playing that piece just now.’ We can often do more in that line than we
think. A human being is not so closely knit. When you use your right
arm constantly in violent exertion, the blood rushes to it, and it
grows at the expense of the rest of your body, while your legs, which
you are using as little as possible, naturally get a little thin. You
can apply the image for yourself. Have you noticed that most of the
idealistic forces in our country, and probably the best of them, are
entirely absorbed in the cause of political freedom? You can take a
lesson from that. Believe me, there is saving grace in fighting for an
idea that is gaining ground, but it is very demoralizing to a man to
belong to a losing minority, which life, in its inevitable course, puts
in the wrong, point by point, step by step. It cannot be otherwise,
for it is bitterly disheartening to see that which your inmost soul
believes to be right and true, to see this Truth reviled and struck in
the face by the meanest camp-follower in the victorious army, to hear
her called vile names, while you can do nothing at all except to love
her even more faithfully, kneel to her in your heart with even deeper
adoration, and see her beautiful face as radiantly beautiful as ever
and as full of majesty, shining with the same immortal light, no matter
how much dust is whirled up around her white forehead, no matter how
thickly the poisonous fog closes in around her halo. It is bitterly
disheartening, and your soul suffers injury inevitably, for it is so
easy to hate until your heart is weary, or to draw around you the cold
shadows of contempt, or to be dulled by pain and let the world go its
own way.—Of course, if there is _that_ within you which makes you not
choose the easiest way nor evade the whole matter, but walk upright
with all your faculties tense and all your sympathies wide awake,
taking the blows and stings of defeat as the scourge falls on your back
again and again, and still keep your bleeding hope from drooping, while
you listen for the distant rumblings that presage revolution, and look
for the faint, distant dawn that some day—some time, perhaps.... If
you have _that_ within you!—but don’t try it, Lyhne. Imagine what the
life of such a man must be, if he is to be true to himself. Never to
open his mouth without knowing that whatever he says will be met with
scorn and jeers! To have his words distorted, besmirched, wrenched
all out of joint, turned into cunning snares for his own feet, and
then, before he can pick them up from the mud and straighten them out
again, to find all the world suddenly deaf. Then to begin over again at
another point and have the same thing happen over and over again.
And—what hurts most, perhaps—to be misunderstood and despised by
noble men and women, whom he looks up to with admiration and respect in
spite of their different principles. Yet it must be so, it cannot be
otherwise. Those who are in opposition must not expect to be attacked
for what they really are or really want, but for what the party in
power is pleased to think they are and want; and besides, power used
upon the weaker must be misused—how can it be otherwise? Surely no
one can expect the party in power to divest itself of its advantages
in order to meet the opposition on equal terms; but that does not make
the struggle of the opposition less painful and heart-rending. When you
think of all this, Lyhne, do you really suppose a man can fight this
battle, with all these vulture-beaks buried in his flesh, unless he has
the blind, stubborn enthusiasm which we call fanaticism? And how in the
world can he get fanatic about a negation? Fanatic for the idea that
there is no God!—But without fanaticism there is no victory. Hush,
listen!”
They stopped before a house where a curtain had been rolled up,
allowing them to look into a large room, and through the slightly
opened window a song floated out to them, borne on the clear voices of
women and children:
“_A child is born in Bethlehem,
In Bethlehem.
Therefore rejoice, Jerusalem!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah!_”
They walked on silently. The song and especially the notes of the piano
followed them down the quiet street.
“Did you hear?” said Hjerrild. “Did you hear the enthusiasm in that
old Hebraic shout of triumph? And those two Jewish names of towns!
Jerusalem was not only symbolic: the entire city, Copenhagen, Denmark,
it was _Us_, the Christian people within the people.”
“There is no God, and man is his prophet,” replied Niels bitterly and
rather sadly.
“Exactly,” scoffed Hjerrild. “After all, atheism is unspeakably tame.
Its end and aim is nothing but a disillusioned humanity. The belief in
a God who rules everything and judges everything is humanity’s last
great illusion, and when that is gone, what then? Then you are wiser;
but richer, happier? I can’t see it.”
“But don’t you see,” exclaimed Niels Lyhne, “that on the day when men
are free to exult and say: ‘There is no God!’ on that day a new heaven
and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Then and not till then
will heaven be a free infinite space instead of a spying, threatening
eye. Then the earth will be ours and we the earth’s, when the dim world
of bliss or damnation beyond has burst like a bubble. The earth will be
our true mother country, the home of our hearts, where we dwell, not
as strangers and wayfarers a short time, but all our time. Think what
intensity it will give to life, when everything must be concentrated
within it and nothing left for a hereafter. The immense stream of love
that is now rising up to the God of men’s faith will bend to earth
again and flow lovingly among all those beautiful human virtues with
which we have endowed and embellished the godhead in order to make it
worthy of our love. Goodness, justice, wisdom,—who can name them all?
Don’t you see what nobility it will give men when they are free to live
their life and die their death, without fear of hell or hope of heaven,
but fearing themselves, hoping for themselves? How their consciences
will grow, and what a strength it will give them when inactive
repentance and humility cannot atone any more, when no forgiveness is
possible except to redeem with good what they sinned with evil.”
“You must have a wonderful faith in humanity. Why, then atheism will
make greater demands on men than Christianity has done.”
“Of course!”
“Of course; but where will you get all the strong individuals you will
need to make up your atheistical community?”
“Little by little; atheism itself must develop them. Neither this
generation nor the next and not the next after that will be ripe for
atheism, of that I am quite aware, but in every generation there will
be a few who will honestly struggle to live and die in it and will
win. These people will, in course of time, form a group of spiritual
ancestors to whom their descendants will look back in pride, and from
whom they will gain courage. It will be hardest in the beginning; many
will fail, and those who win will have torn banners, because they will
still be steeped in traditions to the marrow of their bones; it is not
only the brain that has to be convinced, but the blood and nerves,
hopes and longings, even dreams! But it does not matter; some time it
will come, and the few will be the many.”
“You think so?—I am trying to think of a name; could we call it
pietistical atheism?”
“All true atheism—” Niels began, but Hjerrild cut him short.
“Of course,” he said, “of course! By all means, let us have only a
single gate, one needle’s eye for all the camels on the face of the
earth.”
_Chapter X_
Early that summer Erik Refstrup came home after his two years in Italy.
He had gone away a sculptor; he returned a painter, and he had already
attracted attention, had sold his pictures, and received orders for
others.
The good fortune coming almost at his first call was due to the sure
instinct for self-limitation which bound his art closely to his own
personality. His gift was not of the large and generous kind that is
instinct with every promise and seems about to grasp every laurel, that
sweeps triumphantly through every realm like a bacchanalian troop,
scattering golden seed on every side, and mounting genii on all its
panthers! He was one of those in whom a dream is buried, making a
peaceful sanctuary in one corner of their souls where they are most,
and yet least, themselves. Through everything these people create there
sounds the same wistful refrain, and every work of art that comes from
their hands bears the same timidly circumscribed stamp of kinship,
as if they were all pictures from the same little homeland, the same
little nook deep among mountains. It was so with Erik; no matter where
he plunged into the ocean of beauty, he always fetched the same pearl
up to the light.
His canvases were small: in the foreground a single figure, clay-blue
with its own shadow, behind it a heathery stretch of moor or campagna,
and in the horizon a reddish yellow afterglow of sunset. There was
one picture of a young girl telling her own fortune in the Italian
fashion. She is kneeling on a spot where the earth shows brown between
tufts of short grass. The heart, cross, and anchor of hammered silver,
which she has taken from her necklace, are scattered on the ground.
Now she is lying on her knees, her eyes closed in good faith with one
hand covering them, the other reaching down, seeking rapture of love
beyond words, bitter sorrow solaced by the cross, or the trusting hope
of a common fate. She has not yet dared to touch the ground. Her hand
shrinks back in the cold, mysterious shadow; her cheeks are flushed,
and her mouth trembles between prayer and tears. There is a solemnity
in the air; the sunset glow threatens, hot and fierce out there in the
distance, but softly melancholy where it steals in over the heather.
“If you only knew—rapture of love beyond words, bitter sorrow solaced
by the cross, or the trusting hope of a common fate?”
There was another in which she stands erect on the brown heath, tense
with longing, her cheek pressed down on her folded hands. She is so
sweet in her naïve longing and a wee bit sad and angered with life for
passing her by. Why does not Eros come with kissing roses? Does he
think she is too young? Ah, if he would only feel her heart, how it
beats! If he would only lay his hand there! A world is in there, a
world of worlds, if it would only awaken. But why does it not call?
It is there like a bud, tightly folded around its own sweetness and
beauty, existing only for itself, oppressed by itself. For it knows
there is something in life that it does not know. It is that which has
warmed the sheltering petals and given light to the innermost heart of
reddest dusk, where the scent lies yet scentless, a foreboding only,
pressed into one tremulous tear!
Will it never be freed and breathe out all its slumbering fragrance,
never be rich in its own wealth? Will it never, never unfold and blush
itself awake with gleaming rays of sunlight darting in under its
petals? She has no patience any more with Eros! Her lips are quivering
with approaching tears; her eyes look out into space with hopeless
defiance, and the little head sinks more and more forlornly, turning
the delicate profile in toward the picture, where a gentle breeze wafts
the reddish dust over dark green broom against a sherry-golden sky.
That was the way Erik painted. What he had to say always found
expression in pictures such as these. He would sometimes dream in other
images and long to break through that narrow circle within which he
created, but when he had strayed beyond his bounds and tried his powers
in other fields, he always returned with a chill sense of
discouragement, feeling that he had been borrowing from others
and producing something not his own. After these unfortunate
excursions—which, however, always taught him more than he was aware
of—he became more intensely Erik Refstrup than ever before. Then
he would abandon himself with more reckless courage and with almost
poignant fervor to the cult of his own individuality, while his whole
manner of associating with himself, to his slightest act, would be
suffused with a religious enthusiasm. He seemed surrounded by shadowy
throngs of beautiful forms, younger sisters of the slender-limbed women
of Parmigianino with their long necks and large, narrow princess hands;
they sat at his table, poured his wine with movements full of noble
grace, and held him in the spell of their fair dreams with Luini’s
mystic, contemplative smile, so inscrutably subtle in its enigmatic
sweetness.
But when he had served the god faithfully for eleven days, it sometimes
happened that other powers gained the ascendancy over him, and he would
be seized with a violent craving for the coarse enjoyment of gross
pleasures. Then he would plunge into dissipations, feverish with that
human thirst for self-destruction which yearns, when the blood burns
as hotly as blood can burn, for degradation, perverseness, filth, and
smut, with precisely the measure of strength possessed by another
equally human longing, the longing to keep one’s self greater than
one’s self and purer.
In these moments there was but little that was rough and coarse enough
for him, and when they had passed, it was long before he could regain
his balance; for in truth these excesses were not natural to him;
he was too healthy for them, too little poisoned by brooding. In a
sense, they came as a rebound from his devotion to the higher spirits
of his art, almost like a revenge, as though his nature had been
violated by the pursuit of those idealistic aims which choice, aided by
circumstances, had made his own.
This twofold struggle, however, was not carried on along such definite
lines that it appeared on the surface of Erik Refstrup’s life; nor did
he feel the need of making his friends understand him in this phase.
No, he was the same simple, happy-go-lucky fellow as of old, slightly
awkward in his shrinking from emotions put into words, a little of
a freebooter in his capacity for seizing and holding. Yet the other
thing was in him and could be sensed sometimes in quiet moments, like
the bells that ring in a sunken city on the bottom of the sea. He and
Niels had never understood each other so well as now; both felt it, and
silently each renewed the old friendship. And when vacation time came,
and Niels felt that he really must make his long-deferred visit to his
Aunt Rosalie, who was married to Consul Claudi in Fjordby, Erik went
with him.
* * * * *
The main highway from the richest district above Fjordby enters the
town between two great thorn-hedges, which bound Consul Claudi’s
vegetable garden and his large pleasure garden by the shore. What then
becomes of the road—whether it ends in the Consul’s courtyard, which
is as large as a market-place, or whether it is continued in a bend
running between his hayloft and his lumber yard to form, later, the
main street of the town—is a matter of opinion. Many travellers follow
the bend and drive on, but there are also many who stop and think
the goal reached when they have come within the Consul’s wide tarred
gateway, where the doors are always thrown back and covered with skins
spread for drying.
The buildings on the premises were all old with the exception of
the tall warehouse with its dead-looking slate roof, the newest
architectural feature in Fjordby. The long, low main building appeared
to be forced to its knees by three large gables, and was joined, in a
dim corner, to the wing containing the kitchen and stables; in another
lighter corner, to the warehouse. In the dark corner was the back
door of the store, which formed, with the peasants’ waiting-room, the
office, and the servants’ hall, a rather dingy world of its own, where
the mingled odor of cheap tobacco and moldy floors, of spices and dried
codfish and wet wool, made the air so thick you could almost taste it.
But when you had passed through the office with its pungent smoke of
sealing-wax and had reached the hall which formed the dividing line
between the business and the family, a prevailing perfume of new
millinery prepared you for the delicate scent in the living-rooms. It
was not the fragrance of any nosegay or of any real flower; it was the
intangible, memory-laden atmosphere which pervades a home, though no
one can say whence it comes. Every home has its own, and it may suggest
a thousand things—the smell of old gloves or new playing-cards or
open pianos—but it is always different. It may be stifled by incense,
perfumes, or cigar smoke, but it cannot be killed; it always comes back
unchanged and is there just as before. Here it was of flowers, not
stock or roses or any other flower that can be named, but rather as one
might fancy the scent of those fantastic, pale sapphire lilies that
twine their blossoms around vases of old porcelain. And how well it
went with those wide, low rooms with their heirloom furniture and their
stiff, old-fashioned grace! The floors were white as only grandmothers’
floors can be; the walls were in plain colors with a light tracery
of garlands in delicate tints running under the ceiling, which had
a stucco rose in the centre. The doors were fluted and had knobs of
shining brass in the shape of dolphins. The windows of small square
panes were curtained with filmy net, white as snow, its fullness caught
up and fastened with coquettish bows of colored ribbon, like the
curtains of a bridal bed for Corydon and Phyllis. In the window-sill
the flowers of bygone days bloomed in motley green crocks; there were
blue agapanthus, blue Canterbury bells, fine-leaved myrtles, fiery
red verbenas, and butterfly bright geraniums. But it was, after all,
chiefly the furniture that gave character to the rooms: immovable
tables with wide expanse of darkened mahogany; chairs with backs that
curled round your figure; cabinets of every conceivable form, gigantic
dressers inlaid with mythological scenes in light yellow wood—Daphne,
Arachne, and Narcissus—or small secretaries with thin twisted legs and
on every tiny drawer a mosaic of dendrite marble representing a lovely
square house with a tree near by—all from the time before Napoleon.
There were mirrors, too, the glass painted in white or bronze with
designs of rushes and lotus plants floating on a bright sea. As for
the sofa, it was not one of your trifling things on four legs designed
for two persons; no, solid and massive it rose from the floor to form
a veritable spacious terrace; flanking it on either side and built in
one with the sofa, was a console-cupboard, on top of which a smaller
cabinet rose with architectonic effect to the height of a man and held
a precious old jar above the reach of careless hands. It was no wonder
there were so many old things in the Consul’s house, for his father and
grandfather had rested and enjoyed the good things of life within these
walls in the intervals of their work in lumber yard and office.
The grandfather, Berendt Berendtsen Claudi, whose name the firm still
bore, had built the houses and had interested himself chiefly in the
retail and produce trade. The father had worked up the lumber yard,
bought farmland, built the hayloft, and laid out the two gardens. The
present Claudi had developed the grain trade and built the warehouse.
He united with his mercantile business the activities of the English
and the Hanoverian vice-consulates as well as a Lloyd’s agency; and the
grain and the Western Sea kept him so busy he could give only a very
cursory supervision to the other branches of the work. He therefore
divided the responsibility between an insolvent cousin and an old
unmanageable steward, who would drive the Consul into a corner every
little while by declaring that, whatever happened to the store, the
farm must be attended to, and when he wanted to plough, they could take
horses for hauling lumber wherever they pleased—his they couldn’t
have, so help him. But as the man was capable, there was nothing to be
done but to put up with him.
Consul Claudi was in the early fifties, a man of substantial presence.
His regular features, strong to the point of coarseness, would as
readily harden to an expression of energy and cool astuteness as they
would relax into a look almost lickerish as though relishing a savory
tidbit; and he was, in fact, equally at home whether driving a bargain
with shrewd peasants or arguing with a stubborn salvage gang, or
whether sitting with gray-bearded sinners over the last bottle of port
wine, listening to stories more than salacious or telling them with the
picturesque frankness for which he was noted.
This, however, was not all of the man.
His training naturally made him feel that he was on alien ground
when he ventured outside of purely practical questions, but he never
therefore scoffed at what he did not understand or tried to conceal
his ignorance. Much less did it ever occur to him to give his opinion
and demand that it be respected for the reason that he was a citizen
of mature years and practical experience and a large taxpayer. On
the contrary, he would often listen with a reverence that was almost
touching when ladies and young men discussed such matters; now and then
he would venture a modest question prefaced by elaborate excuses, which
almost always elicited a scrupulously painstaking answer, and then he
would express his thanks with all the courtesy which is so gracious in
an older man thanking his juniors.
At certain favorable moments there could be something surprisingly
fine about Consul Claudi, a wistful look in his clear brown eyes, a
melancholy smile around his strong lips, a seeking, reminiscent note in
his voice, as though he yearned for another and in his own eyes better
world than that to which his friends and acquaintances consigned him,
hide and hair.
The messenger between himself and this better world was his wife.
She was one of those pale, gentle, virginal natures who have not the
courage, or perhaps not the impulse, to give out their love in such
fullness that there is no shred of self left in their innermost soul.
Even in the most fleeting moment they can never be so carried away by
their feeling that they throw themselves in blind rapture under the
chariot wheels of their idol. They cannot do it, but all else they can
do for the beloved; they can fulfil the heaviest duties, are ready for
the most grievous sacrifices, and do not flinch from any humiliation
whatsoever. This is true of the best among them.
Mrs. Claudi was not called on to bear such trials. Nevertheless her
marriage was not without its sorrows; for it was a matter of common
knowledge in Fjordby that the Consul was not, or at least had not been
until a few years ago, the most faithful husband, and that he had
several illegitimate children in the neighborhood. This was, of course,
a bitter grief to her, and it had not been easy to keep her heart
steadfast through the tumult of jealousy, scorn and anger, shame and
sickening fear, which had made her feel as though the ground were
slipping away under her feet. But she stood firm. Not only did she
never allow a reproachful word to pass her lips, but she warded off
any confession on the part of her husband, any direct prayer for
forgiveness, and anything that might seem like a repentant vow. She
felt that if it were ever put into words, they might sweep her along
and away from him. Silently she would bear it, and in the silence
she tried to make herself believe that she was in part to blame for
her husband’s crime, because of the barrier she had built around
herself, which her love had not been strong enough to break down. She
succeeded in magnifying this sin until she felt an indistinct need of
forgiveness, and in course of time she brought herself to the point
where she gave rise to a rumor that the girls whom Consul Claudi had
seduced and their children were taken care of in other ways than with
money; it seemed that a hidden woman’s hand must be sheltering them,
keeping them from harm, supporting and guiding them.
So it came to pass that evil was turned into good, and a sinner and a
saint each made the other better.
The Claudis had two children, a son who was in a merchant’s office in
Hamburg and a nineteen-year-old daughter named Fennimore after the
heroine in _St. Roche_, one of Frau von Palzow’s novels which had been
very popular in the time of Mrs. Claudi’s girlhood.
Fennimore and the Consul came down to meet the steamer on the day it
brought Niels and Erik to Fjordby. Niels was pleasantly surprised to
see that his cousin was pretty, for hitherto he had known her only from
a terrible old family daguerreotype, where she appeared in a misty
atmosphere, forming a group with her brother and her parents, all with
hectic crimson on their cheeks and bright gilding on their jewelry.
And now he found her simply lovely as she stood there in her light
morning dress and her dainty little shoes with their black ribbons
crossing a white-stockinged instep. She was resting one foot on the
plank at the edge of the pier, and bent forward smiling to give him
her parasol-handle for a handshake and a welcome, before the steamer
was made fast. Her lips were so red and her teeth so white, and her
forehead and temples so delicately outlined under the wide brim of
her Eugenie hat, from which shadowing edges of deep black lace fell
weighted with bright jet.
At last the gangplank was let down, and the Consul started off with
Erik. He had already introduced himself with twelve feet of water
between them and, still shouting, had drawn Erik into a humorous
conversation about the agonies of sea-sickness, which he carried on
with a wizened hatter’s widow on board. Now he was calling on him
to admire the large linden trees outside of the revenue collector’s
house and the new schooner standing ready to be launched from Thomas
Rasmussen’s shipyard.
Niels walked with Fennimore. She pointed to the flag flying in the
garden in honor of him and his friend, and then they began to discuss
the Neergaards in Copenhagen. They quickly agreed that Mrs. Neergaard
was a little—a very little—they would not say the word, but
Fennimore smiled primly and made a cat-like movement with her hand.
The characterization was evidently plain enough to them both, for they
smiled and quickly became serious again. Silently they walked on, each
wondering how he or she appeared in the other’s eyes.