of an individuality more marked—like an underscored word. He, on
the other hand, had found much more than he expected. He thought her
charming, almost alluring, in spite of her dress which savored too
much of small town elegance. When they had entered the hall, and she
stood looking down with a preoccupied air, as she took off her hat
and smoothed her hair with wonderfully soft, languid, graceful turns
of hand and wrist, he felt as grateful as if her movements had been
caresses. This almost puzzling sense of gratitude did not leave him
either that day or the next, and sometimes it welled up so strong and
warm that he felt it would have been the greatest happiness if he might
have thanked her in words for being so pretty and so sweet.
Very soon Erik as well as Niels felt quite at home in the Consul’s
hospitable house. Before many days they had slipped into that
pleasantly arranged idling which is the real vacation life and which
it is so difficult to guard against the friendly encroachments of
well-meaning people. They had to use all their diplomacy to avoid
the stuffy evening parties, large boating excursions, summer balls,
and amateur theatricals which were constantly threatening their
peace. They were ready to wish that the Consul’s house and garden had
been on a desert island; and Robinson Crusoe was not more agitated
by fear on finding the footsteps in the sand than they were at the
sight of strange paletots in the hall or unfamiliar reticules on the
sitting-room table. They much preferred to be by themselves; for they
had scarcely passed the middle of the first week before they were both
in love with Fennimore. It was not the mature passion which must and
will know its fate and longs to have and to hold and to be assured.
As yet it was only the first dawn of love like a hint of spring in
the air, instinct with a longing akin to sadness and with an unrest
that is gently pulsing joy. The heart is so tender and yielding and
easily moved. A light on the water, a rustling in the leaves, a flower
unfolding its petals—all seem to have a strange new power. Vague hopes
without a name burst out, suddenly flooding the earth with sunlight and
as suddenly vanishing again: weak despondency sails like a broad cloud
over the glory, churning the flashes of hope down into its own gray
wake.—Then hopelessness, melting hopelessness; bittersweet resignation
to fate, a heart full of self-pity, renunciation gazing at its own
reflection in quiet elegies and fainting in a sigh that is half
dissembled.... But again there is the whispering of roses: a dreamland
rises from the mist with golden haze over soft beech crowns and with
fragrant summer darkness under leafy boughs arched over paths that lead
no one knows whither.
* * * * *
One evening after tea they were all gathered in the sitting-room. The
garden and all outdoor amusements were barred, for the rain was pouring
down; but no one seemed to mind. The sense of being shut in gave the
room something of the snug comfort of a winter evening, and moreover
the rain was a blessing. Everything had been so parched and dry, but
now the water streamed down, and when the heavy drops rattled against
the frame of the reflector in the window the sound called up vague,
fleeting glimpses of luscious green meadows and freshened foliage.
Now and then some one would say under his breath: “How it pours!”
and glance at the window-panes with a little gleam of pleasure and a
half-conscious luxuriating in fellow-feeling with everything out of
doors. Erik had fetched the mandolin he had brought with him from Italy
and sang about Napoli and the bright stars. Then a young lady who had
been to tea sat down at the piano and accompanied her own rendering of
“My little nook among the mountains,” in Swedish, making the _ah’s_
very broad to get the right Swedish effect.
Niels, who was not particularly musical, let himself be soothed into
a gentle melancholy and sat lost in his own thoughts, until Fennimore
began to sing.
Then he awoke, but not pleasantly.
Her song agitated him uncomfortably. She was no longer the little
country girl when she gave herself up to the spell of her own voice.
Strange how she let herself be carried away by the tones, how freely
and unreservedly she poured herself into them! He felt it almost as
something immodest, as though she were singing herself naked before
him. There was a burning around his heart; his temples throbbed, and
he cast his eyes down. Did none of the others see it? No, they saw
nothing. Why, she had flown out of herself, away from Fjordby, from
Fjordby poetry and Fjordby sentiments! She was in another and a bolder
world, where the passions grew on high mountains and flung their red
blossoms to the storm.
Could it be his lack of musical sense that made him read so much
meaning into her song? He could hardly persuade himself that it was so,
and yet he wished it, for he would much rather have her as she usually
appeared. When she sat at her sewing, talking in her quiet, tranquil
voice, or looking up with her clear, kind eyes, his whole being was
drawn to her with the irresistible strength of a deep, calm longing for
home. He wanted to humble himself before her, to bend the knee and call
her holy. He always felt a strange yearning to come close to her, not
only to her present self, but to her childhood and all the days he had
not known her. When they were alone, he would lead her to talk of the
past, of her little troubles and mistakes and the vagaries that every
childhood is full of. He lived in these memories and clung to them with
a restless jealousy and a languishing desire to possess and be one
with these pale foreshadowings of a life which was even now glowing in
richer, riper colors. And then came this song so strangely powerful! It
startled him very much like a wide sweep of horizon suddenly revealed
by a turn of the path, reducing the forest dell which had been his
home to a mere corner in the landscape, and making its little rippling
lines seem insignificant beside the grandeur of the hills and distant
moors.—Oh, but the landscape was a _fata morgana_, and what he thought
he heard in her song only a fantasy; for now she spoke just as she
always did and was her blessed self again. Moreover, he knew from a
thousand little things that she was like still water, without storm or
waves, reflecting the starry blue heavens.
It was thus he loved her, and thus he saw her; and when she was with
him she gradually formed herself upon his image of her, not with any
conscious dissembling, for after all his conception was partly true,
and it was only natural—when his every word and look, his every
thought and dream, appealed to that side of her nature and did homage
to it—that she should assume the guise he almost forced upon her.
Besides, how could she bother about giving each and every one a correct
impression of herself when all her thoughts centred around the one,
Erik, the only one, her chosen lord, whom she loved with a passion
that was not of herself and with an idolatrous worship that terrified
her. She had imagined love to be a sweet dignity, not this consuming
unrest, full of fear and humiliation and doubt. Many a time when the
declaration seemed trembling on Erik’s lips, she had felt as if it were
her duty to put her hand on his mouth and warn him against speaking,
accusing herself and telling him how she had deceived him and how
unworthy of his love she was, how earthly and small and impure, so far
from noble, so wretchedly low and common and wicked! She felt herself
dishonest under his admiring gaze; calculating, when she failed to
avoid him; criminal, when she could not bring herself to beg God in her
evening prayer that He would turn Erik’s heart from her in order that
his life might be all sunlight and honor and glory. For she knew that
her low-born passion would drag him down.
It was almost in spite of himself that Erik loved her. His ideal had
always been high, proud, and noble, with quiet melancholy suffusing her
pale features and coolness of temple air lingering in the severe folds
of her garment. But Fennimore’s sweetness conquered him. He could not
resist her beauty. There was such a fresh, innocent sensuousness about
her whole form. When she walked her gait whispered of her body; there
was a nakedness in her movements and a dreamy eloquence in her repose,
neither of which she could help, for she could not conceal the one or
silence the other, even had she been in the slightest degree conscious
of their existence. No one saw this better than Erik, and he was fully
aware of what a large part her purely physical beauty played in her
attraction for him. He struggled against it, for there were exalted
ideals of love in his soul, ideals which had their source, perhaps, not
only in tradition and poetry, but in deeper strata of his nature than
those that appeared on the surface. But whatever their source, they had
to yield.
He had not yet confessed his love to Fennimore, when it happened that
the good ship _Berendt Claudi_ came in. Inasmuch as it was going to
unload farther up the fjord, it did not enter the harbor, but lay out
in the stream, and as the Consul was very proud of his schooner and
wanted to show it to his guests, they rowed out there one afternoon to
drink tea on board.
It was a glorious day without a breath of wind, and all were intent
on a merry time. The hours passed quickly. They drank English porter,
set their teeth in English hardtack as large as moons, and ate salted
mackerel caught on the voyage across the North Sea. They pumped with
the ship’s pump till the water frothed, tipped the compass, drew water
from the casks with the large tin siphon, and listened to the mate
playing his octagonal hand harmonica.
It was quite dark before they were ready to return.
They separated into two parties. Erik and Fennimore and two of the
older people went in the ship’s yawl, which was to make a detour
around the harbor and then row slowly to land, while the rest of the
party went in the Consul’s own boat, which was to steer directly for
the pier. This arrangement was made in order to hear how the song
would sound over the water on such a quiet night. Erik and Fennimore
therefore sat together in the stern of the yawl and had the mandolin
between them, but the singing was forgotten when the oars were dipped
in the water and revealed an unusually bright phosphorescence which
absorbed their attention.
Silently the boat glided onward, and behind it the dull, glassy surface
was fluted with shifting lines and rings of a tender white light too
faint to penetrate the darkness beyond its own groove, except now and
then when it seemed to give out a luminous mist. It frothed white where
the oars cut into it and slid backward in tremulous rings growing
fainter and fainter; it was scattered from the blades in bright drops
falling like a phosphorescent rain, which was extinguished in the air
but lighted the water drop by drop. There was such quiet over the fjord
that the sound of the oars seemed only to measure the stillness in
pauses of equal length. Hushed and soft, the gray twilight brooded over
the soundless deep; the boat and its occupants melted together in one
dark mass, from which the phosphorescence freed the plying oars and
sometimes a trailing rope’s end, or perhaps the brown impassive face of
the oarsman. No one spoke. Fennimore was cooling her hand in the water;
she and Erik sat turning back to look at the network of light that
trailed silently after the boat and held their thoughts in its fair
meshes.
A call for a song shouted from land roused them, and together they sang
two or three Italian romances to the accompaniment of the mandolin.
Then all was still again.
At last they landed at the little jetty running out from the garden.
The Consul’s empty boat was moored alongside, and the party had already
gone up to the house. Fennimore’s aunt and her companion followed them,
but Erik and Fennimore remained standing and looked after the boat
as it returned to the ship. The latch of the garden gate fell with a
click; the sound of the oars grew fainter and fainter, and the swelling
of the water around the pier died away. Then a breath stirred in the
dark trees around them like a sigh that had hidden itself and now
softly lifted the leaves, flew away, and left them alone.
In the same moment they turned to each other and away from the water.
He caught her hand and slowly, questioningly, drew her close and kissed
her. “Fennimore!” he whispered, and they walked through the dark garden.
“You have known it long!” he said, and she replied, “Yes.” Then they
walked on, and the latch fell once more.
Erik could not sleep when he reached his room at last, after drinking
coffee with the company and saying good-night at the street door.
There was no air in there; he flung the windows wide open, then threw
himself on the couch and listened.
He wanted to get out again.
How everything resounded through the house! He could hear the Consul’s
slippers, and now Mrs. Claudi opened the kitchen door to see if the
fire was out. What in the world could Niels want in his trunk at this
time of night! Ah—there was a mouse behind the wainscoting. Now
some one crossed the attic in stocking-feet—now another—there were
two.—At last! He opened the door to the guest-room within and
listened, then he carefully opened the window, straddled over the
sill, and slid into the courtyard. He knew that he could get down to
the shore through the mangling-room. If any one saw him, he meant to
say that he had forgotten his mandolin down by the jetty and wanted to
rescue it from the dew. Therefore he slung the mandolin on his back.
The garden was a little lighter now; there was a slight breeze and a
bit of moon which laid a tremulous strip of silver from the jetty out
to the _Berendt Claudi_.
He went through the garden out on the stone sloping which protected it
from the water, running in abrupt angles round a large embankment and
all the way out to the end of the harbor mole. Balancing uncomfortably
on the flat, slanting stones, he finally reached the molehead and,
rather out of breath, sat down on the bench.
Above his head the red lantern of the harbor light swung slowly back
and forth with a sound like the sighing of iron, while the flag line
flapped gently against its staff.
The moon had come out a little more and cast a cautious grayish-white
light over the quiet ships in the harbor and over the maze of
rectangular roofs and white dark-eyed gables in the town. Above and
beyond it all the church steeple rose, calm and light.
He leaned back dreaming, while a wave of unutterable joy and exultation
surged through his heart; he felt rich and full of strength and
the warmth of life. It seemed as though Fennimore must hear every
love-thought that grew from his rapture, vine in vine, and blossom on
blossom; and he rose, and quickly striking the strings of the mandolin
sang triumphantly to the town asleep in there:
“_Wakeful aloft lies my lassie,
She listens to my song!_”
Again and again, when his heart grew too full, he repeated the words of
the old ballad.
Gradually he became calmer. Memories of the hours in the past when he
had felt weakest, poorest, and most forlorn pressed in on him with a
slight, tense pain like that of the first tears welling up in the eyes.
He sat down on the bench again, and with his hand lying mute on the
mandolin strings, he gazed out over the blue-gray expanse of the fjord,
where the moon bridge formed a glittering way past the dark ship to the
lines of the Morsö hills, drawn in faint, melancholy cloud-blue land
through a haze of white.
And the memories thronged, but they grew gentler, were lifted to fairer
lands, and seemed lighted by a roseate dawn.
... _My lassie!_
He sang it to himself:
“_Wakeful aloft lies my lassie,
She listens to my song._”
_Chapter XI_
Three years had passed; Erik and Fennimore had been married for two
years, and made their home in a little villa at Mariagerfjord. Niels
had not seen Fennimore since that summer at Fjordby. He lived in
Copenhagen and went out a great deal, but had no intimate friends
except Dr. Hjerrild, who called himself old because touches of gray had
begun to appear in his dark hair.
That unexpected engagement had been a hard blow to Niels. It had a
benumbing effect on him. He grew more bitter and less confiding, and
had no longer so much enthusiasm to pit against Hjerrild’s pessimism.
Though he still pursued his studies, their plan was less and less
definite, while his purpose of some time completing them and beginning
his real life-work flickered uncertainly. He lived much among people,
but very little with them. They interested him, but he did not in the
least care to have them be interested in him; for he felt the force
that should have driven him to do his part with the others or against
them slowly ebbing out of him. He could wait, he told himself, even
if he had to wait till it was too late. Whoever has faith is in no
hurry—that was his excuse to himself. For he believed that, when he
came down to the bedrock of his own nature, he did have faith strong
enough to move mountains—the trouble was that he never managed to
set his shoulder to them. Once in a while, the impulse to create
welled up in him, and he longed to see a part of himself freed in work
that should be his very own. For days he would be excited with the
happy, titanic effort of carting the clay for his Adam, but he never
formed it in his own image. The will-power necessary to persistent
self-concentration was not in him. Weeks would pass before he could
make up his mind to abandon the work, but he did abandon it, asking
himself, in a fit of irritation, why he should continue. What more had
he to gain? He had tasted the rapture of conception; there remained the
toil of rearing, cherishing, nourishing, carrying to perfection—Why?
For whom? He was no pelican, he told himself. But argue as he might, he
was dissatisfied with himself and felt that he had not fulfilled his
own expectations; nor did it avail him to carp at these expectations
and ask whether they were well founded. He had reached the point
where he had to choose, for when first youth is past—early or late
in accordance with each person’s individuality—then, early or late,
dawns the day when Resignation comes to us as a temptress, luring us to
forego the impossible and be content. And Resignation has much in her
favor; for how often have not the idealistic aspirations of youth been
beaten back, its enthusiasms been shamed, its hopes laid waste!—The
ideals, the fair and beautiful, have lost nothing of their radiance,
but they no longer walk here among us as in the early days of our
youth. The broad, firmly planted stairway of worldly wisdom has
conveyed them back, step by step, to that heaven whence our simpler
faith once brought them down; and there they sit, radiant but distant,
smiling but weary, in divine quiescence, while the incense of a
slothful adoration rises, puff on puff, in festive convolutions.
Niels Lyhne was tired. These repeated runnings to a leap that was never
leaped had wearied him. Everything seemed to him hollow and worthless,
distorted and confused, and, oh, so petty! He preferred to stop his
ears and stop his mouth and to immerse himself in studies that had
nothing to do with the busy every-day world, but were like an ocean
apart, where he could wander peacefully in silent forests of seaweed
among curious animals.
He was tired, and the root of his weariness sprang from his baffled
hope of love; thence it had spread, quickly and surely, through his
whole being, to all his faculties and all his thoughts. Now he was
cold and passionless enough, but in the beginning, after the blow had
fallen, his love had grown, day by day, with the irresistible power
of a malignant fever. There had been moments when his soul was almost
bursting with insane passion; it swelled like a wave in its infinite
longing and frothing desire; it rose and went on rising and rising,
till every fibre in his brain and every cord in his heart was strung
tense to the breaking-point. Then weariness had come, soothing and
healing, making his nerves dull against pain, his blood too cold for
enthusiasm, and his pulse too weak for action. And more than that, it
had protected him against a relapse by giving him all the prudence and
egoism of the convalescent. When his thoughts went back to those days
in Fjordby, he had a sense of immunity akin to the feeling of a man
who has just passed through a severe illness and knows that now, when
he has endured his allotted agony, and the fever has burned itself to
ashes within him, he will be free for a long, long time.
Then it happened, one summer day, after Erik and Fennimore had been
married for two years, that he received a half-whining, half-boasting
letter from Erik, in which he blamed himself for having wasted his
time of late. He did not know what the matter was, but he had no
ideas. The people he met in the neighborhood were fine, jolly fellows,
no conventionality or nonsense about them, but they were perfect
dromedaries with regard to art. There was not a human being he could
talk with, and he had gotten himself into a slough of laziness and
stagnation which he could not pull out of. He never had a glimmering
of an idea or a mood, and never felt inspired. Sometimes he was afraid
that his power had run out, and that he never would do anything any
more. But this could not possibly go on forever! It must come back;
he had been too rich to end like this, and when it came he would show
them what art was, those fellows who painted away all the time as if
they had learned it by rote. For the present, however, he was as if
bewitched, and it would be an act of friendship if Niels would visit
Mariagerfjord. They would make him as comfortable as circumstances
allowed, and he could just as well spend his vacation there as any
other place. Fennimore sent her love and would be glad to see him.
This letter was so unlike Erik that Niels saw at once there must be
something serious amiss or he would not complain in this fashion.
He was aware, too, of how little volume there was in the wellspring
of Erik’s production—a slender stream only, which unfavorable
circumstances could easily dry out. He would go at once! For all that
had happened, Erik should find him a faithful friend; whatever the
years had loosened of old ties and uprooted of old illusions, he would
at least know how to guard this old friendship of their childhood. He
had helped Erik before, and he would help him now. A fanaticism of
friendship possessed him. He would renounce his future, fame, ambitious
dreams, everything, for Erik’s sake. All that he owned of smoldering
enthusiasm and creative ferment should be Erik’s; he would merge
himself in Erik with his whole self and all his ideas, holding nothing
back, keeping nothing for himself. He dreamed of greatness for the
friend who had torn his life asunder so roughly, and saw himself
blotted out, forgotten, impoverished, deprived of his intellectual
heritage; and he went on dreaming that his gift to Erik should become
no longer a loan, but Erik’s very own, as he coined it into works and
deeds and gave it his stamp. Erik in honor and glory, and he himself
one of the many, many commonplace folk and nothing else; poor, at
last, by necessity, not by choice; a real beggar, not a prince in
disguise.... And it was sweet to dream himself so bitterly humble.
But dreams are dreams, and he laughed at himself, as he thought that
people who neglect their own work always have no end of time to
interest themselves in that of others. It also occurred to him that,
when he came face to face with Erik, the latter would, of course,
disclaim his letter and pass it off as a joke. He certainly would think
it extremely absurd if Niels were actually to present himself with the
announcement that he was ready to help him recover his creative power.
Nevertheless he went. In his inmost heart he believed that he could do
some good, and no matter how much he tried to explain it away or cast
doubts upon it, he could not rid himself of the feeling that it really
was the friendship of their boyhood which had reasserted itself in all
its old simplicity and warmth, in spite of the years and what the years
had brought.
* * * * *
The villa at Mariagerfjord belonged to an elderly couple who had been
forced by ill-health to make their home in the south for an indefinite
period. They had not intended to rent the place, as they had started
out with the idea of returning after six months, and therefore had
left everything just as it was. So when Erik leased the house fully
furnished, this was so literally true that he got it with bric-à-brac,
family portraits, and everything else, even to an attic full of
decrepit furniture with old letters in the drawers of the secretaries.