would take together as soon as she was quite well. He meant to go
to the city to consult a doctor, and he was sure the doctor would
agree with him that it was the best thing they could do; So-and-so
had travelled and had recovered from his illness completely, simply
through the change; a change often worked wonders. He began to trace
their route in every detail, spoke of how warmly he would wrap her up,
what short trips they would take at first, what a delightful journal
they would keep, how they would notice even the smallest trifles, how
amusing it would be to eat the queerest things in the loveliest spots,
and what awful sins against grammar they would commit in the beginning.
He went on in this strain all that evening and on the days that
followed, never wearying. She entered into his plan as into a pleasant
fancy, but she was plainly convinced that it would never come to pass.
Nevertheless Niels, acting on the doctor’s advice, went on making
all the necessary preparations for the trip, and she let him do as
he pleased, even fix the day of departure—sure that _that_ would
happen which would bring all his plans to naught. But when, finally,
there were only a few days left, and when her youngest brother, who
was to manage the farm in their absence, had really arrived, she grew
uncertain, and now it was she who was most eager to be off, for there
still lurked in her mind a fear that the obstacle would leap out and
stand in their way at the very last moment.
So they set off.
The first day she was still nervous and uneasy with a lingering trace
of her fear, and only when the day was happily ended could she begin
to grasp the fact that she was actually on her way to all the glory
she had longed for so sorely. Then a feverish joy came over her; her
every thought and word was colored by extravagant anticipation, and her
thoughts circled unceasingly around what the coming days would bring,
one after the other.
And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill
her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she
had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined
herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as
it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled
all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines
in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of
enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that
she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out
and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was
shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together
again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently
she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by
riches that she could not make her own.
She yearned to go on and ever on, still hoping to find a spot she might
recognize as a bit of the world she had dreamed, that world which, with
every step she took to approach it, seemed to extinguish the magic
glamor that had suffused it and to lie spread before her disappointed
eyes in the commonplace light of everybody’s sun and everybody’s moon.
But she sought in vain, and as the year was already far advanced, they
hastened to Clarens, where the doctor had advised them to spend the
winter, and where, moreover, a last faintly gleaming hope lured the
tired, dream-wrapped soul; for was it not the Clarens of Rousseau, the
Paradise of Julie!
There they remained, but it was of no avail that Winter made himself
gentle and held his cold breath from touching her; against the fever in
her blood he had no healing. And Spring, when he came on his triumphal
march through the valley with the miracle of sprouting seeds and the
gospel of budding leaves, he too had to pass her by and let her stand
withering in the midst of all this exuberant renascence. The strength
that welled out to her from light and air and earth and water could
not be transformed to strength within her; it could not make her blood
drunk with health nor force it to sing exultantly in the great hymn
to the omnipotence of Spring. No, she could but wither, for the last
dream that had appeared before her in the dimness of her home as a new
reddening dawn, the dream of the glories of the distant world, had not
been followed by day. Its colors seemed paler the nearer she came, and
she felt that they were pale to her because she had longed for colors
that life does not hold and for a beauty that earth cannot ripen. But
her longing was not quenched; silent and strong it burned in her heart,
hotter in its unstilled thirst, hot and consuming.
Round about her, Spring celebrated his feast pregnant with beauty.
Snowdrops rang it in with their white bells, and crocuses welcomed it
joyfully holding up their veined chalices. Hundreds of tiny mountain
streams tumbled headlong down into the valley to report that Spring
had come, but they were all too late, for when they trickled between
green banks, primroses in yellow and violets in blue stood there and
nodded: We know it, we know it; we knew it before you! The willows
unfurled their yellow banners, and the curly ferns and the velvety moss
hung green garlands over the naked walls of the vineyards, while down
below dry nettles hid the stones with long borders of brown and green
and faint purple. The grass spread its mantle of green far and wide,
and no end of pretty flowers sat down upon it: there were hyacinths
with blossoms like stars and blossoms like pearls, legions of daisies,
gentians, anemones, dandelions, with a hundred others. And high above
this bloom on the ground there floated in the air, borne up by the
hoary trunks of aged cherry-trees, a thousand shining flower islands,
where the light foamed against white shores dotted by blue and red
butterflies bringing a message from the flower continent below.
Every day brought new flowers, forcing them out of the ground in motley
patterns in the gardens by the sea, pouring them out over the branches
of the trees down there—paullinias like giant violets and magnolias
like huge purple-stained tulips. Along the paths the flowers advanced
in blue and white phalanxes. They filled the meadows with yellow
swarms, but nowhere was there such a maze of bloom as in the little
sheltered valleys up among the hills, where the larch stood with
glittering ruby cones amidst pale green needles, for there the
narcissus blossomed in dazzling myriads, filling the air far and wide
with the drowsy fragrance from their white orgies.
With all this beauty round about her, she still sat there with the
old unanswered longing for beauty in her heart. It was only now and
then, when the sun sank behind the gentle slopes of Savoy, and the
mountains beyond the sea seemed made of brown opaque glass, as if
their precipitous sides had drunk the light, that nature could hold
her senses spellbound. Then, when the bright yellow mists of evening
veiled the distant Jura Mountains, and the lake, like a copper mirror
from which tongues of golden flame shot into the red sunset glow,
seemed to melt with the sky into one vast, shining infinity,—then it
would seem, once in a great while, as though the longing were silenced,
and the soul had found the land it sought.
As spring advanced, her strength failed more and more. Soon she did not
leave her bed, but she was no longer afraid of death; she awaited it
eagerly, for she cherished the hope that beyond the grave she would be
face to face with all the glory, be one in soul with the fullness of
beauty which here on earth had drawn her in hope and yearning,—a
yearning which had been clarified and transfigured by the increasing
pain of long empty years and thus prepared to attain its goal. She
dreamed many a gentle, wistful dream of how she would return in memory
to what earth had given her, return from the land of immortality, where
all the beauty of the earth would be always beyond the sea.
So she died, and Niels buried her in the friendly churchyard at
Clarens, where the brown vineyard mould covers the children of so many
lands, and where broken columns and veiled urns repeat the same words
of mourning in so many languages.
They gleam white under dark cypresses and among the winter bloom of the
viburnum; early roses strew their petals over many of them, and often
the ground at their base is blue with violets, but over every mound and
every stone creep the glossy-leaved vines of the gentle periwinkle,
Rousseau’s favorite flower, sky blue as never a sky was blue.
_Chapter IX_
Niels Lyhne hurried home. He could not bear his loneliness among so
many strangers, but the nearer he came to Copenhagen, the oftener he
asked himself what he wanted there, and the more he regretted that
he had not stayed abroad. For whom did he have in Copenhagen? Not
Frithjof, and Erik was travelling in Italy on a scholarship, so he was
not there. Mrs. Boye? It was a queer affair, this relation with Mrs.
Boye. Now that he came straight from his mother’s grave, it seemed to
him, not exactly a desecration or anything like that, and yet out of
tune with the key in which his present moods were pitched. It was a
discord. If he had been going to meet his fiancée, his young blushing
bride, now that his soul had so long been bent on filial duties, it
would not have conflicted with his feeling. It was of no use that he
tried to take a superior tone with himself and call the change in his
conception of his intimacy with Mrs. Boye Philistine and provincial.
The word “Bohemian” formed itself subconsciously as an expression of a
distaste that he could not reason away, and it was in line with this
mood that his first visit, after he had engaged his old rooms at the
embankment, was to the Neergaards and not to Mrs. Boye.
The following day he called on her, but did not find her in. The
janitor said she had taken a villa at Emiliekilde, which surprised
Niels, for he knew that her father’s country house was in that
neighborhood.
Well, he would have to go out there in a day or two.
But the very next day he received a note from Mrs. Boye asking him
to meet her in her apartment in town. The pale niece had seen him in
the street. A quarter before one he was to come—he _must_ come. She
would tell him why, _if he did not know it_. Did he know it? He must
not misjudge her, and not be unreasonable. He knew her too well, and
why should he take it as a plebeian nature would? He must not—please!
After all, they were not like other people. Oh, if he only _would_
understand her! Niels, Niels!
This letter made him strangely excited, and he suddenly remembered
with a sense of uneasiness that Mrs. Neergaard had looked at him with
a sarcastic pitying expression and had smiled and said nothing in a
curious meaning way. What could it be? What in the world could have
happened?
The mood that had kept him away from Mrs. Boye had vanished so
completely that he could not understand how he had ever felt it. He was
alarmed. If they had only written to each other like sensible people!
_Why_ had they not written? He certainly had not been so busy. It was
queer how he would allow himself to be so absorbed in the place where
he happened to be that he forgot what was far away, or if he did not
forget it, at least pushed it into the distant background, where it was
buried by the present—as under mountains. No one would think he had
imagination.
At last! Mrs. Boye herself opened the door to the ante-room before he
had time to ring. She said nothing, but gave him her hand in a long,
sympathetic clasp; the newspapers had announced his bereavement.
Niels said nothing either, and so they walked silently through the
parlor, between the two rows of chairs in red-striped covers. The
chandelier was wrapped in paper, and the window-panes were whitened.
In the sitting-room everything was as usual, except that the Venetian
blinds were rolled down before the opened windows, and as they moved
to and fro in the slight breeze, they struck the casement with a
faint, monotonous tapping. Rays of light reflected from the sunlit
canal outside filtered in between the yellow slats and made squares of
tremulous wavy lines in the ceiling, which quivered with the rippling
of the waves outside. Otherwise all was hushed and still, silently
waiting with bated breath....
Mrs. Boye could not make up her mind where she wanted to sit: finally
she decided on the rocking-chair, and dusted it assiduously with her
handkerchief, but instead of sitting down she stood behind the chair,
resting her hands on its back. She still wore her gloves and had only
drawn one arm out of her half-fitting black mantilla. Her dress was
of silk tartan in a very tiny check matching the broad ribbons on the
wide, round Pamela hat of light straw which half hid her face as she
stood looking down and rocking the chair nervously.
Niels seated himself on the piano-stool at a distance from her, as if
he expected something unpleasant.
“Then you know it, Niels?”
“No, but what is it I don’t know?”
The chair stopped. “I am engaged.”
“Are you engaged? But how—why—Mrs. Boye?”
“Oh, don’t call me Mrs. Boye, and don’t begin to be unreasonable
right away!” She leaned against the back of the rocking-chair with a
little air of defiance. “Surely you can understand that it isn’t the
pleasantest thing in the world for me to stand here and explain to you.
I will do it, but you might at least help me.”
“What do you mean? Are you engaged, or are you not?”
“I have just told you that I am,” she replied with gentle impatience,
looking up.
“Then may I be allowed to wish you joy, Mrs. Boye, and to thank you
very much for the time we have known each other.” He had risen to his
feet and bowed sarcastically several times.
“And you can part from me like this, quite calmly? I am engaged, and
then we are done, and everything that has been between us two is just
a stupid old story which mustn’t be brought to mind any more. Past is
past, and that is all—Niels, all the precious days—will the memory of
them be silent from now on? Will you never, never think of me, never
miss me? Won’t you call the dream forth again, on many a quiet evening,
and give it the colors it might have glowed with? Can you keep from
loving it all back to life again in your thoughts and ripening it to
the fullness it might have had? Can you? Can you put your foot on it
and crush it all out of existence, every bit of it? Niels!”
“I hope so; you have shown me that it can be done.—But this is
nonsense, pure, unmitigated nonsense from beginning to end. Why did you
arrange this comedy? I have no shadow of a right to reproach you. You
have never loved me, never said that you loved me. You have given me
leave to love you, that is all, and now you withdraw your permission.
Or perhaps you will allow me to go on, though you have given yourself
to another? I don’t understand you, if you can imagine that to be
possible. We are not children. Or are you afraid I shall forget you too
soon? Never fear. You are not one to be blotted easily out of a man’s
life. But take care! A love like mine does not come to a woman twice in
her life; take care that you do not bring misfortune upon yourself
by casting me off! I don’t wish you any harm, no, no! May you never
know want and sickness, and may you have all the happiness that comes
with wealth, admiration, and social success, in measure full and
overflowing, that is my wish for you. May all the world stand open to
you, all but one little door, one single little door, however much you
knock and try to open it—but otherwise everything as fully and widely
as it is possible to wish it.”
He spoke slowly, almost sadly, not bitterly, but with a strangely
tremulous note in his voice, a note that was new to her and moved her.
She had grown a little pale and stood leaning stiffly against the
chair. “Niels,” she said, “don’t predict misfortune! Remember you were
not here, Niels, and my love—I did not know how real it was; it seemed
more like something that just interested me. It breathed through my
life like a delicate spiritual poem, it never caught me in strong arms;
it had wings—only wings. At least I thought so. I did not know better
until now, or until the moment I had done it—said Yes and all that.
Everything was so difficult, there were so many things all at once and
so many people to consider.... It began with my brother, Hardenskjold,
the one who was in the West Indies, you know. He had been rather wild
when he was here, but over there he settled down and became so sensible
and went into partnership with some one and made a lot of money, and
married a rich widow, a sweet little thing, I assure you, and he and
father made up, for Hardie was so changed, oh, he is so respectable
there is no end to it, and so susceptible to what people say—terribly
bourgeoise, oh! Of course, he thought I ought to be taken up in the
bosom of the family again, and every time he came here he lectured me
and pleaded and palavered, and you see father is an old man now, and so
at last I did it, and everything was just as in the old days.”
She paused for a moment and began to take off first her mantilla and
then her hat and gloves, and, busy with all this, she turned a little
away from Niels, while she went on talking.
“And then Hardie had a friend who is very highly respected—oh,
extremely so, and they all thought I ought to do it and wished it so
much, and then you see I could take my position in society just as
before, or really better than before, because he is so very highly
respected in every way, and after all that is what I have been wishing
for a long time. I suppose you can’t understand that? You would never
have thought it of me? Quite the contrary. Because I was always making
fun of conventional society with its banalities and its stereotyped
morality, its thermometer of virtue and its compass of womanliness—you
remember how witty we were! It is to weep, Niels, for it wasn’t true,
at least not all the time. I will tell you something: we women can
break away for a while, when something in our lives has opened our eyes
to the love of freedom that after all is in us, but we can’t keep it
up. It is in our blood, this passion for the quintessence of propriety
and the pinnacle of gentility up to its most punctilious point. We
can’t bear to be at war with the established order that is accepted
by all commonplace people. In our inmost selves we really think these
people are right, because they are the ones that sit in judgment,
and in our hearts we bow to their judgments and suffer from them, no
matter how brave a face we wear. It is not natural for us women to be
exceptional, not really, Niels, it makes us so queer, more interesting,
perhaps, but still—Can you understand it? It is silly, don’t you think
so? But at least you can comprehend that it made a strange impression
on me to return to the old surroundings. So many things came back to
me, memories of my mother and of her standards. It seemed as though I
had come into a safe haven again; everything was so peaceful and well
ordered, and I had only to bind myself to it to be properly happy ever
after. And so I let them bind me, Niels.”
Niels could not help smiling; he felt so superior, and was so sorry for
her, as she stood there, girlishly unhappy in the midst of all this
confession. He was softened and could not find any hard words.
He went over to her.
Meanwhile she had turned the chair toward her and had sunk down on it,
and now she was sitting there quite forlorn and pathetic, leaning back
with arms hanging and face lifted, gazing out under lowered eyelids
through the darkened parlor with its two rows of chairs into the dim
ante-room.
Niels laid his arm along the back of the chair and rested his hand on
its arm, as he bent over her. “And you had quite forgotten—me?“ he
whispered.
She seemed not to hear him and did not even lift her eyes, but at last
she shook her head, very faintly, and, after another long pause, shook
it again, very faintly.
Round about them everything was very still at first. Then a maid came
clattering along the halls and singing, as she polished the door-locks;
the noise of the knobs turning cut brutally into the silence and made
it seem deeper than before when it suddenly came back. After a while,
nothing was heard except the drowsy, monotonous tapping of the blinds.
The silence seemed to rob them of the power of speech, almost of
thought. She sat as before with her eyes fixed on the dim ante-room,
while he remained standing, bending over her, gazing at the pattern of
her silk dress, and, unconsciously, lured by the enveloping stillness,
he began to rock her in the chair—very—softly—very—softly....
She lifted her eyelids for a look at his shadowed profile, and lowered
them again in quiet content. It was like a long embrace; it was as
though she gave herself into his arms when the chair went back, and
when it swung forward again, and her feet touched the floor, there was
something of him in the pressure of the boards against her foot. He
felt it too; the process began to interest him, and he rocked more and
more vigorously. It was as though he came nearer and nearer to taking
her as he drew the chair farther back; there was anticipation in the
instant when it was about to plunge forward again, and when it came
down there was a strange satisfaction in the soft tap of her passive
feet against the floor; then when he pushed it down yet a little
farther there was complete possession in the action which pressed her
sole gently against the floor and forced her to raise her knee ever so
slightly.
“Let us not dream!” said Niels at last with a sigh and relinquished the
chair.
“Yes, let us!” she said almost pleadingly, and looked innocently at him
with great wistful eyes.
She had risen slowly.
“No dreams!” said Niels nervously, putting his arm around her waist.
“Too many dreams have passed between you and me. Have you never felt
them? Have they never touched you like a light breath caressing your
cheek or stirring your hair? Is it possible that the night has never
been tremulous with sigh upon sigh that dropped and died on your lips?”
He kissed her, and it seemed to him that she grew less young under his
kisses, less young, but lovelier, more glowing in her beauty, more
alluring.
“I want you to know it,” he said. “You don’t know how I love you, how
I have suffered and longed. Oh, if those rooms at the embankment could
speak, Tema!”
He kissed her again and again, and she threw her arms around his neck
with such abandon that her wide silk sleeves fell back above the
billowing lace of the white undersleeves, above the gray elastic that
held them together over the elbow.
“What could those rooms say, Niels?”
“Tema, they could say, ten thousand times and more; they could pray in
that name, rage in that name, sigh and sob in it; they could threaten
Tema, too.”
“Could they?”
From the street below came a conversation floating in through the open
window complete and unabridged, the most commonplace worldly wisdom
drawled in shopworn phrases, welded together by two untemperamental,
gossipy voices. All this prose made it more wonderful yet to stand
there, heart to heart, sheltered in the soft, dim light.
“How I love you, sweetheart, sweetheart—in my arms you are so dear;
are you so dear, so dear? And your hair—I can hardly speak, and all my
memories—so dear—all my memories of how I cried and was wretched and
longed so miserably, they press on and force their way in as if they
too would be happy with me in my happiness—do you understand?—Do you
remember, Tema, the moonlight last year? Are you fond of it?—Oh, you
don’t know how cruel it can be. Such a clear, moonlight night, when the
air seems to have stiffened in cold light, and the clouds lie there in
long layers—Tema, flowers and leaves hold their fragrance so close
around them it is like a frost of scents covering them, and all sounds
seem so far away and die so suddenly and do not linger at all—Such a
night is so merciless, for it makes longing grow so strangely intense;
the silence draws it out from every corner of your soul, sucks it out
with hard lips, and there is no glimmering hope, no slumbering promise
in all that clearness. Oh, how I cried, Tema! Tema, have you never
cried through a moonlight night? Sweetheart, it would be a shame if you
should cry; you shall never cry, there shall always be sunshine for you
and nights of roses—a night of roses—”
She had given herself entirely to his embrace, and with her gaze lost
in his, her lips murmured strangely sweet words of love, half muted by
her breath, words repeated after him, as if she were whispering them to
her own heart.