what she said, and in what she permitted to be said, she kept within
the strictest bounds of prudery. Her coquetry consisted in not being
coquettish, in being incurably blind to her own power, and never making
the slightest distinction between her admirers. For that very reason,
they all dreamed intoxicating dreams of the face that must be hidden
behind the mask; they believed in a fire under the snow and scented
depravity in her innocence. None of them would have been surprised to
hear that she had a secret lover, but neither would they have ventured
to guess his name.
This was the way people saw Edele Lyhne.
She had left the city for Lönborggaard, because her health had suffered
from the constant round of pleasures, the thousand and one nights of
balls and masquerades. Toward the end of the winter, the doctor had
declared her lungs to be affected, and had prescribed fresh air, quiet,
and milk. All these things she found in abundance in her present abode,
but she also found an unceasing boredom, which made her long for
Copenhagen before a week had passed. She filled letter after letter
with entreaties that she might be allowed to return from her exile,
and hinted that homesickness did her more harm than the air did her
good. But the doctor had so alarmed her uncle and aunt that they felt
it their duty to turn a deaf ear to her lamentations, no matter how
pathetic.
It was not so much the social diversions she pined for; it was rather
that she craved the sense of feeling her own life mingling with
the sound-filled air of the great city, whereas in the country the
stillness in thoughts, in words, in eyes—in everything—made her
feel as though she heard herself unceasingly and with inescapable
distinctness, just as one hears a watch ticking through a sleepless
night. And to know that over there they were living exactly as
before—it was as if she were lying dead in the quiet night and heard
the strains of music from a ballroom stealing on the air over her grave.
There was no one she could talk to. No one of them all ever caught just
the shade of meaning that was the essence of what she said. Of course,
they understood her after a fashion, inasmuch as she spoke Danish,
but it was in a dull, general sort of a way, just as they might have
understood a foreign language which they heard only once in a while.
They never had the slightest idea of whom or what was meant by a
particular intonation of a word, never dreamed that such a little
phrase was a quotation, or that another, used in just such a way,
was a new variation of a popular witticism. As for their own speech,
it had a decent leanness through which one could positively feel the
grammatical ribs, and the words were used with a literalness as if
they had just come fresh from the columns of the dictionary. Even the
way they said Copenhagen! Sometimes with a mysterious emphasis, as
if it were a place where people ate little children; then again with
a far-away expression, as if they were speaking of a town in central
Africa, or in a festive voice tremulous with history, as they might
have said Nineveh or Carthage. The pastor always said Axelstead with
a reminiscent rapture, as if it had been the name of one of his old
sweethearts. Not one of them could say Copenhagen so that it meant
the city stretching from Vesterport to the Custom House on both sides
of Östergade and Kongens Nytorv. And so it was with all they said and
all they did.
There was not a thing at Lönborggaard that did not displease her; these
mealtimes regulated by the sun, this smell of lavender in chests and
presses, these Spartan chairs, all these provincial pieces of furniture
that stood shrinking against the walls as if they were afraid of
people! Even the very air was distasteful to her; she could never take
a walk without bringing home a robust perfume of meadow-hay and wild
flowers, as if she had been locked up in a haymarket.
And then to be called aunt, Aunt Edele. How it grated on her ears! She
got used to it after a while, but in the beginning it made the relation
between her and Niels rather cool.
Niels didn’t care.
Then came a Sunday in the early part of August, when Lyhne and his
wife had gone out in the carriage to pay a visit, and Niels and Miss
Edele were home alone. In the morning Edele had asked Niels to pick
some corn-flowers for her, but he had forgotten it. Suddenly, in the
afternoon, as he was walking with Frithjof, he remembered, gathered a
bouquet, and ran up to the house with it.
Everything was so still that he imagined his aunt must be asleep, and
crept silently through the house. At the threshold of the sitting-room
he stopped, with bated breath, preparing to approach Edele’s door. The
sitting-room was flooded with sunshine, and a blossoming oleander made
the air heavy with its sweet fragrance. There was no sound except a
muffled splash from the flower-stand whenever the goldfish moved in
their glass dish.
Niels crossed the room, balancing himself with outstretched arms, his
tongue between his teeth. Cautiously he grasped the door-knob, which
was so hot with the sun that it burned his hand, and turned it slowly
and carefully, knitting his brows and half closing his eyes. He pulled
the door toward him, bent in through the narrow opening, and laid the
flowers on a chair just within. The room was dark as if the shades were
down, and the air seemed moist with fragrance, the fragrance of attar
of roses. As he stooped, he saw only the light straw matting on the
floor, the wainscoting under the window, and the lacquered foot of a
Gueridon; but when he straightened himself to back out of the door, he
caught sight of his aunt.
She was stretched full-length on a couch of sea-green satin, dressed
in a fanciful gypsy costume. As she lay on her back, chin up, throat
tense, and forehead low, her loosened hair flowed down over the end
of the couch and along the rug. An artificial pomegranate flower
looked as if it had been washed ashore on an island made by a little
bronze-colored shoe in the midst of the dull golden stream.
The motley colors of her dress were rich and mellow. Dull blue, pale
rose, gray, and orange were blended in the pattern of a little low-cut
bodice of a thick, lustreless stuff. Underneath, she wore a white silk
chemise with wide sleeves falling to the elbow. The white had a faint
pinkish tone, and was shot with threads of reddish gold. Her skirt of
pansy-colored velvet without any border was gathered loosely around
her, and slid down over the side of the couch in slanting folds. Her
feet and legs were bare, and around her crossed ankles she had wound a
necklace of pale corals. An open fan was lying on the floor, showing
its pattern of playing-cards arranged in a wheel, and a little farther
away a pair of leaf-brown silk stockings had been thrown, one partly
rolled up, the other spread out and revealing the red clock.
At the same moment that Niels caught sight of her, she saw him.
Involuntarily she made a slight movement as if to rise, but checked
herself and lay still as before, only turning her head a little to look
at the boy with a questioning smile.
“I brought these,” he said, and went over to her with the flowers.
She held out her hand, glanced at them and then at her costume,
comparing the colors, and dropped them with a wearily murmured
“Impossible!”
Niels would have picked them up, but she stopped him with a motion of
her hand.
“Give me that!” she said, pointing to a red flask that lay on a
crumpled handkerchief at her feet.
Niels went to take it. His face was crimson, as he bent over the
milk-white, gently rounded legs and the long, slender feet, which had
almost the intelligence of a hand in their fine flexible curves. He
felt dizzy, and when one foot suddenly turned and bent downward with a
quick movement, he almost fell.
“Where did you pick the flowers?” Edele asked.
Niels pulled himself together and turned toward her. “I picked them in
the pastor’s rye-field,” he said, in a voice that sounded strange to
himself. He handed her the flask without looking up.
Edele noticed his emotion and looked at him astonished. Suddenly
she blushed, raised herself on one arm, and drew her feet under her
petticoat. “Go, go, go, go!” she said, half peevishly, half shyly, and
at every word she sprayed him with the attar of roses.
Niels went. When he was out of the room, she let her feet glide slowly
down from the couch and looked at them curiously.
Running with unsteady steps, he hurried through the house to his own
room. He felt quite stunned; there was a strange weakness in his
knees and a choking sensation in his throat. He threw himself down
on the couch and closed his eyes, but it was of no avail, a strange
restlessness possessed him; his breath came heavily as in fear, and the
light tortured him in spite of his closed eyelids.
Little by little a change came over him. A hot, heavy breath seemed to
blow on him and make him helplessly weak. He felt as one in a dream who
hears some one calling and tries to go, but cannot move a foot, and is
tortured by his weakness, sickens with his longing to get away, is
lashed to madness by this calling which does not know one is bound. And
he sighed impatiently as if he were ill and looked around quite lost.
Never had he felt so miserable, so lonely, so forsaken, and so forlorn.
He sat down in the flood of sunlight from the window, and wept.
From that day Niels felt a timid happiness in Edele’s presence. She
was no more a human being like any one else, but an exalted creature,
divine by virtue of her strange, mystic beauty. His heart throbbed
with rapture in merely looking at her, kneeling to her in his heart,
crawling to her feet in abject self-effacement. Yet there were moments
when his adoration had to have vent in outward signs of subjection. At
such times he would lie in wait for a chance to steal into Edele’s room
and go through a fixed rite of a certain interminable number of kisses
lavished on the little rug in front of her bed, her shoe, or any other
object that presented itself to his idolatry.
He regarded it as a piece of great good fortune that his Sunday jacket
happened to be degraded, just then, to every-day use; for the lingering
scent of attar of roses was like a mighty talisman with which he could
conjure up in a magic mirror the image of Edele as he had seen her
lying on the green couch wearing her masquerade costume. In the story
he and Frithjof were telling each other, this image was ever present,
and from now on the wretched Frithjof was never safe from bare-footed
princesses. If he dragged himself through the dense primeval forest,
they would call to him from hammocks of vines. If he sought shelter
from the storm in a mountain cave, they would rise from their couches
of velvety moss to welcome him, and when he dashed, bloody and
smoke-blackened, into the pirate’s cabin, shivering the door with a
tremendous blow of his sabre, he found them there too, resting on the
captain’s green sofa. They bored him terribly, and he could not see why
they should suddenly have become so necessary to their beloved heroes.
* * * * *
No matter in how exalted a place a human being may set his throne,
no matter how firmly he may press the tiara of the exceptional, that
is genius, upon his brow, he can never be sure that he may not, like
Nebuchadnezzar, be seized with a sudden desire to go on all-fours and
eat grass and herd with the common beasts of the field.
That was what happened to Mr. Bigum when he quite simply fell in love
with Miss Edele, and it availed him nothing that he distorted history
to find an excuse for his love by calling Edele Beatrice or Laura or
Vittoria Colonna, for all the artificial halos with which he tried to
crown his love were blown out as fast as he could light them by the
stubborn fact that it was Edele’s beauty he was in love with; nor was
it the graces of her mind and heart that had captivated him, but her
elegance, her air of fashion, her easy assurance, even her graceful
insolence. It was a kind of love that might well fill him with shamed
surprise at the inconstancy of the children of men.
And what did it all matter! Those eternal truths and makeshift lies
that were woven ring in ring to form the heavy armor he called his
principles, what were they against his love? If they really were the
strength and marrow and kernel of life, then let them show their
strength; if they were weaker, let them break; if stronger—But they
were already broken, plucked to pieces like the mesh of rotten threads
they were. What did she care about eternal truths? And the mighty
visions, how did they help him? Thoughts that plumbed the unfathomable,
could they win her? All that he possessed was worthless. Even though
his soul shone with the radiance of a hundred suns, what did it avail,
when his light was hidden under the ugly fustian of a Diogenes’
mantle? Oh, for beauty! Take my soul and give me my thirty pieces of
silver—Alcibiades’ body, Don Juan’s mantle, and a court chamberlain’s
rank!
But, alas, he had none of these graces, and Edele was by no means
attracted to his heavy, philosophic nature. His habit of seeing life
in barbarously naked abstractions gave him a noisy dogmaticism, an
unpleasant positiveness that jarred her like a misplaced drum in a
concert of soft music. The strained quality of his mind, which always
seemed to knit its muscles and strike an attitude before every little
question like a strong man about to play with iron balls, seemed to her
ridiculous. He irritated her by his censorious morality, which pounced
on every lightly sketched feeling, indiscreetly tearing away its
incognito, rudely calling it by name, just as it was about to flit past
him in the course of conversation.
Bigum knew very well what an unfavorable impression he made and how
hopeless his love was, but he knew it as we know a thing when we hope
with all the strength of our soul that our knowledge is false. There
is always the miracle left; and though miracles do not happen, they
might happen. Who knows? Perhaps our intelligence, our instinct, our
senses, in spite of their daylight clearness, are leading us astray.
Perhaps the one thing needful is just that unreasoning courage which
follows hope’s will-o’-the-wisp as it burns over seething passions
pregnant with desire! It is only when we have heard the door of destiny
slam shut that we begin to feel the iron-cold talons of certainty
digging into our breast, gathering slowly, slowly around our heart,
and fastening their clutches upon the fine thread of hope on which our
world of happiness hangs: then the thread is severed; then all that it
held falls and is shattered; then the shriek of despair sounds through
the emptiness.
In doubt, no one despairs.
* * * * *
On a sunny afternoon in September, Edele was sitting on the landing of
the half-dozen broad, old-fashioned steps that led down from the summer
parlor into the garden. Behind her, the French windows were wide open,
flung back against the motley wall-covering of bright red and bright
green vines. She leaned her head against a chair piled high with large
black portfolios, and held an etching up before her with both hands.
Color prints of Byzantine mozaics in blue and gold were scattered on
the pale green rush matting that covered the boards of the landing, on
the threshold, and on the oak-brown parquet floor of the summer parlor.
At the foot of the steps lay a white shade hat; for Edele’s hair was
uncovered, with no ornament but a flower of gold filigree in a pattern
to match the gold bracelet she wore high on her arm. Her white dress
was of semi-transparent stuff with narrow silky stripes; it had an
edging of twisted orange and black chenille and tiny rosettes in the
same two colors. Light silk mitts covered her hands and reached to the
elbow. They were pearl gray like her shoes.
The yellow sunlight was filtered through the drooping branches of an
ancient ash. It pierced the cool dimness, forming distinct lines of
light, powdering the air with gold dust, and painting the steps, the
wall, and the doors with spots of light, spot of sun upon spot of sun,
like a perforated shade. Through the tracery of shadow, each color rose
to meet the light: white from Edele’s dress, blood-red from crimson
lips, amber from yellow-blonde hair, and a hundred other tints round
about, blue and gold, oak-brown, glitter of glass, red and green.
Edele dropped the etching and looked up despondently, her eyes
expressing the silent plaint she was too weary to give vent to in a
sigh. Then she settled down again as if to shut out her surroundings
and withdraw within herself.
Just then Mr. Bigum appeared.
Edele looked at him with a drowsy blinking like that of a child who is
too sleepy and comfortable to stir, but too curious to shut its eyes.
Mr. Bigum wore his new beaver hat. He was absorbed in his own thoughts,
and gesticulated with his tombac watch in his hand, until the thin
silver chain threatened to snap. With a sudden, almost vicious
movement, he thrust the watch deep down into his pocket, threw back
his head impatiently, caught the lapel of his coat in a peevish grasp,
and would have gone on with an angry jerk of his whole body, his face
darkened by all the hopeless rage that boils in a man when he is
running away from his own torturing thoughts, and knows that he runs in
vain.
Edele’s hat, lying at the foot of the steps and shining white against
the black earth of the walk, stopped him in his flight. He picked it
up with both hands, then caught sight of Edele, and as he stood trying
to think of something to say, he held it instead of giving it to her.
Not an idea could he find in his brain; not a word would be born on
his tongue, and he looked straight ahead with a stupid expression of
arrested profundity.
“It is a hat, Mr. Bigum,” said Edele carelessly, to break the
embarrassed silence.
“Yes,” said the tutor eagerly, delighted to hear her confirm a likeness
that had struck him also; but the next moment he blushed at his clumsy
answer.
“It was lying here,” he added hurriedly, “here on the ground like
this—just like this,” and he bent down to show where it had lain with
an inconsequential minuteness born of his confusion. He felt almost
happy in his relief at having given some sign of life, however futile.
He was still standing with the hat in his hand.
“Do you intend to keep it?” asked Edele.
Bigum had no answer to that.
“I mean will you give it to me?” she explained.
Bigum came a few steps nearer and handed her the hat. “Miss Lyhne,” he
said, “you think—you must not think—I beg you to let me speak; that
is—I am not saying anything, but be patient with me!—I love you, Miss
Lyhne, unutterably, unutterably, beyond all words I love you. Oh, if
language held a word that combined the cringing admiration of the
slave, the ecstatic smile of the martyr, and the gnawing homesickness
of the exile, with that word I could tell you my love. Oh, listen to
me, do not thrust me away yet! Do not think that I am insulting you
with an insane hope! I know how insignificant I seem in your eyes, how
clumsy and repulsive, yes, repulsive. I am not forgetting that I am
poor,—you must know it,—so poor that I have to let my mother live
in a charitable institution, and I can’t help it, can’t help it. I am
so miserably poor. Yes, Miss Lyhne, I am only a poor servant in your
brother’s house, and yet there is a world where I am ruler, powerful,
proud, rich, with the crown of victory, noble by virtue of the passion
that drove Prometheus to steal the fire from the heaven of the gods.
There I am brother to all the great in spirit, whom the earth has
borne, and who bear the earth. I understand them as none but equals
understand one another; no flight that they have flown is too high for
the strength of my wings. Do you understand me? Do you believe me? Oh,
don’t believe me! It isn’t true, I am nothing but the Kobold figure
you see before you. It is all past; for this terrible madness of love
has paralyzed my wings, the eyes of my spirit have lost their sight,
my heart is dried up, my soul is drained to bloodless poltroonery. Oh,
save me from myself, Miss Lyhne, don’t turn away in scorn! Weep over
me, weep, it is Rome burning!”
He had fallen to his knees on the steps, wringing his hands. His face
was blanched and distorted, his teeth were clinched in agony, his eyes
drowned in tears; his whole body shook under the suppressed sobs that
were heard only as a gasping for breath.
“Control yourself, Mr. Bigum,” she said in a slightly too compassionate
tone. “Control yourself; don’t give way so, be a man! Please get up
and go down into the garden a little while and try to pull yourself
together.”
“And you can’t love me at all?” groaned Mr. Bigum almost inaudibly.
“Oh, it’s terrible! There is not a thing in my soul that I wouldn’t
murder and degrade if I could win you thereby. No, no, even if any
one offered me madness and I could possess you in my hallucinations,
_possess_ you, then I would say: Take my brain, tear down its wonderful
structure with rude hands, break all the fine threads that bind my
spirit to the resplendent triumphal chariot of the human mind, and let
me sink in the mire of the physical, under the wheels of the chariot,
and let others follow the shining paths that lead to the light! Do you
understand me? Can you comprehend that even if your love came to me
robbed of its glory, debased, befouled, as a caricature of love, as a
diseased phantom, I would receive it kneeling as if it were the Sacred
Host? But the best in me is useless, the worst in me is useless, too. I
cry to the sun, but it does not shine; to the statue, but it does not
answer—answer!... What is there to answer except that I suffer? No,
these unutterable torments that rend my whole being down to its deepest
roots, this anguish is nothing to you but an impertinence. You feel
nothing but a little cold offence; in your heart you laugh scornfully
at the poor tutor and his impossible passion.”
“You do me an injustice, Mr. Bigum,” said Edele, rising, while Mr.
Bigum rose too. “I am not laughing. You ask me if there is no hope,
and I answer: No, there is no hope. That is surely nothing to laugh
at. But there is one thing I want to say to you. From the first moment
you began to think of me, you must have known what my answer would be,
and you did know it, did you not? You knew it all the time, and yet
you have been lashing all your thoughts and desires on toward the goal
which you knew you could not reach. I am not offended by your love,
Mr. Bigum, but I condemn it. You have done what so many people do:
they close their eyes to the realities and stop their ears when life
cries ‘No’ to their wishes. They want to forget the deep chasm fate has
placed between them and the object of their ardent longing. They want
their dream to be fulfilled. But life takes no account of dreams. There
isn’t a single obstacle that can be dreamed out of the world, and in the
end we lie there crying at the edge of the chasm, which hasn’t changed
and is just where it always was. But we have changed, for we have let
our dreams goad all our thoughts and spur all our longings to the very
highest tension. The chasm is no narrower, and everything in us cries
out with longing to reach the other side, but no, always no, never
anything else. If we had only kept a watch on ourselves in time! But
now it is too late, now we are unhappy.”
She paused almost as if she woke from a trance. Her voice had been
quiet, groping, as if she were speaking to herself, but now it hardened
into a cold aloofness.
“I cannot help you, Mr. Bigum. You are nothing to me of what you wish
to be. If that makes you unhappy, you must be unhappy; if you suffer,
you must suffer—there are always some who have to suffer. If you make
a human being your God and the ruler of your fate, you must bow to the
will of your divinity, but it is never wise to make yourself gods, or
to give your soul over to another; for there are gods who will not step
down from their pedestals. Be sensible, Mr. Bigum! Your god is so small
and so little worth your worship; turn from it and be happy with one of
the daughters of the land.”