Mr. Bigum looked after her, crestfallen. For another fifteen minutes he
walked up and down before the steps. All the words that had been spoken
seemed to be still vibrating through the air; she had so lately gone,
it seemed that her shadow must still linger there; it seemed that she
could not yet be out of reach of his prayers, and everything could not
be inexorably ended. But after a while the chambermaid came out and
gathered up the engravings, carried in the chair, the portfolios, the
rush matting—everything.
Then he could go too.
In the open gable window up above, Niels sat gazing after him. He
had heard the whole conversation from beginning to end. His face had
a frightened look, and a nervous trembling passed through his body.
For the first time he was afraid of life. For the first time his mind
grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the
sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you _are_ dragged to the
rack, and you _are_ tortured, and there is no marvellous rescue at the
last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream.
He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror.
* * * * *
Edele did not have a good autumn, and the winter drained her strength
completely. Spring, when it came, did not find one poor little
life-germ that it could warm and coax into growth; it found only a
withering, which no gentleness and no warmth could arrest or even
retard. But it could at least pour a flood of light over the paling
life and caress the ebbing strength with fragrant, balmy air, as the
evening crimson follows slowly in the wake of dying day.
The end came in May, on a day flooded with sunshine, one of the
days when the lark is never silent, and you can almost see the rye
grow. The great cherry-trees outside of her window were white with
flowers—nosegays of snow, wreaths of snow, cupolas, arches, garlands,
a fairy architecture against the bluest of skies.
She was very weak that day, and withal she felt a strange sense of
lightness. She knew what was coming, for that morning she had sent for
Bigum and said good-by to him.
Her uncle had come over from Copenhagen, and all that afternoon the
handsome, white-haired man sat by her bedside with his hand folded in
her hands. He did not speak, but once in a while he would move his
hand, and she would press it; she would look up, and he would smile to
her. Her brother, too, was in the room, gave her medicine, and helped
her in other ways.
She lay very still with closed eyes, while familiar pictures from life
over there flitted past her. Sorgenfri with hanging birches, the red
church at Lyngby standing on a foundation of graves, and the white
country house with the bit of sunken road leading down to the sea,
where the paling always was green as if painted by the water,—the
images took shape before her, grew clear, melted away, and vanished.
And other pictures came. There was Bredgade when the sun went down,
and the darkness closed in around the houses. There was the queer
Copenhagen you found when you came in from the country in the forenoon.
It seemed so weird with its hurry and bustle in the sunlight, with the
whitened window-panes and the streets smelling of fruit. There was
something unreal about the houses in the strong light; the noise and
rattle of wheels could not chase away the silence that seemed to enfold
them.... Then came the dim, quiet drawing-room in the autumn evenings,
when she was dressed for the theatre, and the others were not down
yet—the smell of incense, the wood fire from the stove lighting up
the carpet—the rain whipping the windows—the horses stamping at the
door—the melancholy cry of the mussel-venders ... and back of all this
the theatre awaiting her with light and music and festive glow.
With such pictures the afternoon wore away.
Niels and his mother were in the parlor. Niels knelt by the sofa with
his face pressed down against its brown velvet and his hands clasped
over his head. He wept and wailed aloud, giving himself up to his grief
without any attempt at self-control. Mrs. Lyhne sat beside him. The
hymn-book lay on the table in front of her, open at the hymns usually
sung at funerals. Now and then she read a few verses, and sometimes she
would bend down over her son to speak a word of soothing or chiding,
but Niels would not be comforted, and she could not stop his weeping or
the wild prayers born of his despair.
Presently Lyhne appeared in the door of the sick-room. He made no sign,
but looked at them so solemnly that both rose and followed him in to
his sister. He took them by the hand and led them to the bed. Edele
looked up and gazed at each one in turn, while her lips motioned for
words. Then Lyhne took his wife over to the window and sat down there
with her. Niels threw himself on his knees at the foot of the bed.
He wept softly and prayed with clasped hands, eagerly and incessantly,
in a low, passionate whisper. He told God that he would not stop
hoping. “I won’t let You go, Lord, I won’t let You go before You have
said ‘Yes’! You mustn’t take her away from us; for You know how we love
her—You mustn’t, You mustn’t! Oh, I can’t say, ‘Thy will be done;’ for
Your will is to let her die, but, oh, let her live! I will thank You
and obey You. I will do everything I know You want me to do. I’ll be so
good and never offend You, if You will only let her live! Do You hear,
God? Oh, stop, stop, and make her well before it’s too late! I will, I
will, oh, what can I promise You?—Oh, I’ll thank You, never, never,
forget You; oh, but hear me! Don’t You see she’s dying, don’t You see
she’s dying? Do You hear? Take Your hand away! I can’t lose her, God,
I can’t! Let her live, won’t You please, won’t You please? Oh, it’s
wicked of You—”
Outside, beyond the window, the white flowers flushed to pink in the
light of the setting sun. Arch upon arch, the blossoming sprays built
of their gossamer bloom a rose-castle, a vaulted choir of roses, and
through this airy dome the azure sky shone with a softened twilight
blue, while golden lights and lights of gold flaming to crimson shot
like the rays of a nimbus from every garlanded line of the ethereal
temple.
White and still, Edele lay there with the old man’s hand between both
of hers. Slowly she breathed out her life, breath by breath; fainter
and fainter was the rising of her breast; heavier and heavier fell the
eyelids.
“My love to Copenhagen!” was her last low whisper.
But her last message was heard by no one. It did not come from her lips
even as a breath—her message to him, the great artist whom she had
loved secretly with her whole soul, but to whom she had been nothing,
only a name that his ear knew, only one unrecognized figure in the
great admiring public.
The light faded into blue dusk, and her hands fell weakly apart. The
shadows grew—shadows of night and of death.
The old man bent down over her bed and laid his hands on her pulse,
waiting quietly, and when the last throb of life had ebbed away, when
the last feeble pulse-beat was stilled, he lifted the pale hand to his
lips.
“Little Edele!”
_Chapter IV_
There are those who can take up their grief and bear it, strong natures
who feel their own powers through the very heaviness of their burden.
Weaker people give themselves up to their sorrow passively, as they
would submit to a sickness; and like a sickness their sorrow pervades
them, drinks itself into their innermost being and becomes a part of
them, is assimilated in them through a slow struggle, and finally loses
itself in them, as they return to perfect health.
But there are yet others to whom sorrow is a violence done them, a
cruelty which they never learn to accept as a trial or chastisement
or as simple fate. It is to them an act of tyranny, an expression of
personal hate, and it always leaves a sting in their hearts.
Children do not often grieve in this way, but Niels Lyhne did. For had
he not been face to face with God in the fervor of his prayers? Had
he not crawled on his knees to the foot of the throne, full of hope,
tremulous with fear, and yet firm in his faith in the omnipotence of
prayer, with courage to plead until he should be heard? And he had been
forced to rise from the dust and go away with his hope put to shame.
His faith had not been able to bring the miracle down from heaven, no
God had answered his cry, death had marched straight on and seized its
prey, as if no sheltering wall of prayers had been lifted toward the
sky.
A stillness fell upon him. His faith had flung itself blindly against
the gates of heaven, and now it lay on Edele’s grave with broken
wings. For he had believed with the crude, implicit fairy-tale faith
that children so often feel. The complex, subtly shaded figure of the
Catechism is not the God children believe in; their God is the mighty
one in the Old Testament, He who loved Adam and Eve so much, and to
whom the whole generation of men, kings, prophets, Pharaohs, are
nothing but good and bad children, this tremendous, fatherly God, Who
is wrathful with the anger of a giant and bountiful with the generosity
of a giant, Who has hardly created life before He lets death loose upon
it, Who drowns His earth in the waters from His heaven, who thunders
down laws too heavy for the race He made, and who, finally, in the days
of the Emperor Augustus, has pity upon men and sends His Son to death
in order that the law may be broken while it is fulfilled. This God,
Who always answers with a miracle, is the one to whom children speak
when they pray. By and by, a day comes when they understand that they
have heard His voice for the last time in the earthquake that shook
Golgotha and opened the graves, and that now, since the veil of His
Holy of Holies has been rent in twain, it is the God Jesus who reigns;
and from that day on they pray differently.
But Niels had not yet attained to this. It is true, he had followed
Jesus on His earthly pilgrimage with a believing heart, but when he
saw Him subjecting Himself to the Father, going about so bereft of
power and suffering so humanly, all this had hidden the godhead from
him. He had seen in Him only the one Who did the will of the Father,
the Son of God, not God Himself: therefore, it was to God the Father
he had prayed, and it was God the Father who had failed him in his
bitter need. But if God had turned from him, he could turn from God. If
God had no ears, he had no lips; if God had no compassion, he had no
worship, and he defied and cast God out of his heart.
On the day Edele was buried, he spurned the earth of the grave with
his foot, whenever the pastor spoke the name of the Lord, and when
he met it afterwards in books or on the lips of people, a rebellious
frown would wrinkle his youthful forehead. When he lay down to sleep at
night, a sense of forsaken greatness came over him, as he thought that
now all the others, children and grown people, were praying to the Lord
and closing their eyes in His name, while he alone held his hands from
clasping in prayer, he alone refused to do God homage. He was shut out
from the sheltering care of Heaven. No angel watched by his side; alone
and unprotected, he drifted on the strangely murmuring waters of
darkness, and loneliness enfolded him, spreading out from his bed in
ever widening and receding circles. Still he did not pray; though he
longed till tears came, he did not call.
And it was so all his life. He had freed himself defiantly from the
point of view imposed upon him by his teachers, and he fled with his
sympathy to the side of those who had wasted their strength in vainly
kicking against the pricks. In the books he had been given to read
and in what he had been taught, God and His chosen people and ideas
marched on in an endless triumphal procession, and he had joined in the
jubilant shouting, had exulted in the sense of being counted with the
proud legions of the conqueror; for is not victory always righteous,
and is not the victor a liberator, a reformer, a light bringer?
But now the shouting had died down. Now he was silent, and he began to
enter into the thoughts of the defeated and feel with the hearts of the
vanquished. He understood that even when that which prevails is good,
that which yields is not therefore bad. He went over to the losing
side and told himself that this was finer and greater. The power of
the victor he called mere brute force and violence. He took sides—as
whole-heartedly as he could—against God, but as a vassal who takes up
arms against his liege lord; for he still believed, and could not drive
out his faith by defiance.
His tutor, Mr. Bigum, was not one who could lead a soul back to
the old paths. Indeed, his temperamental philosophy, by virtue of
which he could be fired and enraptured by each and every side of the
question—to-day, one; to-morrow, another—set all dogmas adrift in
the minds of his pupils. At bottom he was really a man of Christian
principles, and if any one could have pinned him down to saying what
was the fixed point in all this fluid matter, he would most likely have
replied that it was the creed of the Evangelical Lutheran Church or
something akin to that, but he himself had very little inclination to
drive his pupils along the straight road of orthodoxy or to warn them
at every step that the least deviation from the beaten track meant
straying into lies and darkness, likely to end in perdition and hell;
for he had none of the passionate concern of the orthodox for jots and
tittles. He was, in fact, religious in the slightly artistic, superior
manner such talented people affect, not afraid of a little harmonizing,
easily enticed into half unconscious rearrangements and adaptations,
because, whatever they do, they must assert their own personality, and,
in whatever spheres they fly, must hear the whirring of their own wings.
Such people do not guide, but their instruction has a fullness, a
copiousness, and a wobbly many-sidedness which, provided they do not
utterly confuse a pupil, tend to develop his independence in a high
degree, since they almost force him to make up his mind for himself.
For children can never rest upon anything vague or indefinite; their
very instinct of self-preservation demands a plain Yes or a plain No,
a for or against, to show them where to turn with their hate and where
with their love.
Hence there was no firm and immutable authority that might have guided
Niels with its constant clinching of arguments and pointing of ways. He
had taken the bit in his teeth, and plunged headlong on any path that
opened before him, provided only that it led him away from what had
been the home of his feelings and of his thoughts.
He felt a new sense of power in thus seeing with his own eyes and
choosing with his own heart and forming himself by his own will. Many
new things came to his mind; traits of his own nature that he had
never thought of and that seemed unrelated one to the other, fitted
themselves together wonderfully and were fused into a rational whole.
It was a fascinating time of discovery. Little by little, in fear and
uncertain exultation, in incredulous joy, he found himself. He began to
realize that he was not like others, and a new spiritual modesty made
him shy, awkward, and taciturn. He grew suspicious of questions, and
imagined he found hints of his own most hidden thoughts in everything
that was said. Having learned to read in his own heart, he supposed
everybody else could read what was written there, and he shunned
his elders, preferring to roam about alone. It seemed to him that
people had suddenly become very intrusive; he developed a slightly
hostile feeling toward them as to creatures of another race, and in
his loneliness he began to hold them up for scrutiny and judgment.
Formerly the names of father, mother, the pastor, the miller, sufficed
to characterize, and the name had quite hidden the person from him. But
now he saw that the pastor was a jolly little man, who made himself as
meek and demure as he could at home to escape the notice of his wife,
while abroad he tried to forget the domestic yoke by talking himself
into a frenzy of rebellion and loud-voiced thirst for liberty. That was
the pastor as he saw him now.
And Mr. Bigum?
He had seen him ready to throw everything overboard for Edele’s love,
had heard him deny himself and the soul within him in that hour
of passion in the garden, and now he was always talking about the
philosopher rising in Olympic calm above the vague whirlwinds and
mist-born rainbows of life. It roused a painful contempt in the lad
and made his doubts sleep but lightly, ready to wake in a moment. For
how could he know that the very things in human nature which Mr. Bigum
called by belittling names were otherwise christened when they appeared
in himself, and that his Olympic calm toward that which moves common
mortals was but a Titan’s disdainful smile, quick with memories of a
Titan’s longing and a Titan’s passions.
_Chapter V_
Six months had passed since Edele’s death, when one of Lyhne’s cousins,
Mrs. Refstrup, became a widow. Her husband had been a potter, but the
business had never been flourishing, and during his long illness it had
quite run to seed, so there was scarcely anything between the widow and
actual want. Seven children were more than she could provide for. The
two youngest and also the oldest, who could help her in the factory,
remained with her, but the others were distributed among the family.
The Lyhnes took the second boy, Erik, who was fourteen, and had been
studying at the Latin school in the nearest town, where he had free
tuition. Now he was to share Mr. Bigum’s instruction with Niels and
Frithjof Petersen, the pastor’s boy.
It was very much against his will that he was kept at his books, for he
wanted to be a sculptor. His father had called this nonsense, but Lyhne
had nothing against it; he said the boy had talent. Still he thought he
ought to take his bachelor’s degree first, in order to have something
to fall back upon; and besides a classical education was necessary to
a sculptor, or was, at least, very desirable. That settled the matter
for the time being. Erik had to console himself with the fairly large
collection of good engravings and neat bronzes that Lönborggaard
had to offer. This meant a great deal to one who had seen nothing
but the rubbish bequeathed the local library by a bone-carver more
freakish than artistic in taste, and Erik was soon busy with pencil
and modelling-stick. No one attracted him as did Guido Reni, who in
those days was more famous than Raphael and the greatest; nor is there
anything that can open young eyes to the beauty of a work of art
better than the certainty that their admiration is authorized up to
the highest pinnacle. Andrea del Sarto, Parmigianino, and Luini, who
were to mean so much to him later when he and his talent had found each
other, left him quite indifferent, while the boldness of Tintoretto and
the bitterness of Salvator Rosa and Caravaggio filled him with delight.
For sweetness in art has no appeal for the very young; the daintiest of
miniature painters begins his career in the footsteps of Buonarotti,
and the pleasantest of lyrists sets out on his first voyage under the
black sail of bloody tragedy.
Still Erik’s art was to him only a game, only a little better than
other games, and he was no more proud of a well-modelled head or a
cleverly carved horse than of hitting the weather vane on the church
steeple with a stone, or of swimming out to Sönderhagen and back again
without resting. These were the games in which he excelled, games
requiring physical prowess, strength, endurance, a sure hand, and a
practised eye. He cared nothing for the kind of sport Niels and
Frithjof liked, where fancy plays the leading rôle, and all the events
and triumphs are imagined. The result was that the other two soon left
their old pastime to follow Erik’s lead. Their romance books were laid
aside, and the interminable story came to a rather violent end one day
at a secret session in the hayloft. Silence brooded over its newly
filled grave. In fact, they shrank from mentioning it to Erik, for he
had not been with them many days before they suspected that he would
make fun of them and their story, that he would shame them and lower
them in their own eyes. He had the power to do this because he himself
was so free from all day-dreams and fancies and enthusiasms. His clear,
boyish common sense was as merciless in its perfect healthfulness and
as contemptuous of mental idiosyncrasies as children generally are of
physical blemishes. For that reason Niels and Frithjof were afraid of
him. They formed themselves after him, denied much and concealed more.
Niels was especially quick to suppress in himself anything that was not
of Erik’s world, and with the burning zeal of the renegade, he scoffed
at Frithjof, whose slower, more faithful nature could not instantly
throw over the old for the new. His unkind mockery really sprang from
jealousy, for he had fallen in love with Erik on the very first day,
while the latter, in shy aloofness, half reluctant, half supercilious,
just barely and grudgingly allowed himself to be loved.
Among all the emotional relations of life is there any that is finer,
more sensitive, and more fervent than the exquisitely modest love of
one boy for another boy? It is a love that never speaks and never
dares to vent itself in a caress or a look, a seeing love that grieves
bitterly over every fault in the loved one, a love made up of longing
and admiration and self-forgetfulness, of pride and humility and calmly
breathing happiness.
Erik stayed at Lönborggaard only a little over a year. It happened that
Lyhne, on a visit to Copenhagen, took occasion to speak about the boy
to one of the leading sculptors there, and showed him some of Erik’s
sketches, whereupon Mikkelsen, the sculptor, declared that this was
talent, and further studying was a waste of time. It did not require
much classical education to find a Greek name for a nude figure. So it
was settled that Erik was to be sent at once to the city to attend the
Academy and work in Mikkelsen’s studio.
On the last afternoon, Niels and Erik were sitting in their room, Niels
looking at the pictures in a penny magazine, Erik deep in Spengler’s
critical catalogue of the art collection at Christiansborg. How often
he had turned the leaves of this book and tried to form a conception of
the pictures from its naïve description! Sometimes he would get almost
sick with longing to behold all this art and beauty with his own eyes,
to grasp it in very truth and make that glory of line and color his
own by the mere strength of his enthusiasm. And how often, too, he had
closed the book, weary of gazing into that drifting, fantastic mist of
words which refused to solidify and take shape, refused to give forth
anything, but went on in a vague and confused shifting—flowing and
slipping away—flowing and slipping away.
But to-day it was all different. Now he had the certainty that the
shapes he read about would not be shadows from dreamland much longer,
and he felt rich in the promise of the book. The pictures rose before
him as never before, flashing out like brilliant, many-colored suns
from a mist that was golden and dancing with gold.
“What are you looking at?” he asked Niels.
Niels pointed to a portrait in his book representing Lassen, the hero
of the Second of April.
“How ugly he is!” commented Erik.
“Ugly! Why, he was a hero—would you call _him_ ugly, too?” Niels
turned the leaves back to the picture of a great poet.
“Awfully ugly!” replied Erik decisively, making a grimace. “What a
nose! And look at the mouth, and the eyes, and those tufts around his
head!”
Then Niels saw that he was ugly, and he was silenced. It had never
occurred to him that greatness was not always cast in a mould of beauty.
“While I think of it,” said Erik, closing his Spengler, “let me give
you the key to the deck-house.”
Niels would have brushed him aside gloomily, but Erik hung a small
padlock key around his friend’s neck on a broad piece of ribbon. “Shall
we go down there?” he asked.
They went. Frithjof they found by the garden fence. He lay there eating
green gooseberries, and had tears in his eyes because of the parting.
Besides he was hurt that the others had not looked him up; for though
he generally came uninvited, he felt that such a day demanded a certain
amount of formality. Without speaking, he held out a handful of berries
to them, but they had had their favorite dishes for dinner, and turned
up their noses.
“Sour!” said Erik with a shudder.
“Indigestible truck!” added Niels, disdainfully looking down at the
proffered berries. “How can you eat it? Chuck the stuff, we’re going
down to the deck-house,” and he pointed with his chin at the key, for
his hands were in his pockets.
At that they all three set forth.