simply to blurt it out. It was said only in veiled declarations and in
a half-feigned lyric passion that made a pose of being carried away
into hot words and fantastic hopes. Nevertheless, a certain intimacy
of a strange kind grew up between them, born of a youth’s humble
love, a dreamer’s ardent longing, and a woman’s pleasure in being the
inaccessible object of romantic desire. Their relation took the form of
a myth that arose, neither of them knew how, a pale, still myth bred in
a drawing-room. Its heroine was a fair woman who had loved in her early
youth one of the great men in the world of thought. He had gone away to
die in a strange land, forgotten and forsaken. And the fair woman sat
sorrowing for many long years, though none knew her suffering; solitude
alone was sacred enough to look upon her grief. Then came a youth who
called the departed great one master, who was filled with his spirit
and enthusiastic for his work. And he loved the sorrowing woman. To her
it seemed that the dead happy days rose from their grave and came to
life again. A sweet, strange bewilderment came over her; past and
present were blurred in the silvery mist of a shadowy dream-day, in
which she loved the youth, partly as himself and partly as the image of
another, and gave him the half of her soul. But he must tread softly,
lest the dream-bubble should burst; he must put a stern bar to all hot
earthly longings, lest they should dispel the tender twilight and wake
her to sorrow again.
Sheltered by this myth, their intimacy gradually took on a stable
form. They called each other by their Christian names and were Niels
and Tema to each other when they were alone, while the presence of
the niece was reduced to a minimum. To be sure, Niels sometimes tried
to break through the accepted barriers, but Mrs. Boye was so much the
stronger that she could easily and gently quell all such attempts at
insubordination, and Niels had to submit and fall back for a time on
this fanciful passion with real tableaux. Their relation never ran out
into a platonic flatness; nor did it sink to rest in the monotony of
habit. Rest was the word that least of all described it. Niels Lyhne’s
hope was never weary, and though it was gently suppressed whenever it
would flare up in a demand, that only made it smolder more hotly than
ever in secret. And how Mrs. Boye would feed the fire by her thousand
and one coquetries, her provocative simplicity, and her naked courage
in discussing the most delicate subjects! Besides, the game was not
entirely in her hands, for there were times when her blood would dream
in its idleness of rewarding this half-tamed devotion by lavishing on
it the fullest rapture of love in order to rejoice in its wondering
happiness. But such a dream was not easily extinguished, and the next
time Niels came she would meet him with the nervousness of conscious
sin, a shyness born of wrongdoing, a sweet shame that made the air
strangely tremulous with passion.
There was yet another thing that gave their intimacy a certain tension.
Niels Lyhne’s love possessed so much virility that he chivalrously held
himself back from taking in imagination what the reality denied him,
and even in that separate world where everything did his bidding he
respected Mrs. Boye as if she were actually present.
Hence their relation was well buttressed from both sides, and there was
no immediate danger that it would fall to pieces. Indeed, it seemed
made for a nature at once brooding and athirst for life such as Niels
Lyhne’s, and though it was only a game, it was a game of realities,
sufficient to give him that undercurrent of passion which he needed.
Niels Lyhne was bent upon being a poet, and there was much in the
external circumstances of his life to lead his thoughts in that
direction and stimulate his faculties for the task. So far, however, he
had little but his dreams to write about, and nowhere is there more
sameness and monotony than in the world of imagination; for in that
dreamland, which seems so boundless and so infinitely varied, there
are, in fact, only a few short beaten paths where everybody walks and
from which no one ever strays. People may differ, but in their dreams
they do not differ; there they always attain the three or four things
that they desire—it may be with more or less speed and completeness,
but they always attain them in the end. No one seriously dreams of
himself as empty-handed. Therefore no one ever discovers himself in
his dreams or becomes conscious through them of his individuality. Our
dreams tell nothing of how we are satisfied when we win the treasure,
how we relinquish it when lost, how we feast on it while it is ours,
where we turn when it is taken from us.
Niels Lyhne’s poetry had hitherto been nothing but the expression of
an esthetic personality which, in a general way, found spring teeming,
the ocean wide, love erotic, and death melancholy. He himself was not
in his poems; he merely put the verses together. But now a change came
over him. Now that he wooed a woman and wanted her to love him,—him,
Niels Lyhne of Lönborggaard, who was twenty-three years old, walked
with a slight stoop, had beautiful hands and small ears, and was a
little timid, wanted her to love him and not the idealized Nicolaus of
his dreams, who had a proud bearing and confident manners, and was a
little older,—now he began to take a vital interest in this Niels whom
he had hitherto walked about with as a slightly unpresentable friend.
He had been so busy decking himself with the qualities he lacked
that he had not had time to take note of those he possessed, but now
he began to piece his own self together from scattered memories and
impressions of his childhood and from the most vivid moments of his
life. He saw with pleased surprise how it all fitted together, bit by
bit, and was welded into a much more familiar personality than the one
he had chased after in his dreams. This figure was far more genuine,
far stronger, and more richly endowed. It was no mere dead stump of
an ideal, but a living thing, full of infinite shifting possibilities
playing through it and shaping it to a thousandfold unity. Good God, he
_had_ powers that could be used just as they were! He _was_ Aladdin,
and there was not a thing he had been storming the clouds for but it
had fallen right down into his turban.
Now came a happy time for Niels, the glorious time when the mighty
impulse of growth sweeps us jubilantly past the dead points in our
own nature; when we are filled to bursting with a strength that makes
us eager to put our shoulders to mountains if need be, while we build
away bravely on the Tower of Babel, which is meant to pierce the sky,
but ends in being just a squatty structure that we go on all our lives
adding to—now a timid spire, now a freakish bay window.
Everything was changed; his nature, his faculties, and his work fitted
into one another like cogged wheels. He could never think of stopping
to rejoice in his art, for a thing was no sooner finished than it was
cast aside: he had outgrown it even while he worked on it, and it
became a mere step that led upward to an ever-receding goal, one of
many steps on a road he had left behind him and forgotten even while it
resounded with his footfall.
While he felt himself borne along by new impulses and new thoughts to
greater power and wider vision, he grew more and more solitary. One
after another of his old friends and comrades fell back and vanished
from his ken, for he lost interest in them when he saw less and less
difference between these men of the opposition and that majority which
they attacked. Everything seemed to him to melt together in one great
hostile mass of boredom. What did they write when they gave the call
to battle? Pessimistic verses in which they declared that dogs were
often more faithful than men and jailbirds more honest than those who
walked freely about, eloquent odes to the effect that green woods and
brown heath were preferable to dusty cities, stories of peasant virtue
and rich men’s vice, of red-blooded nature and anemic civilization, the
narrowness of age and the divine right of youth. What modest demands
they made when they wrote! They were at least bolder when they talked
within four safe walls.
No, when his time came, he would give them music—a clarion call!
His older friendships suffered too, especially that with Frithjof.
The fact was that Frithjof, who had a very positive nature, a good
head for systems, and a broad back for dogmas, had read a little too
much Heiberg, and had taken it all for gospel truth, never suspecting
that the makers of systems are clever folk who fashion their systems
from their books and not their books from their systems. It is a
well-known fact that young people who have committed themselves to a
system generally become great dogmatists, because of the praiseworthy
affection youth often bears to what is finished and finite. And
when you have become the possessor of the whole truth, it would be
unpardonable to keep it for yourself alone and to allow less fortunate
fellow creatures to go their own misguided way, instead of leading and
instructing them, pruning away their wild shoots with loving severity,
forcing them up against the wall with gentle coercion, and pointing
out to them the lines along which they must grow, in order that they
may sometime, when they have been formed into correct and artistic
espaliers, thank you, even if tardily, for the trouble you have taken.
Niels was fond of saying that he liked nothing better than criticism,
but the truth was that he preferred admiration, and he certainly
would not brook criticism from Frithjof, whom he had always regarded
as his serf, and who had always been delighted to wear the livery of
his opinions and his principles. And here he was trying to play the
equal and to masquerade in a self-chosen mantle! Of course he must be
snubbed, and Niels first tried, in a tone of good-natured superiority,
to make Frithjof ridiculous in his own eyes, but when that would not
work he had recourse to insolent paradoxes, which he would scorn to
discuss, simply throwing them out in all their grotesque hideousness
and then retiring behind a teasing silence.
In this way they grew apart.
With Erik he got on better. Their boyish friendship had always kept a
certain reserve, a kind of spiritual modesty, and this had saved them
from the too great familiarity that is so dangerous to friendship. They
had been enthusiastic together in the festival hall of their souls and
had chatted intimately in the drawing-room, but they had never made
free with each other’s bed-rooms, bath-rooms, and other private places
in the mansion of their souls.
It was the same now; indeed, the reserve was, if anything, stricter, at
least on Niels’s part, but that did not lessen their friendship, the
cornerstone of which, now as of old, was Niels Lyhne’s admiration for
Erik’s spirit and audacity, his way of seeming at home with life, and
his readiness to grasp and hold. Yet Niels could not conceal from
himself that the friendship was extremely one-sided. Not that Erik was
wanting in real affection or faith in him—far from it. No one could
think more highly of Niels than Erik did; he considered him so vastly
his own superior in intellect that he never dreamed of criticizing, but
this blind admiration led him to place Niels and his work and interests
too far beyond the horizon his own eyes could scan. He was sure that
Niels would go far along the road he had chosen, but he was equally
sure that his own feet had nothing to do on that path, nor did he ever
attempt to set them there.
Niels felt that this was rather hard; for though Erik’s ideals were
not his, and though Erik in his art tried to express a romanticism or
a romantic sentimentalism with which he was not in accord, he could
still feel a broader sympathy by virtue of which he faithfully followed
his friend’s development, rejoiced with him when he gained a step, and
helped him to hope when he stood still.
In this way their friendship was one-sided, and it was not strange that
Niels should have his eyes opened to the lack in it just at the time
when his own mind was struggling with new ideas, and he felt the need
of pouring out his thoughts to a sympathetic listener. It made him
bitter, and he began to examine more closely this friend whom he had
always judged so leniently. A dreary sense of loneliness came over him
as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and
from the old days seemed to fall away from him and let him go his own
way, forgotten and forsaken. The door to the past was barred, and he
stood outside, empty-handed and alone; whatever he needed and desired
he must win for himself—new friends and new shelter, new affections
and new memories.
* * * * *
For more than a year, Mrs. Boye had been Niels’s only real companion,
when a letter from his mother, telling him that his father was
dangerously ill, called him back to Lönborggaard.
When he arrived, his father was dead.
The consciousness that for several years he had longed very little for
his home weighed on Niels almost like a crime. He had often enough
visited it in his thoughts, but always as a guest with the dust of
other lands on his clothes and the memories of other places in his
heart: he had never longed for it in passionate homesickness as for the
fair sanctuary of his life, nor pined to kiss its soil and rest under
its roof. Now he repented that he had been faithless to his home, and,
oppressed as he was by his grief, he felt his remorse darkened by a
sense that in some mysterious way he was an accessory to what had
happened, as though his faithlessness had called death in. He wondered
how he could ever have lived contentedly away from this home which now
drew him with such strange power. With every fibre of his being he
clung to it, in an infinite, desolate longing, uneasy because he could
not become one with it as fully as he would, miserable because the
thousand memories that called from every corner and every bush, from
sounds and myriad scents, from the play of light and from the silence
itself,—because all these things called with such distant voices that
he could not grasp them in the strength and fullness he craved; they
seemed only to whisper in his soul like the rustling of leaves that
fall to the ground and the lapping of waves that flow on and ever on....
Happy in his sorrow is he who at the death of one dear to him can weep
all his tears over the emptiness, the desolation, and the loneliness.
Sorer and bitterer are the tears with which you try to atone for the
past when you have failed in love toward one who is gone and to whom
you can never make amends for what you have sinned. For now they come
back to you: not only the hard words, the subtly poisoned retorts, the
harsh censure, and the unreasoning anger, but even unkind thoughts that
were not put into words, hasty judgments that merely passed through
your mind, unseen shruggings of the shoulder, and hidden smiles full of
contempt and impatience, they all come back like malign arrows, sinking
their barb deep in your own breast, their dull barb, for the point
has been broken off in the heart that is no more. There is nothing
you can expiate any more, nothing. Now there is abundance of love in
your heart, now that it is too late. Go now to the cold grave with
your full heart! Does it bring you any nearer? Plant flowers and bind
wreaths—does that help you?
At Lönborggaard they were binding wreaths; there, too, they were
haunted by memories of hours when love had been silenced by harsher
voices; to them, too, the stern lines about the closed mouth of the
grave spoke of remorse.
It was a dark, sad time, but it held a ray of light in that it brought
mother and son more closely together than they had been for many, many
years; for in spite of the great love they bore to each other, they
had always been, as it were, on their guard each toward the other, and
there had been a certain reserve in their intercourse, from the time
when Niels grew too large to sit on his mother’s knee. He had shrunk
from the excitable and high-strung side of her nature, while she had
felt something alien in the timidity and hesitation of his. But now
life itself, which keys up and tones down and harmonizes, had prepared
their hearts, and would soon give them wholly to each other.
Scarcely two months after the funeral, Mrs. Lyhne fell violently ill,
and for a long time her life was in danger. The anxiety that filled
these weeks seemed to force their earlier grief into the background,
and when Mrs. Lyhne began to get better, it seemed to both her and
Niels that years had been thrust in between them and the freshly made
grave. Especially to Mrs. Lyhne the time seemed long. While she was
ill she had been sure that she was going to die and had been very much
afraid of death. Even now that she had begun to recover, and the doctor
had declared the danger to be past, she could not rid herself of her
gloomy thoughts.
It was a dreary convalescence, in which her strength returned as it
seemed reluctantly, drop by drop. She felt no gentle and healing
drowsiness, but rather a restless languor with a depressing sense of
weakness and an incessant, impotent longing for strength.
After a while there was a change; her recovery was more rapid, and her
strength came back. Still the idea that she and life were soon to part
did not leave her, but lay like a shadow over her and held her captive
in a perturbed and yearning melancholy.
One evening she was sitting alone in the summer parlor, gazing out
through the wide-open doors. The trees of the garden hid the gold and
crimson of the sunset, but in one spot the trunks parted to reveal a
bit of fiery sky, from which a sunburst of long, deep golden rays shot
out, waking green tints and bronze-brown reflections in the dark leafy
masses.
High above the restless tree-tops, the clouds drifted dark against a
smoke-red sky, and as they hurried on, they left behind them little
loosened tufts, tiny little strips of cloud which the sunlight steeped
in a wine-colored glow.
Mrs. Lyhne sat listening to the wind in the trees. Her head moved very
slightly in time with the uneven swelling and sinking of each gust, as
it came rushing, swept on boisterously, and died away. But her eyes
were far away, farther even than the clouds they gazed on. Pale in her
black widow’s garb, she sat there with a piteous expression of unrest
about her faintly colored lips, while her hands fidgeted with the thick
little book on her lap. It was Rousseau’s _Héloïse_. Other books were
piled up around her: Schiller, Staffeldt, Evald, and Novalis, and large
portfolios with prints of old churches and ruins and mountain lakes.
Now she heard doors opening and shutting, then steps that seemed to
seek some one in the inner rooms, and presently Niels came in. He had
been for a long walk by the fjord. His cheeks were ruddy from the fresh
air, and the wind was still in his hair.
Outside, the blue-gray colors had prevailed in the sky, and a few heavy
drops of rain splashed against the windows.
Niels told of how high the waves came rolling in and how they had
washed the seaweed up on the beach, and about what he had seen and whom
he had met. As he talked, he gathered up the books, closed the doors to
the garden, and fastened the windows. Then he sat down on the low stool
at his mother’s feet, took her hand in his, and laid his cheek on her
knee.
It had grown quite black outside; the rain beat like hail and ran in
streams down casements and panes.
“Do you remember,” said Niels after a long silence,—“do you remember
how often we sat like this in the dusk and went out in search of
adventures, while father was talking to Jens Overseer in his office,
and Duysen was rattling the teacups in the dining-room? And when the
lamp was brought in, we both woke up from our strange adventures to
the sheltered comfort around us, yet I can well remember that I always
thought the story did not stop when we did, but went on unfolding
somewhere under the hills on the way to Ringkjöbing.”
He did not see his mother’s wistful smile, but he felt her hand passing
gently over his hair.
“Do you remember,” she said after a while, “how often you promised me
that when you grew up you would sail out in a big ship and bring me
back all the treasures of the world?”
“Do I remember! I was to bring hyacinths, because you loved hyacinths
so much, and a palm like the one that died, and pillars of gold and
marble. There were so many pillars in your stories, always. Do you
remember?”
“I have been waiting for that ship—no, sit still, dear, you don’t
understand me—it was not for myself, it was the ship of your
fortune.... I hoped your life would be full and glorious, that you
would travel on shining paths.... Fame—everything—No, not that, if
you would only be one of those who fight for the greatest. I don’t know
how it is, but I am so tired of commonplace happiness and commonplace
goals. Do you understand me?”
“You wanted me to be a Sunday child, mother dear, one of those who do
not pull in harness with others, but have their own heaven to be saved
in, and their own place of damnation all to themselves, too.—We wanted
to have flowers on board, didn’t we? Gorgeous flowers to strew over a
bleak world; but the ship did not come, and they were poor birds, Niels
and his mother, were they not?”
“Have I hurt you, dear? Why, it was nothing but dreams; don’t mind
them!”
Niels was silent a long time, for he felt a shyness about what he
wanted to say. “Mother,” he said, “we are not so poor as you think.
Some day the ship will come in.—If you would only believe that and
believe in me.... Mother—I am a poet—really—through my whole soul.
Don’t imagine this is childish dreams or dreams fed by vanity. If you
could feel my grateful pride in what’s best in me—my humble joy in
saying this, so little personal, so far from vainglory, you would
believe it just as I want you to believe it. Dearest, dearest! I
_shall_ be one of those who fight for the greatest, and I promise you
that I shall not fail, that I shall always be faithful to myself and my
gift. Nothing but the best shall be good enough. No compromise, mother!
When I weigh what I have done and feel that it isn’t sterling, or when
I hear that it’s got a crack or a flaw—into the melting-pot it goes!
Every single work must be my best! Do you see why I have to promise?
It’s my gratitude for my riches that drives me to make vows, and you
must receive them. Then if I fail, it will be a sin against you, for
it’s all owing to you that my soul is like a high-vaulted room—your
dreams and longings have given me the impulse to growth, and your
sympathies and your unsatisfied thirst for beauty have consecrated me
to my life-work.”
Mrs. Lyhne wept silently. She felt herself growing pale with rapture.
Softly she laid both hands on her son’s head, but he drew them gently
to his lips and kissed them.
“You have made me so happy, Niels! Then my life has not been one long,
useless sigh, if I have helped to lead you on as I hoped and dreamed so
ardently—good heavens! how often I have dreamed it!—And yet there is
so much sadness mixed in my joy, Niels! To think that my fondest wish
should be fulfilled, the thing I have longed for so many years.... Such
things happen only when life is almost done.”
“You mustn’t talk like that, you mustn’t! Why, everything is going on
well, and you are getting stronger every day, mother dear, are you not?”
“It is so hard to die,” she said under her breath. “Do you know what I
was thinking of in those long sleepless nights, when death seemed so
terribly near? I thought the bitterest of all was to know that there
were so many great and beautiful things out in the world which I should
have to leave behind without ever having seen them. I thought of the
thousands and thousands of souls they had lifted up and filled with
life and joy, while for me they had not existed. It seemed to me that
my soul would fly away poverty-stricken on feeble wings, without any
golden memories to carry with it as a reflection from the glories of
its homeland, because it had only been sitting in the chimney-corner
listening to stories about the wonderful world.—Niels, no one can
imagine what agony it is to lie imprisoned in a dull, dark sick-room
and struggle, in your feverish fancies, to call up before you the
beauties of lands you have never seen—snowy Alpine peaks above
blue-black mountain lakes, and sparkling rivers between vine-clad
banks, and long lines of mountains with ruins peeping out of the woods,
and then lofty halls with marble gods—and never to get it quite, but
always to give up and start over again, because it seems so terribly
hard to leave it without having had the slightest part in it.... O God,
Niels, to long for it with your whole soul, while you feel that you are
being slowly carried to the threshold of another world, to stand on the
threshold and look back with a long, long gaze, while all the time you
are being forced through that door where none of your longings have
gone before you.... Niels, take me along in your thoughts, dear, when
the time comes for you to share in all that glory which I shall never,
never see!”
She wept.