there for two or three years, spending most of the time in Rome. There
was nothing in the rumor that she had smoked opium in the French club,
nor in the story that she had allowed herself to be modelled in the
same manner as Paulina Borghese; and the little Russian prince who shot
himself while she was in Naples did not commit suicide for her sake. It
was true, however, that German artists never tired of serenading her;
and it was true that one morning she had donned the dress of an
Albanian peasant girl and had seated herself on the steps of a church
high up in the Via Sistina, where a newly arrived artist had engaged
her to stand as a model for him with a pitcher on her head and a little
brown boy holding her hand. At least there was such a picture hanging
on her wall.
On the way home from Italy she met a countryman, a noted clever critic,
who would rather have been a poet. A negative, sceptical nature,
people called him, a keen mind, one who dealt harshly and pitilessly
with others because he dealt harshly and pitilessly with himself and
supposed his brutality to be justified by that fact. Nevertheless, he
was not quite what they believed him to be; he was not so repellently
uncompromising nor so robustly consistent as he appeared. Although he
was always in a state of strife against the idealistic tendencies of
the age and called them by more disparaging names, still he felt drawn
toward these dreamy, ethereal ideals, this blue-blue mysticism, these
unattainable heights and evanescent lights; they appealed to him more
than the earth-born opinions for which he did battle and in which, most
of the time, he believed.
Rather against his will, he fell in love with Mrs. Boye, but he did
not tell her so, for his was not a young and open love, nor a hopeful
one. He loved her as a creature of another, a finer and happier race
than his own, and there was in his love a rancor, an instinctive rage
against everything in her that bore the marks of race.
He looked with hostile, jealous eyes upon her sentiments and opinions,
her tastes and views of life. He fought with every weapon he possessed,
with subtle eloquence, with heartless logic and harsh authority, with
derision wrapped in pity, to bring her over to his side, and he won.
But when truth had conquered, and she had become like him, he saw
that the victory was too complete, that he had loved her as she was,
with her illusions and prejudices, her dreams and her errors, and not
as she had now become. Dissatisfied with himself, with her, and with
everything in his own country, he went away and did not return. But
then she had just begun to love him.
This relationship, of course, gave people food for talk, and they made
the most of it. The Councillor’s wife told Niels about it in the tone
that aged virtue uses in speaking of young error, but Niels took it in
a manner that offended and horrified the old lady. He replied in a high
strain about the tyranny of society and the freedom of the individual,
about the plebeian respectability of the mob and the nobility of
passion.
From that day on he went but seldom to the home of his solicitous
relatives, but Mrs. Boye saw him all the more frequently.
_Chapter VII_
It was an evening in spring; the sun threw a red light into the room,
as it sank toward the horizon. The wings of the windmill on the
embankment drew shadows over the window-panes and the walls, coming,
going, in a monotonous swinging from darkness to light: a moment of
darkness, two moments of light.
At the window, Niels Lyhne sat gazing through the darkly burnished
elms on the embankment to the fiery clouds beyond. He had been in the
country, walking under blossoming beeches, past green rye-fields, over
flower-decked meadows. Everything had been so fair and light, the sky
so blue, the Sound so bright, the women he met so wondrously beautiful.
Singing, he had followed the forest path, but soon the words had died
out of his song, then the rhythm was lost, at last the tones were
muted, and silence came over him like a fit of giddiness. He closed his
eyes, and still he felt how his body drank the light, and his nerves
vibrated with it. Every breath he drew of the cool, intoxicating air
sent his blood rushing more wildly through the quivering, helpless
veins. He felt as though all the teeming, budding, growing, germinating
forces of spring were mysteriously striving to vent themselves through
him in a mighty cry, and he thirsted for this cry, listened for it,
till his listening grew into a vague, turgid longing.
Now, as he sat there by the window, the longing awoke in him again.
He yearned for a thousand tremulous dreams, for cool and delicate
images, transparent tints, fleeting scents, and exquisite music from
streams of highly strung, tensely drawn silvery strings—and then
silence, the innermost heart of silence, where the waves of air
never bore a single stray tone, but where all was rest unto death,
steeped in the calm glow of red colors and the languid warmth of fiery
fragrance.—This was not what he longed for, but the images glided
forth from his mood and submerged all else until he turned from them to
follow his own train of thought again.
He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain-dreams. Life a poem?
Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead
of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty!
This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks—in
a circle, of course. This sham diving into the stream of life while
all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in
one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by
something—life, love, passion—so that he could no longer shape it
into poems, but had to let it shape him!
Involuntarily he made a gesture as if to ward it off with his hand.
After all, he was afraid in his inmost heart of this mighty thing
called passion. This storm-wind sweeping away everything settled and
authorized and acquired in humanity as if it were dead leaves. He
did not like it! This roaring flame squandering itself in its own
smoke—no, _he_ wanted to burn slowly.
And yet this living on at half speed in quiet waters, always in sight
of land, seemed so paltry. Would that the storm and waves would come!
If he only knew how, his sails should fly to the yards for a merry run
over the Spanish Main of life! Farewell to the slowly dripping days,
farewell to the pleasant little hours! Peace be with you, you dull
moods that have to be furbished with poetry before you can shine, you
lukewarm emotions that have to be clothed in warm dreams and yet freeze
to death! May you go to your own place! I am headed for a coast where
sentiments twine themselves like luxuriant vines around every fibre of
the heart—a rank forest; for every vine that withers, twenty are in
blossom; for each one that blossoms, a hundred are in bud.
Oh, that I were there!
He grew tired of his longing and sick of himself. He needed people. But
of course Erik was not in now. Frithjof had been with him all morning,
and it was too late for the theatre. Nevertheless he went out and
strolled dejectedly through the streets.
Perhaps Mrs. Boye would be in. This was not one of her evenings and it
was rather late. Suppose he try, anyway.
Mrs. Boye was in. She was home alone. Too tired from the spring air to
go to a dinner party with her niece, she had preferred to lie on the
sofa, drinking strong tea and reading Heine; but now she was tired of
verses and wanted to play lotto.
So they played lotto. Fifteen, twenty, thirty-seven, a long series of
figures, the rattling of dice in a bag, and an irritating sound of
balls rolling on the floor in the apartment above them....
“This is not amusing,” said Mrs. Boye, when they had played for a long
time without covering any numbers. “Is it?—No!” she answered herself
and shook her head disconsolately. “But what else can we play?”
She folded her hands before her on the disks and looked at Niels with a
hopeless, inquiring gaze.
Niels really did not know.
“Anything but music!” She bent her face down over her hands and touched
her lips to the knuckles, one after the other, the whole row, then back
again. “This is the most wretched existence in the world,” she said,
looking up. “It isn’t possible to have anything like an adventure, and
the small happenings that life has to offer are surely not enough to
keep one’s spirits up. Don’t you feel that, too?”
“Well, I can’t suggest anything better than that we act like the Caliph
in Arabian Nights. With that silk kimono you are wearing, if you would
only wind a white cloth around your head, and let me have your large
Indian shawl, we could easily pass for two merchants from Mossul.”
“And what should we two unfortunate merchants do?”
“Go down to Storm Bridge, hire a boat for twenty pieces of gold, and
sail up the dark river.”
“Past the sand-chests?”
“Yes, with colored lamps on the masthead.”
“Like Ganem, the Slave of Love.—Oh, I know that line of thought so
well! It’s exactly like a man—to get so terribly busy building up
scenery and background, forgetting the action itself for the setting.
Have you never noticed that women live much less in their imagination
than men? We don’t know how to taste pleasure in our fancy or escape
from pain with a fanciful consolation. What is, is. Imagination—it is
so innocuous. When we get as old as I am now, then sometimes we content
ourselves with the poverty-stricken comedy of imagination. But we ought
never to do it—never!”
She settled herself languidly on the sofa, half reclining, her hand
under her chin, her elbow supported by the cushions. She gazed dreamily
out before her, and seemed quite lost in melancholy thoughts.
Niels was silent too, and the room was so quiet that the restless
hopping of the canary bird was plainly heard; the great clock ticked
and ticked its way through the silence, louder and louder, and a string
in the open piano, suddenly vibrating, emitted a long, low, dying note
that blended with the softly singing stillness.
She looked very young as she lay there, flooded from head to foot
in the soft yellow light of the lamp above her. There was something
alluring in the incongruity of her beautiful, strongly moulded throat
and matronly Charlotte Corday cap with the frank child-eyes and the
little mouth opening over milk-white teeth.
Niels looked at her admiringly.
“How strange it is to long for one’s self!” she said; “and yet I often,
so often, long for myself as a young girl. I love her as one whom I had
been very close to and shared life and happiness and everything with,
and then had lost while I stood helpless. What a wonderful time that
was! You cannot conceive the purity and delicacy of such a young girl’s
soul when she is just beginning to love for the first time. It can only
be told in music, but you can think of it as a festival in a fairy
palace, where the air shines like blushing silver. It is filled with
cool flowers, and they change color, their tints are slowly shifting.
Everything is song, jubilant and yet soft. Dim presentiments gleam and
glow like mystic wine in exquisite dream-goblets. It is all song and
fragrance; a thousand scents are wafted through the palace. Oh, I could
weep when I think of it, and when I think that if it could all come
back to me, by a miracle, just as it was, it would no longer bear me
up; I should fall through like a cow trying to dance on cobwebs.”
“No, quite the contrary,” said Niels eagerly, and his voice trembled,
as he went on: “no, the love you could feel now would be much finer,
much more spiritual than that young girl’s.”
“Spiritual! I hate this spiritual love. The flowers growing from that
soil are made of cotton cloth; they don’t even grow, they are taken
from the head and stuck in the heart, because the heart has no flowers
of its own. That is exactly what I envy in the young girl: everything
about her is genuine, she does not fill the goblet of her love with the
makeshift of imagination. Do not suppose, because her love is shot
through and shadowed over by imagined pictures and again pictures in a
great, teeming vagueness, that she cares more for those images than for
the earth she walks upon. It is only that all her senses and instincts
and powers are reaching out for love everywhere—everywhere, without
ever feeling weary. But she does not revel in her fancies, nor even so
much as rest in them; no, she is very much more genuine, so genuine
that in her own unwitting manner she very often becomes innocently
cynical. You have no idea, for instance, of what intoxicating pleasure
a young girl finds in breathing secretly the odor of cigars that clings
to the clothes of the man she loves—that is a thousand times more to
her than a whole conflagration of fancies. I despise imagination. What
good is it, when our whole being yearns toward the heart of another, to
be admitted only to the chilly ante-room of his imagination! And that
is what happens so often. How often we have to submit to letting the
man we love deck us out with his imagination, put a halo around our
head, tie wings on our shoulders, and wrap us in a star-spangled robe!
Then at last he finds us worthy of his love, when we masquerade in this
costume; but then we can’t be ourselves, because we are too dressed up,
and because men confuse us by kneeling in the dust and worshipping us
instead of just taking us as we are and simply loving us.”
Niels was quite bewildered. He had picked up the handkerchief she
dropped and sat there intoxicating himself with its perfume. He was not
at all prepared to have her look at him in that impatient, questioning
way, just as he was absorbed in studying her hand, but he managed to
answer that he thought a man could not give a finer proof of his love
than this—that he had to justify himself to himself for loving a human
being so unutterably, and therefore set her so high and surrounded her
with a nimbus of divinity.
“But that is just what I find so insulting,” said Mrs. Boye, “as if we
were not divine enough in ourselves.”
Niels smiled complacently.
“No, you mustn’t smile, I’m not joking. It is really very serious, for
this adoration is at bottom tyrannical in its fanaticism; it cramps us
in a mould of man’s ideal. Slash a heel and clip a toe! Anything in us
that doesn’t square with man’s conception has to be eliminated, perhaps
not by force, but by ignoring it, systematically relegating it to
oblivion, and never giving it a chance to develop, while the qualities
we don’t possess or that aren’t in the least characteristic of us are
forced to the rankest growth by lauding them to the skies, taking for
granted that we have them in the fullest measure, and making them the
cornerstone on which man builds his love. I say that we are subjected
to a drill; man’s love puts us through a drill. And we submit to it,
even those who love no one submit to it, contemptible minions that we
are!”
She had risen from her reclining posture and looked threateningly at
Niels.
“If I were beautiful!—oh, I mean ravishingly beautiful, more alluring
than any woman who ever lived, so that all who saw me were struck
with unquenchable, agonizing love as by witchcraft—then I would use
the power of my beauty to make them adore _me_, not their traditional
bloodless ideal, but myself, as I am, every inch, every line of _my_
being, every gleam of _my_ nature!”
She had risen now to her full height, and Niels thought he ought to
go, but he stood turning over in his mind a great many audacious
words, which, after all, he did not dare to utter. At last, summoning
all his courage, he seized her hand and kissed it, but she gave him
her other hand to kiss too, and then he could say nothing more than:
“Good-night.”
Niels Lyhne had fallen in love with Mrs. Boye, and he was happy because
of it.
When he went home through the same streets where he had strolled so
dejectedly that same evening, it seemed to him that ages had passed
since he walked there. His bearing had acquired a new poise, a grave
decorum, and when he carefully buttoned his gloves, he did so with a
subconscious sense that he had undergone a great change which somehow
demanded that he should button his gloves—carefully.
Too much absorbed to think of sleep, he went up on the embankment.
It seemed to him that his thoughts flowed very quietly. He was
surprised at his own calm, but he did not have perfect faith in it. He
felt as though something in the very depths of his being were bubbling,
very softly, but persistently: welling up, seething, pressing on, but
far, far away. He was in a mood as one who waits for something that
must come from afar, a distant music that must draw near, little by
little, singing, murmuring, frothing, rushing, roaring, and whirling
down over him, catching him up he knew not how, carrying him he knew
not whither, coming on as a flood, breaking as a surf, and then—
But now he was calm. There was only the tremulous singing in the
distance; otherwise all was peace and tranquillity.
He loved—he said it aloud to himself again and again. The words had
such a strange ring of dignity, and held such deep meanings. They
meant that he was no longer a captive in the imagined world of his
childhood, nor was he the sport of aimless longings and misty dreams.
He had escaped from the elf-land that had grown up with him and around
him, encircling him with a hundred arms, blindfolding him with a
hundred hands. He had broken away from its grasp and had become master
of himself, and though it reached after him, implored him with dumb
appealing eyes, and beckoned him with white fluttering garments, its
power was dead as a dream killed by day, a mist dispelled by the sun.
Was not his young love day and sun and all the world? He had been
strutting about in royal purple not yet spun, and had taken his seat on
a throne not yet built; but now he stood on a high mountain, looking
out over the world that stretched before him like a plain. In this
world thirsting for song he had as yet no existence and was not even
awaited. What a rapturous thought it was that, in all this silent,
wakeful infinity, not a breath of his spirit had stirred a leaf or
raised a ripple. It was all his to win, and he knew that he could win
it. He felt strong and all-conquering as only those can feel whose
songs are still unsung, throbbing in their own breast.
The soft spring air was full of perfumes, not saturated with them as
the summer nights may be, but rather as it were streaked—now with the
pungent aroma from resinous young poplars, now with the cool breath of
late violets, and again with the sweet almond odor of cherry-trees. The
scents came and mingled, were wafted away and dissolved; sometimes one
would quicken and free itself from the others, only to die as suddenly
or to vanish slowly on a breath of wind. Light moods flitted across
his mind like the shadows from this fitful dance of scents, and as the
perfumes mocked his senses by coming and going as they listed, so his
mind was baffled by his vain longing to be borne aloft, calmly resting
in tranquil flight on the slowly gliding wings of a mood. For his moods
were not yet birds with wings strong enough to carry him; they were
down and feathers only, drifting on the wind, falling like snow, and
melting.
He tried to recall the picture of her as she lay on the sofa and
talked to him, but it would not come. He saw her vanishing in a lane
of trees; or sitting and reading with her hat on, holding one of the
large white leaves in her gloved fingers, just on the point of turning
it, then turning leaf after leaf. He saw her entering her carriage
in the evening after the theatre and nodding to him behind the pane;
then the carriage drove away, and he stood looking after it; it kept
on driving, and he still followed it with his eyes. Indifferent faces
came and spoke to him, figures he had not seen for years passed down
the street, turned and looked after him, and still the carriage kept
on driving, and he could not get rid of it, could not think of other
pictures because of that carriage. Then, just as he was getting nervous
with impatience, it came: the yellow light from the lamp, the eyes, the
mouth, the hand under the chin, as plainly as if it were all before him
there in the darkness.
How lovely she was, how mild, how fair! He loved her with a desire that
knelt at her feet, begging for all this seductive beauty. Cast yourself
from your throne down to me! Make yourself my slave! Put the chain
around your neck with your own hands, but not in sport,—I want to pull
the chain, I demand submission in your every limb, bondage in your
eyes! Oh, that I could draw you to me with a love-philtre, but, no, a
love-philtre would compel you, you would yield to its power without
volition, and I want none to be your master but myself. Your will must
be broken in your hands, and you must hold it out humbly to me. You
shall be my queen, and I your slave, but my slave’s foot must be on
your queenly neck. There is no lunacy in this desire, for is it not in
the nature of a woman’s love to be proud and strong and to bend? It is
love, I know, to be weak and to reign.
He felt that he could never draw to himself the part of her soul that
was one with the luxuriant, glowing, sensuous-soft aspect of her
beauty; it would never clasp him in those gleaming Juno arms, never
in passionate weakness give that voluptuous neck to his kisses—never
in all eternity. He saw it all clearly. He could win, perhaps he
already had won, the young girl in her, and he was sure that she, the
full-blooded beauty, felt this fair young creature who had died within
her mysteriously stirring in her living grave to clasp him with slender
maiden arms and meet him with timid maiden lips. But his love was not
that. He loved the very thing in her that he could not win, loved this
neck with its warm, flower-like whiteness gleaming with a dew of gold
under the dusky hair. He sobbed with yearning passion and wrung his
hands with impotent desire, threw his arms around a tree, leaned his
cheek against the bark, and wept.
_Chapter VIII_
There was in Niels Lyhne’s nature a lame reflectiveness, child of
an instinctive shrinking from decisive action, grandchild of a
subconscious sense that he lacked personality. He was always struggling
against this reflectiveness, sometimes goading himself by calling it
vile names, then again decking it out as a virtue that was a part
of his inmost self and was bound up with all his possibilities and
powers. But whatever he made of it, and however he looked upon it, he
hated it as a secret infirmity, which he might perhaps hide from the
world, but never from himself; it was always there to humiliate him
whenever he was alone with himself. How he envied the audacity that
rushes confidently into words, never heeding that words bring actions,
and actions bring consequences—until those consequences are at its
heels. People who possessed it always seemed to him like centaurs—man
and horse cast in a single mould. With them impulse and leap were one,
whereas he was divided into rider and horse—impulse one thing, leap
something very different.
Whenever he pictured himself declaring his love for Mrs. Boye—and he
always had to picture everything—he could plainly see himself in the
scene, his attitude, his every motion, his whole figure from the front,
from the side, and from the back. He could see himself falter with
the feverish irresolution that robbed him of his presence of mind and
paralyzed him, while he stood there awaiting her answer as if it were
a blow forcing him to his knees, instead of a shuttlecock to be thrown
back in ever so many ways and returned in as many more.