I can’t see it.”

“But don’t you see,” exclaimed Niels Lyhne, “that on the day when men are free to exult and say: ‘There is no God!’ on that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Then and not till then will heaven be a free infinite space instead of a spying, threatening eye. Then the earth will be ours and we the earth’s, when the dim world of bliss or damnation beyond has burst like a bubble. The earth will be our true mother country, the home of our hearts, where we dwell, not as strangers and wayfarers a short time, but all our time. Think what intensity it will give to life, when everything must be concentrated within it and nothing left for a hereafter. The immense stream of love that is now rising up to the God of men’s faith will bend to earth again and flow lovingly among all those beautiful human virtues with which we have endowed and embellished the godhead in order to make it worthy of our love. Goodness, justice, wisdom,—who can name them all? Don’t you see what nobility it will give men when they are free to live their life and die their death, without fear of hell or hope of heaven, but fearing themselves, hoping for themselves? How their consciences will grow, and what a strength it will give them when inactive repentance and humility cannot atone any more, when no forgiveness is possible except to redeem with good what they sinned with evil.”

“You must have a wonderful faith in humanity. Why, then atheism will make greater demands on men than Christianity has done.”

“Of course!”

“Of course; but where will you get all the strong individuals you will need to make up your atheistical community?”

“Little by little; atheism itself must develop them. Neither this generation nor the next and not the next after that will be ripe for atheism, of that I am quite aware, but in every generation there will be a few who will honestly struggle to live and die in it and will win. These people will, in course of time, form a group of spiritual ancestors to whom their descendants will look back in pride, and from whom they will gain courage. It will be hardest in the beginning; many will fail, and those who win will have torn banners, because they will still be steeped in traditions to the marrow of their bones; it is not only the brain that has to be convinced, but the blood and nerves, hopes and longings, even dreams! But it does not matter; some time it will come, and the few will be the many.”

“You think so?—I am trying to think of a name; could we call it pietistical atheism?”

“All true atheism—” Niels began, but Hjerrild cut him short.

“Of course,” he said, “of course! By all means, let us have only a single gate, one needle’s eye for all the camels on the face of the earth.”

_Chapter X_

Early that summer Erik Refstrup came home after his two years in Italy. He had gone away a sculptor; he returned a painter, and he had already attracted attention, had sold his pictures, and received orders for others.

The good fortune coming almost at his first call was due to the sure instinct for self-limitation which bound his art closely to his own personality. His gift was not of the large and generous kind that is instinct with every promise and seems about to grasp every laurel, that sweeps triumphantly through every realm like a bacchanalian troop, scattering golden seed on every side, and mounting genii on all its panthers! He was one of those in whom a dream is buried, making a peaceful sanctuary in one corner of their souls where they are most, and yet least, themselves. Through everything these people create there sounds the same wistful refrain, and every work of art that comes from their hands bears the same timidly circumscribed stamp of kinship, as if they were all pictures from the same little homeland, the same little nook deep among mountains. It was so with Erik; no matter where he plunged into the ocean of beauty, he always fetched the same pearl up to the light.

His canvases were small: in the foreground a single figure, clay-blue with its own shadow, behind it a heathery stretch of moor or campagna, and in the horizon a reddish yellow afterglow of sunset. There was one picture of a young girl telling her own fortune in the Italian fashion. She is kneeling on a spot where the earth shows brown between tufts of short grass. The heart, cross, and anchor of hammered silver, which she has taken from her necklace, are scattered on the ground. Now she is lying on her knees, her eyes closed in good faith with one hand covering them, the other reaching down, seeking rapture of love beyond words, bitter sorrow solaced by the cross, or the trusting hope of a common fate. She has not yet dared to touch the ground. Her hand shrinks back in the cold, mysterious shadow; her cheeks are flushed, and her mouth trembles between prayer and tears. There is a solemnity in the air; the sunset glow threatens, hot and fierce out there in the distance, but softly melancholy where it steals in over the heather. “If you only knew—rapture of love beyond words, bitter sorrow solaced by the cross, or the trusting hope of a common fate?”

There was another in which she stands erect on the brown heath, tense with longing, her cheek pressed down on her folded hands. She is so sweet in her naïve longing and a wee bit sad and angered with life for passing her by. Why does not Eros come with kissing roses? Does he think she is too young? Ah, if he would only feel her heart, how it beats! If he would only lay his hand there! A world is in there, a world of worlds, if it would only awaken. But why does it not call? It is there like a bud, tightly folded around its own sweetness and beauty, existing only for itself, oppressed by itself. For it knows there is something in life that it does not know. It is that which has warmed the sheltering petals and given light to the innermost heart of reddest dusk, where the scent lies yet scentless, a foreboding only, pressed into one tremulous tear!

Will it never be freed and breathe out all its slumbering fragrance, never be rich in its own wealth? Will it never, never unfold and blush itself awake with gleaming rays of sunlight darting in under its petals? She has no patience any more with Eros! Her lips are quivering with approaching tears; her eyes look out into space with hopeless defiance, and the little head sinks more and more forlornly, turning the delicate profile in toward the picture, where a gentle breeze wafts the reddish dust over dark green broom against a sherry-golden sky.

That was the way Erik painted. What he had to say always found expression in pictures such as these. He would sometimes dream in other images and long to break through that narrow circle within which he created, but when he had strayed beyond his bounds and tried his powers in other fields, he always returned with a chill sense of discouragement, feeling that he had been borrowing from others and producing something not his own. After these unfortunate excursions—which, however, always taught him more than he was aware of—he became more intensely Erik Refstrup than ever before. Then he would abandon himself with more reckless courage and with almost poignant fervor to the cult of his own individuality, while his whole manner of associating with himself, to his slightest act, would be suffused with a religious enthusiasm. He seemed surrounded by shadowy throngs of beautiful forms, younger sisters of the slender-limbed women of Parmigianino with their long necks and large, narrow princess hands; they sat at his table, poured his wine with movements full of noble grace, and held him in the spell of their fair dreams with Luini’s mystic, contemplative smile, so inscrutably subtle in its enigmatic sweetness.

But when he had served the god faithfully for eleven days, it sometimes happened that other powers gained the ascendancy over him, and he would be seized with a violent craving for the coarse enjoyment of gross pleasures. Then he would plunge into dissipations, feverish with that human thirst for self-destruction which yearns, when the blood burns as hotly as blood can burn, for degradation, perverseness, filth, and smut, with precisely the measure of strength possessed by another equally human longing, the longing to keep one’s self greater than one’s self and purer.

In these moments there was but little that was rough and coarse enough for him, and when they had passed, it was long before he could regain his balance; for in truth these excesses were not natural to him; he was too healthy for them, too little poisoned by brooding. In a sense, they came as a rebound from his devotion to the higher spirits of his art, almost like a revenge, as though his nature had been violated by the pursuit of those idealistic aims which choice, aided by circumstances, had made his own.

This twofold struggle, however, was not carried on along such definite lines that it appeared on the surface of Erik Refstrup’s life; nor did he feel the need of making his friends understand him in this phase. No, he was the same simple, happy-go-lucky fellow as of old, slightly awkward in his shrinking from emotions put into words, a little of a freebooter in his capacity for seizing and holding. Yet the other thing was in him and could be sensed sometimes in quiet moments, like the bells that ring in a sunken city on the bottom of the sea. He and Niels had never understood each other so well as now; both felt it, and silently each renewed the old friendship. And when vacation time came, and Niels felt that he really must make his long-deferred visit to his Aunt Rosalie, who was married to Consul Claudi in Fjordby, Erik went with him.

* * * * *

The main highway from the richest district above Fjordby enters the town between two great thorn-hedges, which bound Consul Claudi’s vegetable garden and his large pleasure garden by the shore. What then becomes of the road—whether it ends in the Consul’s courtyard, which is as large as a market-place, or whether it is continued in a bend running between his hayloft and his lumber yard to form, later, the main street of the town—is a matter of opinion. Many travellers follow the bend and drive on, but there are also many who stop and think the goal reached when they have come within the Consul’s wide tarred gateway, where the doors are always thrown back and covered with skins spread for drying.

The buildings on the premises were all old with the exception of the tall warehouse with its dead-looking slate roof, the newest architectural feature in Fjordby. The long, low main building appeared to be forced to its knees by three large gables, and was joined, in a dim corner, to the wing containing the kitchen and stables; in another lighter corner, to the warehouse. In the dark corner was the back door of the store, which formed, with the peasants’ waiting-room, the office, and the servants’ hall, a rather dingy world of its own, where the mingled odor of cheap tobacco and moldy floors, of spices and dried codfish and wet wool, made the air so thick you could almost taste it. But when you had passed through the office with its pungent smoke of sealing-wax and had reached the hall which formed the dividing line between the business and the family, a prevailing perfume of new millinery prepared you for the delicate scent in the living-rooms. It was not the fragrance of any nosegay or of any real flower; it was the intangible, memory-laden atmosphere which pervades a home, though no one can say whence it comes. Every home has its own, and it may suggest a thousand things—the smell of old gloves or new playing-cards or open pianos—but it is always different. It may be stifled by incense, perfumes, or cigar smoke, but it cannot be killed; it always comes back unchanged and is there just as before. Here it was of flowers, not stock or roses or any other flower that can be named, but rather as one might fancy the scent of those fantastic, pale sapphire lilies that twine their blossoms around vases of old porcelain. And how well it went with those wide, low rooms with their heirloom furniture and their stiff, old-fashioned grace! The floors were white as only grandmothers’ floors can be; the walls were in plain colors with a light tracery of garlands in delicate tints running under the ceiling, which had a stucco rose in the centre. The doors were fluted and had knobs of shining brass in the shape of dolphins. The windows of small square panes were curtained with filmy net, white as snow, its fullness caught up and fastened with coquettish bows of colored ribbon, like the curtains of a bridal bed for Corydon and Phyllis. In the window-sill the flowers of bygone days bloomed in motley green crocks; there were blue agapanthus, blue Canterbury bells, fine-leaved myrtles, fiery red verbenas, and butterfly bright geraniums. But it was, after all, chiefly the furniture that gave character to the rooms: immovable tables with wide expanse of darkened mahogany; chairs with backs that curled round your figure; cabinets of every conceivable form, gigantic dressers inlaid with mythological scenes in light yellow wood—Daphne, Arachne, and Narcissus—or small secretaries with thin twisted legs and on every tiny drawer a mosaic of dendrite marble representing a lovely square house with a tree near by—all from the time before Napoleon. There were mirrors, too, the glass painted in white or bronze with designs of rushes and lotus plants floating on a bright sea. As for the sofa, it was not one of your trifling things on four legs designed for two persons; no, solid and massive it rose from the floor to form a veritable spacious terrace; flanking it on either side and built in one with the sofa, was a console-cupboard, on top of which a smaller cabinet rose with architectonic effect to the height of a man and held a precious old jar above the reach of careless hands. It was no wonder there were so many old things in the Consul’s house, for his father and grandfather had rested and enjoyed the good things of life within these walls in the intervals of their work in lumber yard and office.

The grandfather, Berendt Berendtsen Claudi, whose name the firm still bore, had built the houses and had interested himself chiefly in the retail and produce trade. The father had worked up the lumber yard, bought farmland, built the hayloft, and laid out the two gardens. The present Claudi had developed the grain trade and built the warehouse. He united with his mercantile business the activities of the English and the Hanoverian vice-consulates as well as a Lloyd’s agency; and the grain and the Western Sea kept him so busy he could give only a very cursory supervision to the other branches of the work. He therefore divided the responsibility between an insolvent cousin and an old unmanageable steward, who would drive the Consul into a corner every little while by declaring that, whatever happened to the store, the farm must be attended to, and when he wanted to plough, they could take horses for hauling lumber wherever they pleased—his they couldn’t have, so help him. But as the man was capable, there was nothing to be done but to put up with him.

Consul Claudi was in the early fifties, a man of substantial presence. His regular features, strong to the point of coarseness, would as readily harden to an expression of energy and cool astuteness as they would relax into a look almost lickerish as though relishing a savory tidbit; and he was, in fact, equally at home whether driving a bargain with shrewd peasants or arguing with a stubborn salvage gang, or whether sitting with gray-bearded sinners over the last bottle of port wine, listening to stories more than salacious or telling them with the picturesque frankness for which he was noted.

This, however, was not all of the man.

His training naturally made him feel that he was on alien ground when he ventured outside of purely practical questions, but he never therefore scoffed at what he did not understand or tried to conceal his ignorance. Much less did it ever occur to him to give his opinion and demand that it be respected for the reason that he was a citizen of mature years and practical experience and a large taxpayer. On the contrary, he would often listen with a reverence that was almost touching when ladies and young men discussed such matters; now and then he would venture a modest question prefaced by elaborate excuses, which almost always elicited a scrupulously painstaking answer, and then he would express his thanks with all the courtesy which is so gracious in an older man thanking his juniors.

At certain favorable moments there could be something surprisingly fine about Consul Claudi, a wistful look in his clear brown eyes, a melancholy smile around his strong lips, a seeking, reminiscent note in his voice, as though he yearned for another and in his own eyes better world than that to which his friends and acquaintances consigned him, hide and hair.

The messenger between himself and this better world was his wife. She was one of those pale, gentle, virginal natures who have not the courage, or perhaps not the impulse, to give out their love in such fullness that there is no shred of self left in their innermost soul. Even in the most fleeting moment they can never be so carried away by their feeling that they throw themselves in blind rapture under the chariot wheels of their idol. They cannot do it, but all else they can do for the beloved; they can fulfil the heaviest duties, are ready for the most grievous sacrifices, and do not flinch from any humiliation whatsoever. This is true of the best among them.

Mrs. Claudi was not called on to bear such trials. Nevertheless her marriage was not without its sorrows; for it was a matter of common knowledge in Fjordby that the Consul was not, or at least had not been until a few years ago, the most faithful husband, and that he had several illegitimate children in the neighborhood. This was, of course, a bitter grief to her, and it had not been easy to keep her heart steadfast through the tumult of jealousy, scorn and anger, shame and sickening fear, which had made her feel as though the ground were slipping away under her feet. But she stood firm. Not only did she never allow a reproachful word to pass her lips, but she warded off any confession on the part of her husband, any direct prayer for forgiveness, and anything that might seem like a repentant vow. She felt that if it were ever put into words, they might sweep her along and away from him. Silently she would bear it, and in the silence she tried to make herself believe that she was in part to blame for her husband’s crime, because of the barrier she had built around herself, which her love had not been strong enough to break down. She succeeded in magnifying this sin until she felt an indistinct need of forgiveness, and in course of time she brought herself to the point where she gave rise to a rumor that the girls whom Consul Claudi had seduced and their children were taken care of in other ways than with money; it seemed that a hidden woman’s hand must be sheltering them, keeping them from harm, supporting and guiding them.

So it came to pass that evil was turned into good, and a sinner and a saint each made the other better.

The Claudis had two children, a son who was in a merchant’s office in Hamburg and a nineteen-year-old daughter named Fennimore after the heroine in _St. Roche_, one of Frau von Palzow’s novels which had been very popular in the time of Mrs. Claudi’s girlhood.

Fennimore and the Consul came down to meet the steamer on the day it brought Niels and Erik to Fjordby. Niels was pleasantly surprised to see that his cousin was pretty, for hitherto he had known her only from a terrible old family daguerreotype, where she appeared in a misty atmosphere, forming a group with her brother and her parents, all with hectic crimson on their cheeks and bright gilding on their jewelry. And now he found her simply lovely as she stood there in her light morning dress and her dainty little shoes with their black ribbons crossing a white-stockinged instep. She was resting one foot on the plank at the edge of the pier, and bent forward smiling to give him her parasol-handle for a handshake and a welcome, before the steamer was made fast. Her lips were so red and her teeth so white, and her forehead and temples so delicately outlined under the wide brim of her Eugenie hat, from which shadowing edges of deep black lace fell weighted with bright jet.

At last the gangplank was let down, and the Consul started off with Erik. He had already introduced himself with twelve feet of water between them and, still shouting, had drawn Erik into a humorous conversation about the agonies of sea-sickness, which he carried on with a wizened hatter’s widow on board. Now he was calling on him to admire the large linden trees outside of the revenue collector’s house and the new schooner standing ready to be launched from Thomas Rasmussen’s shipyard.

Niels walked with Fennimore. She pointed to the flag flying in the garden in honor of him and his friend, and then they began to discuss the Neergaards in Copenhagen. They quickly agreed that Mrs. Neergaard was a little—a very little—they would not say the word, but Fennimore smiled primly and made a cat-like movement with her hand. The characterization was evidently plain enough to them both, for they smiled and quickly became serious again. Silently they walked on, each wondering how he or she appeared in the other’s eyes.

Fennimore had imagined Niels Lyhne taller, more distinguished, and of an individuality more marked—like an underscored word. He, on the other hand, had found much more than he expected. He thought her charming, almost alluring, in spite of her dress which savored too much of small town elegance. When they had entered the hall, and she stood looking down with a preoccupied air, as she took off her hat and smoothed her hair with wonderfully soft, languid, graceful turns of hand and wrist, he felt as grateful as if her movements had been caresses. This almost puzzling sense of gratitude did not leave him either that day or the next, and sometimes it welled up so strong and warm that he felt it would have been the greatest happiness if he might have thanked her in words for being so pretty and so sweet.

Very soon Erik as well as Niels felt quite at home in the Consul’s hospitable house. Before many days they had slipped into that pleasantly arranged idling which is the real vacation life and which it is so difficult to guard against the friendly encroachments of well-meaning people. They had to use all their diplomacy to avoid the stuffy evening parties, large boating excursions, summer balls, and amateur theatricals which were constantly threatening their peace. They were ready to wish that the Consul’s house and garden had been on a desert island; and Robinson Crusoe was not more agitated by fear on finding the footsteps in the sand than they were at the sight of strange paletots in the hall or unfamiliar reticules on the sitting-room table. They much preferred to be by themselves; for they had scarcely passed the middle of the first week before they were both in love with Fennimore. It was not the mature passion which must and will know its fate and longs to have and to hold and to be assured. As yet it was only the first dawn of love like a hint of spring in the air, instinct with a longing akin to sadness and with an unrest that is gently pulsing joy. The heart is so tender and yielding and easily moved. A light on the water, a rustling in the leaves, a flower unfolding its petals—all seem to have a strange new power. Vague hopes without a name burst out, suddenly flooding the earth with sunlight and as suddenly vanishing again: weak despondency sails like a broad cloud over the glory, churning the flashes of hope down into its own gray wake.—Then hopelessness, melting hopelessness; bittersweet resignation to fate, a heart full of self-pity, renunciation gazing at its own reflection in quiet elegies and fainting in a sigh that is half dissembled.... But again there is the whispering of roses: a dreamland rises from the mist with golden haze over soft beech crowns and with fragrant summer darkness under leafy boughs arched over paths that lead no one knows whither.

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One evening after tea they were all gathered in the sitting-room. The garden and all outdoor amusements were barred, for the rain was pouring down; but no one seemed to mind. The sense of being shut in gave the room something of the snug comfort of a winter evening, and moreover the rain was a blessing. Everything had been so parched and dry, but now the water streamed down, and when the heavy drops rattled against the frame of the reflector in the window the sound called up vague, fleeting glimpses of luscious green meadows and freshened foliage. Now and then some one would say under his breath: “How it pours!” and glance at the window-panes with a little gleam of pleasure and a half-conscious luxuriating in fellow-feeling with everything out of doors. Erik had fetched the mandolin he had brought with him from Italy and sang about Napoli and the bright stars. Then a young lady who had been to tea sat down at the piano and accompanied her own rendering of “My little nook among the mountains,” in Swedish, making the _ah’s_ very broad to get the right Swedish effect.

Niels, who was not particularly musical, let himself be soothed into a gentle melancholy and sat lost in his own thoughts, until Fennimore began to sing.

Then he awoke, but not pleasantly.