been bought at a beach auction. It had been put up by the fjord, and
had served as a tool-house when the dam was being built, but now it was
no longer in use. So the boys had taken possession of it, and concealed
in it their ships, bows and arrows, leaping-poles, and other treasures,
particularly such forbidden but indispensable things as powder,
tobacco, and matches.
Niels opened the door of the deck-house with an air of gloomy
solemnity. They went in and fumbled till they found their things in the
dark corners of the empty bunks.
“Do you know,” said Erik, with his head deep in a distant corner, “I’m
going to blow mine up.”
“Mine and Frithjof’s too!” cried Niels with a grand, consecrating
gesture.
“Not mine, by Joe!” exclaimed Frithjof; “then what’d we have to sail
with when Erik’s gone?”
“What indeed!” mocked Niels, turning away contemptuously.
Frithjof felt uncomfortable, but when the others had gone outside, he
carefully moved his ship to a safer shelter.
Outside they quickly laid the powder in the ships imbedded in a nest of
tarred oakum, set the sails, fixed the fuses, lighted them, and sprang
back. Running along the beach, they signalled to the crew on board,
loudly explaining to one another every chance turn of the ships as the
result of the good captain’s nautical skill. But the ships ran aground
at the point without the desired explosion having taken place, and this
gave Frithjof an opportunity nobly to sacrifice the wadding of his cap
to the manufacture of new and better fuses.
With all sails set, the ships stood in toward Sjaelland reef; the
Britisher’s huge frigates came heavily lurching in a closed ring,
while the foam blew white around the black bows, and the cannon
mounted at the head filled the air with their harsh clamor. Nearer
and nearer—glowing with red and blue, glittering with gold, the
figure-heads of the _Albion_ and the _Conqueror_ rose fathom-high.
Grayish masses of sails hid the horizon; the smoke rolled out in great
white clouds, and drifted as a veiling mist low over the sun-bright
glitter of the waves. Then the deck of Erik’s ship was splintered with
a feeble little puff; the oakum caught fire, a red blaze burst forth,
and the nimble flames licked the shrouds and ran along the spars, ate
their way smouldering along the bolt-rope, then shot like long flashes
of lightning into the sails, while the burning canvas shrivelled up,
broke, and flew in large black flakes far out to sea. The Danebrog was
still waving high on the slender top of the tall schooner-mast, the
flag-staff was burned in two, the flag fluttered wildly like red wings
eager for battle,—but the flame caught it, and the smoke-blackened
ship drifted without rudder or helmsman, dead and powerless, the sport
of the winds and breakers. Niels’s ship did not burn so well; the
powder had caught fire and some smoke came out, but that was all, and
it was not enough.
“Hey, there!” called Niels from the point, “sink her! Point the
starboard cannon down the aft hatch and give her a volley!” He bent
down and picked up a stone, “Ready, fire!” and the stone flew from his
hand.
Erik and Frithjof followed suit, and soon the hull was in splinters.
Then Erik’s ship shared the same fate. The wreckage was hauled ashore
to make a bonfire. It was piled up with dry seaweed and grass into a
burning heap, from which thick smoke issued, while the crystals that
hung on the seaweed burst and crackled with the intense heat.
For a long time the boys sat quietly around the bonfire, but suddenly
Niels, still gloomy, jumped up and brought all his things from the
deck-house, broke them in little bits, and threw them into the flames.
Then Erik brought his, and Frithjof also brought some. The flames of
the sacrificial pyre leaped so high that Erik was afraid they might
be seen from the pasture, and began to smother them with wet seaweed,
but Niels stood still, gazing sorrowfully after the smoke that drifted
along the beach. Frithjof kept in the background and hummed to himself
a heroic lay, which he accompanied secretly, now and then, with a
sweeping, bard-like gesture, as if he were playing on the strings of an
invisible harp.
At last the fire died down, and Erik and Frithjof went home, while
Niels stayed behind to lock the deck-house. That done, he looked
cautiously after the others, and then threw key and ribbon far out into
the fjord. Erik happened to look around at that moment and saw them
fall, but he quickly turned his head away, and began to run a race with
Frithjof.
The next day he left.
* * * * *
For a while they missed him sorely and bitterly, for their life had
been gradually formed on the supposition that they were three to share
it. Three were company, variety, change; two were boredom and nothing
at all.
What in the world could two find to do?
Could two shoot at a target or two play ball? They could play Friday
and Robinson Crusoe, to be sure, but then who would be the savages?
Such Sundays! Niels was so weary of existence that he began first to
review and afterwards, with the aid of Mr. Bigum’s large atlas, to
extend his geographical knowledge far beyond the prescribed bounds.
Finally, he started to read the whole Bible through and to keep a
diary. But Frithjof, in his utter loneliness, stooped so low as to seek
consolation in playing with his sisters.
After a while the past became less vivid to them, the longing less
keen. Sometimes on a quiet evening, when the sun reddened the wall in
the lonely chamber, and the distant, monotonous calling of the cuckoo
died down, making the stillness wider and larger, the longing would
come creeping into Niels’s mind, stealing its power; but it no longer
tortured, it was a vague thing that lay lightly on him and was half
sweet like a pain that is passing.
His letters showed the same trend. In the beginning they were full of
regrets, questions, and wishes loosely strung together, but soon they
grew longer, dealt more with externals, narrated, and were written
throughout in a well-formed style that hid between the lines a certain
conscious pleasure in being able to write so well.
As time passed, many things that had not dared to show themselves while
Erik was there began to raise their heads. Imagination strewed its
bright flowers through the humdrum calm of an eventless life. A dream
atmosphere enveloped Niels’s mind, bringing with it the provocative
fragrance of life, and, hidden in the fragrance, the insidious poison
of life-thirsting fancies.
So Niels grows up, and all the influences of his childhood work on the
plastic clay. Everything helps to shape it; everything is significant,
the real and the dreamed, what is known and what is foreshadowed—all
add their touch, lightly but surely, to that tracery of lines which is
destined to be first hollowed out and deepened and afterwards flattened
out and smoothed away.
_Chapter VI_
“Mr. Lyhne—Mrs. Boye; Mr. Frithjof Petersen—Mrs. Boye.”
It was Erik who performed the introduction, and it took place in
Mikkelsen’s studio, a light, spacious room with a floor of stamped clay
and a ceiling twenty-five feet high. At one end of the room two portals
led to the yard; at the other, a series of doors opened into the
smaller studios within. Everything was gray with the dust of clay and
plaster and marble. It had made the cobweb threads overhead as thick
as twine and had drawn river maps on the large window-panes. It filled
eyes and nose and mouth and outlined muscles, hair, and draperies on
the medley of casts that filled the long shelves running round the room
and made them look like a frieze from the destruction of Jerusalem.
Even the laurels, high trees planted in big tubs in a corner near one
of the portals, were powdered till they became grayer than gray olives.
Erik stood at his modelling in the middle of the studio wearing his
blouse and with a paper cap on his dark, wavy hair. He had acquired a
moustache and looked quite manly beside his two friends, who had just
taken their bachelor’s degree and, still pale and tired from their
examinations, looked provincially proper with their too new clothes and
their too closely cropped heads in rather large caps.
At a little distance from Erik’s scaffolding, Mrs. Boye sat in a low
high-backed chair, holding a richly bound book in one hand and a lump
of clay in the other. She was small, quite small, and slightly brunette
in coloring, with clear, light brown eyes. Her skin had a luminous
whiteness, but in the shadows of the rounded cheek and throat it
deepened to a dull golden tone which went well with the burnished hair
of a dusky hue changing to a tawny blondness in the high lights.
She was laughing when they came in, as a child laughs—a long, merry
peal, gleefully loud, delightfully free. Her eyes, too, had the artless
gaze of a child, and the frank smile on her lips seemed all the more
childlike because the shortness of her upper lip left the mouth
slightly open revealing milk-white teeth.
But she was no child.
Was she a little and thirty? The fullness of the chin did not say “No,”
nor the ripe glow of the lower lip. Her figure was well rounded with
firm, luxuriant outlines accentuated by the dark blue dress, which
fitted snugly as a riding-habit around her waist, arms, and bosom. A
dull crimson silk kerchief lay in rich folds around her neck and over
her shoulders, its ends tucked into the low pointed neck of her bodice.
Carnations of the same color were fastened in her hair.
“I am afraid we interrupted a pleasant reading,” said Frithjof with a
glance at the richly bound book.
“No, indeed—not in the least. We had been quarrelling for a full
hour about what we read,” replied Mrs. Boye. “Mr. Refstrup is a great
idealist in everything that has to do with art, while I think it’s
dreadfully tiresome—all this about the crude reality that has to be
purified and clarified and regenerated and what not until there is just
pure nothingness left. Do me the favor of looking at that Bacchante
of Mikkelsen’s—the one which deaf Traffelini over there is cutting
in marble. If I were to enter her in a descriptive catalogue.... Good
heavens! Number 77. A young lady in _negligé_ is standing thoughtfully
on both her feet and doesn’t know what to do with a bunch of grapes.
She should crush those grapes if I had my way—crush them till the red
juice ran down her breast—now shouldn’t she? Don’t you agree with
me?” and she caught Frithjof by the sleeve, almost shaking him in her
childlike eagerness.
“Yes,” Frithjof admitted; “yes, I do think there is something
lacking—something of freshness—of spontaneity—”
“It’s simply naturalness that’s lacking, and good heavens! _why_ can’t
we be natural? Oh, I know perfectly well; it’s because we lack the
courage. Neither the artists nor the poets are brave enough to own up
to human nature as it is. Shakespeare was, though.”
“Well, you know,” came from Erik behind the figure he was modelling,
“I never could get along very well with Shakespeare. It seems to me he
does too much of it; he whirls you round till you don’t know where you
are.”
“I shouldn’t go so far as to say that,” Frithjof demurred; “but on
the other hand,” he added with an indulgent smile, “I cannot call the
berserker ragings of the great English poet by the name of conscious
and intelligent artistic courage.”
“Really? Gracious, how funny you are!” and she laughed long and
heartily, laughed till she was tired. She had risen and was strolling
about the studio, but suddenly she turned, held out her arms toward
Frithjof, and cried, “God bless you!” and laughed again till she was
almost bent double.
Frithjof was on the verge of getting offended, but it seemed too fussy
to go away angry, especially as he knew himself to be in the right, and
moreover the lady was very pretty. So he stayed and began to talk to
Erik, all the while trying for Mrs. Boye’s benefit to infuse a tone of
mature tolerance into his voice.
Meanwhile Mrs. Boye was roaming about at the other end of the studio,
thoughtfully humming a tune, which sometimes rose in a few quick,
laughing trills, then sank again into a slow, solemn recitative.
A head of the young Augustus was standing on a large packing-case.
She began to dust it. Then she found some clay and made moustaches, a
pointed beard, and finally ear-rings, which she fastened on it.
While she was busy with this, Niels managed to stroll in her direction
under cover of examining the casts. She had not glanced toward him
once, but she must have sensed that he was there, for, without turning,
she held out her hand to him and asked him to bring Erik’s hat.
Niels put the hat into her outstretched hand, and she set it on the
head of Augustus.
“Good old Shakespeareson,” she said, patting the cheek of the
travestied bust, “stupid old fellow who didn’t know what he was doing!
Did he just sit there and daub ink till he turned out a Hamlet head
without thinking of it—did he?” She lifted the hat from the bust and
passed her hand over the forehead in a motherly way as if she would
push back its hair. “Lucky old chap, for all that! More than half
lucky old poet boy!—For you must admit that he wasn’t at all bad as a
writer, this Shakespeare?”
“I confess I have my own opinion of that man,” replied Niels, slightly
vexed and blushing.
“Good gracious! Have you too got your own opinion about Shakespeare?
Then what is your opinion? Are you for us or against us?” She struck an
attitude by the side of the bust and stood there, smiling, with her arm
resting on its neck.
“I am unable to say whether the opinion which you are astonished to
learn I possess is so fortunate as to acquire significance from the
fact of agreeing with your own, but I do think I may say that it is
_for_ you and your _protégé_. At any rate I hold the opinion that he
knew what he was doing, weighed what he was doing, and dared it. Many a
time he dared in doubt, and the doubt is still apparent. At other times
he only half dared, and then he blurred over with new features that
which he did not have courage to leave as he first had it.”
And he went on in this strain.
While he was speaking, Mrs. Boye grew more and more restless. She
looked nervously first to one side, then to the other, and drummed
impatiently with her fingers, while her face was clouded by a troubled
look which finally deepened to one of pain.
At last she could contain herself no longer.
“Don’t forget what you were going to say,” she exclaimed, “but I
implore you, Mr. Lyhne, stop doing that with your hand—that gesture as
if you were pulling teeth! Please do, and don’t let me interrupt you!
Now I am all attention again, and I quite agree with you.”
“But then it’s of no use to say any more.”
“Why not?”
“When we agree?”
“When we agree!”
Neither of them meant anything in particular by these last words,
but they said them in a significant tone, as if a world of delicate
meanings were hidden in them, and looked at each other with a subtle
smile, like an afterglow of the wit that had just flashed between them,
while each wondered what the other meant and felt slightly annoyed at
being so slow of comprehension.
They strolled back to the other end of the room, and Mrs. Boye took her
seat on the low chair again.
Erik and Frithjof had talked till they were beginning to be bored
with each other and were glad to be joined by the others. Frithjof
approached Mrs. Boye and made himself agreeable, while Erik, with the
modesty of the host, kept himself in the background.
“If I were curious,” said Frithjof, “I should inquire what the book was
that made you and Refstrup quarrel just as we were coming in.”
“Do you inquire?”
“I do.”
“Ergo?”
“Ergo!” replied Frithjof with a humble, acquiescent bow.
She held up the book and solemnly announced: “_Helge_, Oehlenschläger’s
_Helge_.—And what canto? It was ‘The Mermaid visits King Helge.’—And
what verse? It was the lines telling of how Tangkjaer lay down by
Helge’s side, and how he couldn’t control his curiosity any longer, but
turned
—_and at his side,
With white arms soft and round,
The greatest beauty he espied
That e’er on earth was found._
_The maid had doffed her cloak of gray;
Her lovely limbs were bare,
Save for the robe like silver spray
That veiled her form so fair._
That is all he allows us to see of the mermaid’s charms, and that is
what I am dissatisfied with. I want a luxuriant, glowing picture there;
I want to see something so dazzling that it takes my breath away. I
want to be initiated into the mysterious beauty of such a mermaid body,
and I ask of you, what can I make of lovely limbs with a piece of
gauze spread over them? Good heavens! No, she should have been naked
as a wave and with the wild lure of the sea about her. Her skin should
have had something of the phosphorescence of the summer ocean and her
hair something of the black, tangled horror of the seaweed. Am I not
right? Yes, and a thousand tints of the water should come and go in
the changeful glitter of her eyes. Her pale breast must be cool with
a voluptuous coolness, and her limbs have the flowing lines of the
waves. The power of the maelstrom must be in her kiss, and the yielding
softness of the foam in the embrace of her arms.”
She had talked herself into a glow, and stood there still animated
by her theme, looking at her young listeners with large, inquiring
child-eyes.
But they said nothing. Niels had flushed scarlet, and Erik looked
extremely embarrassed. Frithjof was absolutely carried away and stared
at her with the most open admiration, though of the three he was the
one least aware how entrancingly beautiful she was, as she stood there
with the glamor of her words about her.
Not many weeks had passed before Niels and Frithjof were as constant
visitors in Mrs. Boye’s home as Erik Refstrup. Besides her pale niece,
they met a great many young people, coming poets, painters, actors,
and architects, all artists by virtue of their youth rather than their
talent, all full of hope, valiant, lusting for battle, and easily moved
to enthusiasm. It is true, there were among them some of those quiet
dreamers who bleat wistfully toward the faded ideals of the past; but
most of them were full of ideas that were modern at the time, drunk
with the theories of modernity, wild with its powers, dazzled by its
clear morning light. They were modern, belligerently modern, modern
to excess, and perhaps not least because in their inmost hearts there
was a strange, instinctive longing which had to be stifled, a longing
which the new spirit could not satisfy—world-wide, all-embracing,
all-powerful, and all-enlightening though it was.
But, for all that, the exultation of the storm was in their young
souls. They had faith in the light of the great stars of thought; they
had hope fathomless as the ocean. Enthusiasm bore them on the wings of
the eagle, and their hearts expanded with the courage of thousands.
No doubt life would in time wear it all out, lull most of it to sleep;
worldly wisdom would break down much, and cowardice would sweep away
the rest—but what of it? The time that has gone with happiness does
not come back with grief, and nothing the future may bring can wither a
day or wipe out an hour in the life that has been lived.
To Niels the world, in those days, began to wear a different aspect.
He heard his own vaguest, most secret thoughts loudly proclaimed by
ten different mouths. He saw his own unique ideas, which to him had
been a misty landscape, with lines blurred by fog, with unknown depths
and muted notes,—he saw this landscape unveiled in the bright, clear,
sharp colors of day, revealed in every detail, furrowed everywhere
by roads, and with people swarming on the roads. There was something
strangely unreal in the very fact that the creations of his fancy had
become so real.
He was no longer a lonely child-king, reigning over lands that his own
dreams had conjured up. No, he was one of a crowd, a man in an army, a
soldier in the service of modern ideas. A sword had been placed in his
hand, and a banner waved before him.
What a wonderful time full of promise! And how strange to hear with
his ears the indistinct, mysterious whisper of his soul now sounding
through the air of reality like wild, challenging trumpet-blasts, like
the thunder of battering-rams against temple walls, like the whizzing
of David’s pebble against Goliath’s brow, like exultant fanfares. It
was as though he heard himself speaking with strange tongues, with
a clarity and power not his own, about that which belonged to his
deepest, innermost self.
This gospel of modernity, with its message of dissolution and
perfection, did not sound only from the lips of his contemporaries.
There were older men with names that carried weight whose eyes were
likewise open to the glories of new ideas. These men used more pompous
words and had more magnificent conceptions; the names of past centuries
swept along in their train; history was with them—the history of the
world and the human mind, the _Odyssey_ of thought. These were men who
in their youth had been moved by the very things that now thrilled
the young people and had borne witness to the spirit within them; but
when they heard in their own voices the sound which tells a man crying
in the wilderness that he _is_ alone, they were silenced. The young
people, however, remembered only that these men had spoken, not that
they had been silent; they were ready to bring laurel wreaths and
martyr crowns, willing to admire and happy in their admiration. Nor
did the objects of their homage repel this late-born appreciation;
they put on the crowns in good faith, looked at themselves in a large
and historic light, and poetized out of their past the less heroic
features; as for the old conviction, which ill winds had cooled, they
soon talked it into a glow again.
Niels Lyhne’s family in Copenhagen, more particularly the old
Councillor Neergaards, were not at all pleased with the circle their
young relative had entered. It was not the modern ideas that worried
them, but rather the fact that some of the young men found long hair,
great hunting-boots, and a slight slovenliness favorable to the growth
of such ideas, and though Niels himself was not at all fanatical on
this point, it was annoying to meet him, and even more annoying to
have their friends meet him, in company with youths who could be thus
characterized. These things, however, were trifles compared to his
intimacy with Mrs. Boye and his frequenting the theatre in company with
her and her pale niece.
Not that there was anything in particular to be said against Mrs. Boye,
but people talked about her. They said a great many things.
She was well born, a Konneroy, and the Konneroys were among the oldest,
most finely patrician families in town. Yet she had broken with them.
Some said it was on account of a dissipated brother, whom they had sent
off to the colonies to get rid of him. Certain it was that the break
was complete, and there were even whispers that old Konneroy had cursed
her, and afterwards had had an attack of his bad spring asthma.
All this had happened after she became a widow.
Mr. Boye, her husband, had been a pharmaceutist, an _assessor
pharmacia_, and had been knighted. When he died he was sixty and owned
a barrel and a half of gold. So far as any one knew, they had lived
quite happily together. In the first three years of their marriage, the
elderly husband had been very much in love, but later they had each
lived their own life, he busy with his garden and with keeping up his
reputation as a great man at stag parties, she with theatres, romantic
music, and German poetry.
Then he died.