Chapter VI: Part 6

Her song agitated him uncomfortably. She was no longer the little country girl when she gave herself up to the spell of her own voice. Strange how she let herself be carried away by the tones, how freely and unreservedly she poured herself into them! He felt it almost as something immodest, as though she were singing herself naked before him. There was a burning around his heart; his temples throbbed, and he cast his eyes down. Did none of the others see it? No, they saw nothing. Why, she had flown out of herself, away from Fjordby, from Fjordby poetry and Fjordby sentiments! She was in another and a bolder world, where the passions grew on high mountains and flung their red blossoms to the storm.

Could it be his lack of musical sense that made him read so much meaning into her song? He could hardly persuade himself that it was so, and yet he wished it, for he would much rather have her as she usually appeared. When she sat at her sewing, talking in her quiet, tranquil voice, or looking up with her clear, kind eyes, his whole being was drawn to her with the irresistible strength of a deep, calm longing for home. He wanted to humble himself before her, to bend the knee and call her holy. He always felt a strange yearning to come close to her, not only to her present self, but to her childhood and all the days he had not known her. When they were alone, he would lead her to talk of the past, of her little troubles and mistakes and the vagaries that every childhood is full of. He lived in these memories and clung to them with a restless jealousy and a languishing desire to possess and be one with these pale foreshadowings of a life which was even now glowing in richer, riper colors. And then came this song so strangely powerful! It startled him very much like a wide sweep of horizon suddenly revealed by a turn of the path, reducing the forest dell which had been his home to a mere corner in the landscape, and making its little rippling lines seem insignificant beside the grandeur of the hills and distant moors.—Oh, but the landscape was a _fata morgana_, and what he thought he heard in her song only a fantasy; for now she spoke just as she always did and was her blessed self again. Moreover, he knew from a thousand little things that she was like still water, without storm or waves, reflecting the starry blue heavens.

It was thus he loved her, and thus he saw her; and when she was with him she gradually formed herself upon his image of her, not with any conscious dissembling, for after all his conception was partly true, and it was only natural—when his every word and look, his every thought and dream, appealed to that side of her nature and did homage to it—that she should assume the guise he almost forced upon her. Besides, how could she bother about giving each and every one a correct impression of herself when all her thoughts centred around the one, Erik, the only one, her chosen lord, whom she loved with a passion that was not of herself and with an idolatrous worship that terrified her. She had imagined love to be a sweet dignity, not this consuming unrest, full of fear and humiliation and doubt. Many a time when the declaration seemed trembling on Erik’s lips, she had felt as if it were her duty to put her hand on his mouth and warn him against speaking, accusing herself and telling him how she had deceived him and how unworthy of his love she was, how earthly and small and impure, so far from noble, so wretchedly low and common and wicked! She felt herself dishonest under his admiring gaze; calculating, when she failed to avoid him; criminal, when she could not bring herself to beg God in her evening prayer that He would turn Erik’s heart from her in order that his life might be all sunlight and honor and glory. For she knew that her low-born passion would drag him down.

It was almost in spite of himself that Erik loved her. His ideal had always been high, proud, and noble, with quiet melancholy suffusing her pale features and coolness of temple air lingering in the severe folds of her garment. But Fennimore’s sweetness conquered him. He could not resist her beauty. There was such a fresh, innocent sensuousness about her whole form. When she walked her gait whispered of her body; there was a nakedness in her movements and a dreamy eloquence in her repose, neither of which she could help, for she could not conceal the one or silence the other, even had she been in the slightest degree conscious of their existence. No one saw this better than Erik, and he was fully aware of what a large part her purely physical beauty played in her attraction for him. He struggled against it, for there were exalted ideals of love in his soul, ideals which had their source, perhaps, not only in tradition and poetry, but in deeper strata of his nature than those that appeared on the surface. But whatever their source, they had to yield.

He had not yet confessed his love to Fennimore, when it happened that the good ship _Berendt Claudi_ came in. Inasmuch as it was going to unload farther up the fjord, it did not enter the harbor, but lay out in the stream, and as the Consul was very proud of his schooner and wanted to show it to his guests, they rowed out there one afternoon to drink tea on board.

It was a glorious day without a breath of wind, and all were intent on a merry time. The hours passed quickly. They drank English porter, set their teeth in English hardtack as large as moons, and ate salted mackerel caught on the voyage across the North Sea. They pumped with the ship’s pump till the water frothed, tipped the compass, drew water from the casks with the large tin siphon, and listened to the mate playing his octagonal hand harmonica.

It was quite dark before they were ready to return.

They separated into two parties. Erik and Fennimore and two of the older people went in the ship’s yawl, which was to make a detour around the harbor and then row slowly to land, while the rest of the party went in the Consul’s own boat, which was to steer directly for the pier. This arrangement was made in order to hear how the song would sound over the water on such a quiet night. Erik and Fennimore therefore sat together in the stern of the yawl and had the mandolin between them, but the singing was forgotten when the oars were dipped in the water and revealed an unusually bright phosphorescence which absorbed their attention.

Silently the boat glided onward, and behind it the dull, glassy surface was fluted with shifting lines and rings of a tender white light too faint to penetrate the darkness beyond its own groove, except now and then when it seemed to give out a luminous mist. It frothed white where the oars cut into it and slid backward in tremulous rings growing fainter and fainter; it was scattered from the blades in bright drops falling like a phosphorescent rain, which was extinguished in the air but lighted the water drop by drop. There was such quiet over the fjord that the sound of the oars seemed only to measure the stillness in pauses of equal length. Hushed and soft, the gray twilight brooded over the soundless deep; the boat and its occupants melted together in one dark mass, from which the phosphorescence freed the plying oars and sometimes a trailing rope’s end, or perhaps the brown impassive face of the oarsman. No one spoke. Fennimore was cooling her hand in the water; she and Erik sat turning back to look at the network of light that trailed silently after the boat and held their thoughts in its fair meshes.

A call for a song shouted from land roused them, and together they sang two or three Italian romances to the accompaniment of the mandolin.

Then all was still again.

At last they landed at the little jetty running out from the garden. The Consul’s empty boat was moored alongside, and the party had already gone up to the house. Fennimore’s aunt and her companion followed them, but Erik and Fennimore remained standing and looked after the boat as it returned to the ship. The latch of the garden gate fell with a click; the sound of the oars grew fainter and fainter, and the swelling of the water around the pier died away. Then a breath stirred in the dark trees around them like a sigh that had hidden itself and now softly lifted the leaves, flew away, and left them alone.

In the same moment they turned to each other and away from the water. He caught her hand and slowly, questioningly, drew her close and kissed her. “Fennimore!” he whispered, and they walked through the dark garden.

“You have known it long!” he said, and she replied, “Yes.” Then they walked on, and the latch fell once more.

Erik could not sleep when he reached his room at last, after drinking coffee with the company and saying good-night at the street door.

There was no air in there; he flung the windows wide open, then threw himself on the couch and listened.

He wanted to get out again.

How everything resounded through the house! He could hear the Consul’s slippers, and now Mrs. Claudi opened the kitchen door to see if the fire was out. What in the world could Niels want in his trunk at this time of night! Ah—there was a mouse behind the wainscoting. Now some one crossed the attic in stocking-feet—now another—there were two.—At last! He opened the door to the guest-room within and listened, then he carefully opened the window, straddled over the sill, and slid into the courtyard. He knew that he could get down to the shore through the mangling-room. If any one saw him, he meant to say that he had forgotten his mandolin down by the jetty and wanted to rescue it from the dew. Therefore he slung the mandolin on his back.

The garden was a little lighter now; there was a slight breeze and a bit of moon which laid a tremulous strip of silver from the jetty out to the _Berendt Claudi_.

He went through the garden out on the stone sloping which protected it from the water, running in abrupt angles round a large embankment and all the way out to the end of the harbor mole. Balancing uncomfortably on the flat, slanting stones, he finally reached the molehead and, rather out of breath, sat down on the bench.

Above his head the red lantern of the harbor light swung slowly back and forth with a sound like the sighing of iron, while the flag line flapped gently against its staff.

The moon had come out a little more and cast a cautious grayish-white light over the quiet ships in the harbor and over the maze of rectangular roofs and white dark-eyed gables in the town. Above and beyond it all the church steeple rose, calm and light.

He leaned back dreaming, while a wave of unutterable joy and exultation surged through his heart; he felt rich and full of strength and the warmth of life. It seemed as though Fennimore must hear every love-thought that grew from his rapture, vine in vine, and blossom on blossom; and he rose, and quickly striking the strings of the mandolin sang triumphantly to the town asleep in there:

“_Wakeful aloft lies my lassie,
She listens to my song!_”

Again and again, when his heart grew too full, he repeated the words of the old ballad.

Gradually he became calmer. Memories of the hours in the past when he had felt weakest, poorest, and most forlorn pressed in on him with a slight, tense pain like that of the first tears welling up in the eyes. He sat down on the bench again, and with his hand lying mute on the mandolin strings, he gazed out over the blue-gray expanse of the fjord, where the moon bridge formed a glittering way past the dark ship to the lines of the Morsö hills, drawn in faint, melancholy cloud-blue land through a haze of white.

And the memories thronged, but they grew gentler, were lifted to fairer lands, and seemed lighted by a roseate dawn.

... _My lassie!_

He sang it to himself:

“_Wakeful aloft lies my lassie,
She listens to my song._”

_Chapter XI_

Three years had passed; Erik and Fennimore had been married for two years, and made their home in a little villa at Mariagerfjord. Niels had not seen Fennimore since that summer at Fjordby. He lived in Copenhagen and went out a great deal, but had no intimate friends except Dr. Hjerrild, who called himself old because touches of gray had begun to appear in his dark hair.

That unexpected engagement had been a hard blow to Niels. It had a benumbing effect on him. He grew more bitter and less confiding, and had no longer so much enthusiasm to pit against Hjerrild’s pessimism. Though he still pursued his studies, their plan was less and less definite, while his purpose of some time completing them and beginning his real life-work flickered uncertainly. He lived much among people, but very little with them. They interested him, but he did not in the least care to have them be interested in him; for he felt the force that should have driven him to do his part with the others or against them slowly ebbing out of him. He could wait, he told himself, even if he had to wait till it was too late. Whoever has faith is in no hurry—that was his excuse to himself. For he believed that, when he came down to the bedrock of his own nature, he did have faith strong enough to move mountains—the trouble was that he never managed to set his shoulder to them. Once in a while, the impulse to create welled up in him, and he longed to see a part of himself freed in work that should be his very own. For days he would be excited with the happy, titanic effort of carting the clay for his Adam, but he never formed it in his own image. The will-power necessary to persistent self-concentration was not in him. Weeks would pass before he could make up his mind to abandon the work, but he did abandon it, asking himself, in a fit of irritation, why he should continue. What more had he to gain? He had tasted the rapture of conception; there remained the toil of rearing, cherishing, nourishing, carrying to perfection—Why? For whom? He was no pelican, he told himself. But argue as he might, he was dissatisfied with himself and felt that he had not fulfilled his own expectations; nor did it avail him to carp at these expectations and ask whether they were well founded. He had reached the point where he had to choose, for when first youth is past—early or late in accordance with each person’s individuality—then, early or late, dawns the day when Resignation comes to us as a temptress, luring us to forego the impossible and be content. And Resignation has much in her favor; for how often have not the idealistic aspirations of youth been beaten back, its enthusiasms been shamed, its hopes laid waste!—The ideals, the fair and beautiful, have lost nothing of their radiance, but they no longer walk here among us as in the early days of our youth. The broad, firmly planted stairway of worldly wisdom has conveyed them back, step by step, to that heaven whence our simpler faith once brought them down; and there they sit, radiant but distant, smiling but weary, in divine quiescence, while the incense of a slothful adoration rises, puff on puff, in festive convolutions.

Niels Lyhne was tired. These repeated runnings to a leap that was never leaped had wearied him. Everything seemed to him hollow and worthless, distorted and confused, and, oh, so petty! He preferred to stop his ears and stop his mouth and to immerse himself in studies that had nothing to do with the busy every-day world, but were like an ocean apart, where he could wander peacefully in silent forests of seaweed among curious animals.

He was tired, and the root of his weariness sprang from his baffled hope of love; thence it had spread, quickly and surely, through his whole being, to all his faculties and all his thoughts. Now he was cold and passionless enough, but in the beginning, after the blow had fallen, his love had grown, day by day, with the irresistible power of a malignant fever. There had been moments when his soul was almost bursting with insane passion; it swelled like a wave in its infinite longing and frothing desire; it rose and went on rising and rising, till every fibre in his brain and every cord in his heart was strung tense to the breaking-point. Then weariness had come, soothing and healing, making his nerves dull against pain, his blood too cold for enthusiasm, and his pulse too weak for action. And more than that, it had protected him against a relapse by giving him all the prudence and egoism of the convalescent. When his thoughts went back to those days in Fjordby, he had a sense of immunity akin to the feeling of a man who has just passed through a severe illness and knows that now, when he has endured his allotted agony, and the fever has burned itself to ashes within him, he will be free for a long, long time.

Then it happened, one summer day, after Erik and Fennimore had been married for two years, that he received a half-whining, half-boasting letter from Erik, in which he blamed himself for having wasted his time of late. He did not know what the matter was, but he had no ideas. The people he met in the neighborhood were fine, jolly fellows, no conventionality or nonsense about them, but they were perfect dromedaries with regard to art. There was not a human being he could talk with, and he had gotten himself into a slough of laziness and stagnation which he could not pull out of. He never had a glimmering of an idea or a mood, and never felt inspired. Sometimes he was afraid that his power had run out, and that he never would do anything any more. But this could not possibly go on forever! It must come back; he had been too rich to end like this, and when it came he would show them what art was, those fellows who painted away all the time as if they had learned it by rote. For the present, however, he was as if bewitched, and it would be an act of friendship if Niels would visit Mariagerfjord. They would make him as comfortable as circumstances allowed, and he could just as well spend his vacation there as any other place. Fennimore sent her love and would be glad to see him.

This letter was so unlike Erik that Niels saw at once there must be something serious amiss or he would not complain in this fashion. He was aware, too, of how little volume there was in the wellspring of Erik’s production—a slender stream only, which unfavorable circumstances could easily dry out. He would go at once! For all that had happened, Erik should find him a faithful friend; whatever the years had loosened of old ties and uprooted of old illusions, he would at least know how to guard this old friendship of their childhood. He had helped Erik before, and he would help him now. A fanaticism of friendship possessed him. He would renounce his future, fame, ambitious dreams, everything, for Erik’s sake. All that he owned of smoldering enthusiasm and creative ferment should be Erik’s; he would merge himself in Erik with his whole self and all his ideas, holding nothing back, keeping nothing for himself. He dreamed of greatness for the friend who had torn his life asunder so roughly, and saw himself blotted out, forgotten, impoverished, deprived of his intellectual heritage; and he went on dreaming that his gift to Erik should become no longer a loan, but Erik’s very own, as he coined it into works and deeds and gave it his stamp. Erik in honor and glory, and he himself one of the many, many commonplace folk and nothing else; poor, at last, by necessity, not by choice; a real beggar, not a prince in disguise.... And it was sweet to dream himself so bitterly humble.

But dreams are dreams, and he laughed at himself, as he thought that people who neglect their own work always have no end of time to interest themselves in that of others. It also occurred to him that, when he came face to face with Erik, the latter would, of course, disclaim his letter and pass it off as a joke. He certainly would think it extremely absurd if Niels were actually to present himself with the announcement that he was ready to help him recover his creative power. Nevertheless he went. In his inmost heart he believed that he could do some good, and no matter how much he tried to explain it away or cast doubts upon it, he could not rid himself of the feeling that it really was the friendship of their boyhood which had reasserted itself in all its old simplicity and warmth, in spite of the years and what the years had brought.

* * * * *

The villa at Mariagerfjord belonged to an elderly couple who had been forced by ill-health to make their home in the south for an indefinite period. They had not intended to rent the place, as they had started out with the idea of returning after six months, and therefore had left everything just as it was. So when Erik leased the house fully furnished, this was so literally true that he got it with bric-à-brac, family portraits, and everything else, even to an attic full of decrepit furniture with old letters in the drawers of the secretaries.

Erik had discovered the villa when he left Fjordby after his engagement. As it contained everything they needed, and as he hoped to go to Italy in a year or two, he had persuaded Consul Claudi to postpone the purchase of household furnishings for a while. They had moved into Marianelund very much as into a hotel, except that they brought a few more trunks than travellers usually carry.

The house fronted the fjord, less than twenty feet from the water, and was rather ordinary in appearance. It had a balcony above, a veranda below, and at the back a young garden with trees no thicker than walking-sticks, but from the garden one could step right into a magnificent bit of beech woods with heathery glades and wide clefts opening between banks of white clay, and that made up for many shortcomings.

This was Fennimore’s new home, and for a while it was as bright as happiness could make it, for they were both young and in love, strong and healthy, and without a care for their means of subsistence, either spiritual or material.

But every palace of joy that rises heavenward has sand mixed in the earth on which it is founded, and the sand will collect and run away, slowly perhaps, imperceptibly perhaps, but it runs and runs, grain by grain.... And love? Even love is not a rock, however much we may wish to believe it.

She loved him with her whole soul, with the hot, tremulous passion born of fear. He was to her much more than a god, much nearer—he was an idol, whom she worshipped without reason and without reserve.

His love was strong as hers, but it lacked the fine, manly tenderness that protects the loved woman against herself and watches over her dignity. Dimly he felt it as a duty, which called him sometimes in a faint, low voice, but he would not hear. She was too alluring in her blind love; her beauty, which had the provocative luxuriance and the humble seductiveness of the female slave, incited him to a passion that knew neither bounds nor mercy.

In the old myth about Amor, is it not told somewhere that he puts his hand over Psyche’s eyes before they fly away, rapturously, into the glowing night?

Poor Fennimore! if she could have been consumed by the fire of her own heart, he who should have guarded her would have fanned the flames; for he was like that drunken monarch who swung the incendiary torch, shouting with joy to see his imperial city burn, intoxicating himself with the sight of the leaping flames, until the ashes made him sober.

Poor Fennimore! She did not know that the hymn of joy can be sung so often that both melody and words are lost, and nothing remains but a twaddle of triviality. She did not know that the intoxication which uplifts to-day takes its strength from the wings of to-morrow, and when at length sobriety dawned, gray and heavy, she realized tremblingly that they had loved themselves down to a sweet contempt for themselves and each other—a sweet contempt which day by day lessened in sweetness and became, at last, utterly bitter. They turned away from each other as far as they could; he, to dream about his betrayed ideal of lofty coldness and scornful grace; she, to gaze with longing despair at the dim, quiet shores of her girlhood days, now so immeasurably far away. With each day that passed, it seemed harder to bear; shame burned madly in her veins, and a suffocating disgust with herself made everything seem wretched and hopeless. There was a small deserted room containing nothing but the trunks she had brought from home, and there she would often sit, hour after hour, until the sun sank over the world out there and filled the room with reddish light. There she tortured herself with thoughts sharper than thorns and scourged herself with words more stinging than whips, until she was stupefied by misery and tried to deaden her pain by throwing herself down on the floor as something too full of corruption and dregs—a carrion of herself—too foul to be the seat of a soul. Her husband’s mistress! That thought was never out of her mind; with that she threw herself in the dust and trampled on herself; with that she barred every hope of regeneration and turned every happy memory to stone.

Gradually a hard, brutal indifference came over her, and she ceased to despair, as she had long ceased to hope. Her heaven had fallen, but she did not try to raise the vault again in her dreams. The earth was good enough for her, since she was but of earth, earthy. She did not hate Erik, nor did she draw away from him. No, she accepted his kisses; she despised herself too much to repulse them, and besides, was she not his wife—his woman?

For Erik, too, the awakening was bitter, although his man’s prosaic common sense had warned him that some time it must come. When it really came, however, when love no longer gave boot for every bane, and the veil of gleaming gold in which it had descended to earth for him had been wafted away, he felt such a sinking of his spirits and such a sluggishness creeping over all his powers that he was angered and alarmed. Feverishly he turned to his work to assure himself that he had lost nothing else besides happiness, but art did not give him the answer he hoped for. He got hold of some unlucky ideas which he could not do anything with and yet could not make up his mind to abandon. Though they refused to take shape, they continued to tease his mind, and prevented other ideas from breaking through or absorbing his energy. He grew despondent and dissatisfied and sank into a moody idleness, since work was so confoundedly perverse, and since, of course, he had only to wait for the spirit to move him again. But time passed; his talent was still barren, and here by the quiet fjord there was nothing that could fructify it; nor were there any fellow artists whose triumphs could spur him on either to emulation or to creative opposition.

This inactivity grew unbearable. He was seized with a violent craving to feel himself, no matter how or in what, and since nothing else offered, he turned to a crowd of older and younger men about the neighborhood who enlivened the dulness of country life by such dissipations as their limited fancy could invent and their rather one-sided taste could savor. The kernel of their pleasures was always drinking and cards, no matter whether the shell enclosing them was called a market-day or a hunt. Nor did it make any particular difference that the scene was occasionally laid in a small neighboring town, and certain real or imagined business was transacted with the tradesmen during the afternoon; for the bargain was always closed at night in the tavern, where the discriminating landlord always showed persons of the right stripe into Number Caveat. If there happened to be strolling players in town, the tradesmen were let go, for the players were more sociable, did not shy at the bottle, and were usually ready to undergo the miraculous—though never quite successful—cure of drinking themselves sober in gin after getting drunk on champagne.

The leader of the crowd was a hunting squire of sixty, and its main stock was made up of small landowners and country gentlemen in the neighborhood, though it also included a massive young dandy of a brandy-distiller and a white-necked tutor, who had not been a tutor for twenty years or more, but had gone as a vagrant from house to house with a sealskin bag and an old gray mare, which he used to say he had bought from a horse-butcher. He was a silent drinker, a virtuoso on the flute, and was supposed to know Arabic. Among those whom the squire called his “staff“ were also a solicitor, who always had new stories to tell, and a doctor, who knew only a single one from the siege of Lübeck in the year 6.

The members of this band were widely scattered, and it scarcely ever happened that they were all together at one time, but whenever any one stayed away from the company too long the squire would issue a summons to the faithful to inspect the renegade’s oxen, which all understood to mean that they should quarter themselves upon the unfortunate man for two or three days and turn his house upside down with drinking, gambling, and whatever rustic amusements the season afforded. During such a punitive visit, it once happened that the whole party was snowbound, and the host’s supply of coffee, rum, and sugar ran out, so that they were reduced to drinking a coffee punch boiled of chicory, sweetened with sirup, and strengthened with brandy.

It was a coarse-grained crowd of boon companions that Erik had fallen in with, but perhaps people of such tremendous animal vitality could hardly find sufficient outlet in more civilized amusements, and their unfailing good humor and broad, bruin-like joviality really took away much of the grossness. If Erik’s talent had been akin to that of Brouwer or Ostade, this choice band of revellers would have been a perfect gold mine to him. As it was, he got nothing out of it except that he enjoyed it very much, too much in fact, for soon this wild racketing became indispensable to him and took up nearly all his time. Now and then, he would blame himself for his idling and vow to end it, but whenever he made an attempt at working, the sense of blankness and spiritual impotence would come over him again and drive him back to the old life.

The letter to Niels had been framed one day when his everlasting barrenness had made him wonder if his talent had been attacked by a wasting disease. As soon as it was sent, he regretted it, and hoped that Niels would let his plaint go in at one ear and out at the other.

But Niels he came, the knight-errant of friendship personified, and was met with that mixture of rebuff and pity which knights-errant in all times have encountered from those in whose behalf they have dragged Rosinante out of her snug stable. As Niels was tactful, however, and bided his time, Erik thawed before long, and the old intimacy was soon established between them; for Erik’s need of pouring himself out in complaint and confession had grown into an almost physical craving.

One evening after bedtime, when Fennimore had retired, they sat over their cognac and water in the dark sitting-room. Only the glow of their cigars showed where they were, and once in a while, when Niels leaned far back in his chair, his upturned profile would stand out black against the dark window-pane. They had been drinking a good deal, Erik especially, while they sat talking of the time when they were boys at Lönborggaard. Now Fennimore’s departure had made a pause which neither of them seemed inclined to break, for their thoughts came stealing upon them in a pleasant languor, as they listened drowsily to the singing of their blood, warm from the cognac.

“What fools we were when we were twenty,” came Erik’s voice at last. “God knows what we expected and how we had got it into our heads that such things were on earth. We called them by the same names that they bear in reality, but we meant something entirely above and beyond comparison with this tame sufficiency that we’ve got. There isn’t much to life, really. Do you think so?”

“Oh, I don’t know; I take it for what it is worth. We don’t generally live very much. Most of the time we only exist. If you could get life handed to you in one whole large, appetizing cake that you could set your teeth in ... but doled out in bits!—no, it’s not amusing.”

“Tell me, Niels—it’s only to you I can talk of such absurd things; I don’t know how it is, but you’re so queer. Tell me—is there anything in your glass? All right!—Have you ever thought of death?”

“Have I? Why, yes. Have you?“

“I don’t mean at funerals or when a man is sick, but sometimes when I’m just sitting here comfortably it comes over me like—like a despair simply. When I sit here and mope and don’t do anything and _can’t_ do anything, then I actually feel the time slipping away from me. Hours and weeks and months rush past with nothing in them, and I can’t nail them to the spot with a piece of work. I don’t know if you understand what I mean, but I want to get hold of it with something achieved. When I paint a picture, the time I use for it remains mine forever; it isn’t lost, even though it’s past. I am sick when I think of the days as they go—incessantly. And I _have_ nothing, or I can’t get at it. It’s torture! I sometimes get into such a rage that I have to get up and walk the floor and sing some idiotic thing to keep myself from crying, and then when I stop I am almost mad to think that the time has gone meanwhile, and is going while I think, and going and going. There is nothing more wretched than to be an artist. Here I am, strong and healthy; I have eyes to see; my blood is warm and red; my heart beats, and there is nothing the matter with my head, and I _want_ to work, but I can’t. I am struggling and groping for something that eludes me, something that I can’t grasp even if I toil and moil till I sweat blood. What can a man do for inspiration or to get an idea? It is all one whether I concentrate or whether I go out and pretend I am not looking for anything, never, never anything except the sense that now Time is standing up to the waist in eternity and hauling in the hours, and they rush past, twelve white and twelve black, never stopping, never stopping. What shall I do? What do people do when they feel like that? Surely, I can’t be the first. Have you nothing to suggest?”

“Travel.”

“No, anything but that. What made you think of that? You don’t believe I’m done for, do you?”

“Done for! No, but I thought the new impressions—”

“The new impressions! Exactly. Have you never heard about people who had plenty of talent in their first youth while they were fresh and full of hope and plans, but when youth had passed their talent was gone too—and never came back?”

They were silent for a long time.

“_They_ travelled, Niels, to get new impressions, that was their fixed idea. The south, the Orient—it was all in vain; it slid off from them as from a looking-glass. I have seen their graves in Rome—two of them, but there are many, many others. One of them went mad.”

“I have never heard that about painters before.”

“It’s true. What can it be, do you think? A hidden nerve that’s given way? Or something we have failed in or sinned against in ourselves, perhaps—who knows? A soul is such a fragile thing, and no one knows how far the soul extends in a human being. We ought to be good to ourselves—Niels!” His voice had grown low and soft. “I have often longed to travel, because I felt so empty. You have no idea how I have longed for it, but I simply don’t dare to, for suppose it didn’t help, and that I was one of those people I was telling you of. What then! Think of standing face to face with the certainty that I was done for, didn’t possess anything, couldn’t do anything—think of it—couldn’t do anything! A paltry wretch, a cursed dog of a cripple, a miserable eunuch! What do you think would become of me? And after all it is not impossible. My first youth is past, and as for illusions and that sort of thing, I can assure you I haven’t many left. It’s terrible how we go through them, and yet I was never one of those who’re anxious to get rid of them. I was not like you and the rest of the people who used to foregather at Mrs. Boye’s—you were always so busy plucking the fine feathers from one another, and the balder you got, the more you crowed. Still what’s the difference—sooner or later we all start molting.”

They were silent again. The air was bitter with cigar smoke and heavy with cognac, and they sighed drearily, oppressed by the stuffiness of the room and by their own very sad hearts.

Niels had travelled two hundred miles to bring aid, and here he sat feeling his impulse put to shame, while the colder side of his nature looked on. For what could he do, when it came to the point? What if he tried to talk picturesquely to Erik, in many words of purple and ultramarine, dripping with light and wading in shadow! There had been a dream of something like that in his brain when he started out. How utterly absurd! To bring aid! You might perhaps drive away the goddess with the closed hands from an artist’s door, but that was certainly the utmost; you could no more help him to create than you could help him, if he were paralyzed, to lift his little finger by his own strength. No, not though your heart overflowed with affection and sympathy and devotion and everything else that was generous.... What you ought to do was to mind your own affairs; that was useful and healthy, but of course it was easier to let your heart run amuck in a large and generous way. The only trouble was that it was so lamentably impracticable and so utterly ineffective. Minding your own affairs and doing it well did not insure you paradise, but at least you did not have to cast down your eyes before either God or man.

Opportunity was abundant for Niels to make melancholy reflections on the impotence of a kind heart, for all that he accomplished was to keep Erik at home a little more than usual for a month or so. Nevertheless, he did not care to return to Copenhagen during the hot season, and as he did not wish to remain a guest indefinitely, he engaged a room with a family a little above the peasant class, on the opposite shore of the fjord, so near that he could row over to Marianelund in fifteen minutes. Now that he was accustomed to the neighborhood, he would just as lief stay there as any other place, for he was one of the susceptible people over whom outward surroundings easily acquire a hold. Besides, his friend and his cousin Fennimore were there, and that was reason enough, especially as there was not a human being anywhere else expecting him.

During the trip from Copenhagen, he had carefully thought out his behavior to Fennimore and how he would show her that he had forgotten so completely that he did not remember there was anything to forget; above all, no coldness, but a friendly indifference, a superficial cordiality, a polite sympathy; that was the proper attitude.

But it was all thrown away.

The Fennimore he met was a different person from the one he had left. She was still lovely; her form was luxuriant and beautiful as before, and she had the same slow, languid movements that charmed him in former days, but there was a dreary thoughtlessness in the expression of her mouth as of one who had thought too much, and a pitiful, tortured cruelty in her gentle eyes. He did not understand it at all, but one fact was at least clear, and that was that she had had other things to think of than remembering him, and that she was quite callous to any memories he could awaken. She looked like one who had made her choice and done the worst she could do with it.

Little by little, he began to spell and put things together, and one day, when they were walking along the shore, he began to understand.

Erik was cleaning up his studio, and as they were strolling by the water, the maid came out with an apronful of refuse which she threw on the beach. There was a litter of old brushes, fragments of casts, broken palette knives, bits of oil bottles, and empty paint tubes. Niels poked the heap with his foot, and Fennimore looked on with the vague curiosity people often feel in turning over old rubbish. Suddenly Niels drew his foot away as if something had burned it, but caught himself as quickly, and gave the pile another kick.

“Oh, let me see it,” begged Fennimore, and put her hand on his arm as if to stop him. He bent down and pulled out a plaster cast of a hand holding an egg.

“It must be a mistake,” he said.

“Why no, it is broken,” she replied quietly, as she took it from him. “See, the forefinger is gone,” she added, pointing, but when she suddenly became aware that the egg had been cut in two and a yolk painted inside it with chrome yellow, she blushed, and, bending down, she slowly and deliberately knocked the hand against a stone, until it was broken into little bits.

“Do you remember the time it was cast?” Niels asked, in order to say something.

“I remember that my hand was smeared with green soap so the plaster should not stick to it. Is that what you were thinking of?”

“No, I mean the time when Erik passed the cast around at the tea-table. Don’t you remember, when it came to your old aunt, how her eyes filled with tears, and she embraced you with the deepest compassion and kissed you on the brow, as if some harm had been done to you?”

“Yes, people are so sensitive.”

“No, we all laughed at her, but there was a delicacy in it nevertheless, although it was so nonsensical.”

“Yes, there is much of that nonsensical delicacy in the world.”

“I believe you want to quarrel with me to-day.”

“No, I don’t, but there is something I want to say to you. You won’t take offence at a little frankness?—Well, then—suppose a man tells a story that is not very nice in his wife’s presence and perhaps otherwise shows what appears to you a lack of consideration for her; don’t you think it is unnecessary for you then to express your protest by your emphatic fastidiousness and your exceeding great chivalry? It is fair to assume that the man knows his own wife best, and knows that it won’t offend or wound her; otherwise he would not do it. Is not that true?”

“No, it is not true, generally speaking, but in this case, and on your authority, I don’t mind saying yes.”

“That’s right. You may be sure that women are not the ethereal creatures many a good youth fancies; they are really no more delicate than men, and not very different from them. Take my word for it, there has been some filthy clay used in the shaping of them both.”

“Dearest Fennimore! Thank God you don’t know what you are saying, but you are very unjust to women and to yourself. _I_ believe in woman’s purity.”

“Woman’s purity! What do you mean by woman’s purity?”

“I mean—that is—”

“You mean—I will tell you; you mean nothing, for that is another piece of nonsensical delicacy. A woman can’t be pure, and isn’t supposed to be—how could she? It is against nature! And do you think God made her to be pure? Answer me!—No, and ten thousand times no. Then why this lunacy! Why fling us up to the stars with one hand, when you have to pull us down with the other! Can’t you let us walk the earth by your side, one human being with another, and nothing more at all? It is impossible for us to step firmly on the prose of life when you blind us with your poetic will-o’-the-wisps. Let us alone! For God’s sake, let us alone!”

She sat down and wept.

Niels understood much. Fennimore would have been miserable had she known how much. Was it not partly the old story of love’s holiday fare which refuses to turn into daily bread, but goes on being holiday fare, only more tasteless, more insipid, and less nourishing, day by day? One can’t perform a miracle, and the other can’t perform it, and there they sit in their banqueting clothes, careful to smile and to use festive words, but underneath they feel the agony of hunger and thirst, while their eyes shrink from each other, and hatred begins to grow in their hearts. Was not that the first chapter, and was not the other the equally dreary tale of a woman’s despair at not being able to recover herself after finding out that the demigod, whose bride she became so joyously, was only an ordinary mortal? First the despair, the bootless despair, and then the merciful stupor—that must be the explanation. It seemed to Niels that he understood everything: the hardness in her, the dreary humility, and her coarseness, which was the bitterest drop in the whole goblet. By degrees he came to see also that his delicacy and deferential homage must oppress and irritate her, because a woman who has been hurled from the purple couch of her dreams to the pavement below will quickly resent any attempt to spread carpets over the stones which she longs to feel in all their hardness. In her first despair she is not satisfied to tread the path with her feet: she is determined to crawl it on her knees, choosing the way that is steepest and roughest. She desires no helping hand and will not lift her head—let it sink down with its own heaviness, so that she may put her face to the ground and taste the dust with her tongue!

Niels pitied her with all his heart, but he left her alone as she desired.

It was hard to look on and not help, to sit apart and dream her happy, in stupid dreams, or to wait and calculate, with the cold knowledge of the physician, how long she had to suffer. He told himself, in this dreary wisdom, that there could be no relief until her old hope in the fair, gleaming treasures of life had bled to death and a more sluggish stream had entered her veins, making her dull enough to forget, blunt enough to accept, and, at last, at last, coarse enough to rejoice in the thick atmosphere of a bliss many heavens lower than that which she had meekly hoped and humbly prayed for wings to reach.—He was full of disgust with all the world when he thought that she, to whom he had once knelt in adoration, had come to such a pass that she had been forced to a slave’s estate, and stood at the gate shivering with cold, while he rode past on his high horse with the large coins of life jingling in his pocket.

One Sunday afternoon, in the latter part of August, Niels rowed across the fjord. Fennimore was at home alone when he came; he found her lying on a sofa in the corner room, and very miserable. Her breath came with that low, monotonous moaning which seems to afford relief from pain, and she said that she had a frightful headache. There was no one to help her, for she had given the maid leave to go home to Hadssund, and soon afterward some one had come and carried off Erik; she could not understand where they had gone in the rain. Now she had been lying there for two hours trying to sleep, but it was impossible, the pain was so bad. She had never had it before, and it had come on so suddenly—at dinner-time there had been nothing the matter. First it was in the temples, and then it seemed to dig deeper and deeper and deeper in; now it seemed to be behind her eyes—if it only was not anything dangerous. She was not used to being ill, and was very frightened and unhappy.

Niels comforted her as well as he could, telling her to lie still, close her eyes, and not speak. He found a heavy shawl, which he wrapped around her feet, fetched vinegar from the buffet, and made a cold compress, which he laid on her brow. Then he sat down quietly by the window, and looked out at the rain.

From time to time, he stole over to her on tiptoe and changed the compress without speaking, merely nodding to her, as she looked up at him gratefully between his hands. Sometimes she wanted to speak, but he hushed her with a look, shaking his head, and returned to his seat again.

At last she fell asleep.

One hour passed and another, and she was still sleeping. Slowly one quarter slipped into the other, while the melancholy daylight faded, and the shadows in the room waxed larger, as if they were growing out of the furniture and the walls. Outside the rain fell, evenly and steadily, blotting out every other sound in its low, incessant patter.

She was still sleeping.

The fumes of the vinegar and the vanilla scent of the heliotrope, mingling in a pungent odor like wine, filled the room. Warmed by their breath, the air covered the gray window-panes with a dewy film, which grew denser with the increasing coolness of the evening.

By this time, he was far away in memories and dreams, though a part of his consciousness still watched over the sleeper and followed her sleep. Gradually, as the darkness pressed in, his fancy wearied of feeding these dreams that flickered up and died down, just as the soil gets tired of bringing forth the same crop again and again; and the dreams grew feebler, more sterile, and stiffer, losing the luxuriant details that had entwined them like long shoots of clinging vines. His thoughts left the distance and came homing back.—How quiet everything was! Was it not as if they were together, he and she, on an island of silence rising above the monotonous sea of sound made by the soft patter of the rain? And their souls were still, calm and safe, while the future seemed to slumber in a cradle of peace.