in stupid dreams, or to wait and calculate, with the cold knowledge of
the physician, how long she had to suffer. He told himself, in this
dreary wisdom, that there could be no relief until her old hope in the
fair, gleaming treasures of life had bled to death and a more sluggish
stream had entered her veins, making her dull enough to forget, blunt
enough to accept, and, at last, at last, coarse enough to rejoice in
the thick atmosphere of a bliss many heavens lower than that which
she had meekly hoped and humbly prayed for wings to reach.—He was
full of disgust with all the world when he thought that she, to whom
he had once knelt in adoration, had come to such a pass that she had
been forced to a slave’s estate, and stood at the gate shivering with
cold, while he rode past on his high horse with the large coins of life
jingling in his pocket.
One Sunday afternoon, in the latter part of August, Niels rowed across
the fjord. Fennimore was at home alone when he came; he found her lying
on a sofa in the corner room, and very miserable. Her breath came with
that low, monotonous moaning which seems to afford relief from pain,
and she said that she had a frightful headache. There was no one to
help her, for she had given the maid leave to go home to Hadssund,
and soon afterward some one had come and carried off Erik; she could
not understand where they had gone in the rain. Now she had been
lying there for two hours trying to sleep, but it was impossible,
the pain was so bad. She had never had it before, and it had come on
so suddenly—at dinner-time there had been nothing the matter. First
it was in the temples, and then it seemed to dig deeper and deeper
and deeper in; now it seemed to be behind her eyes—if it only was
not anything dangerous. She was not used to being ill, and was very
frightened and unhappy.
Niels comforted her as well as he could, telling her to lie still,
close her eyes, and not speak. He found a heavy shawl, which he wrapped
around her feet, fetched vinegar from the buffet, and made a cold
compress, which he laid on her brow. Then he sat down quietly by the
window, and looked out at the rain.
From time to time, he stole over to her on tiptoe and changed the
compress without speaking, merely nodding to her, as she looked up at
him gratefully between his hands. Sometimes she wanted to speak, but
he hushed her with a look, shaking his head, and returned to his seat
again.
At last she fell asleep.
One hour passed and another, and she was still sleeping. Slowly one
quarter slipped into the other, while the melancholy daylight faded,
and the shadows in the room waxed larger, as if they were growing out
of the furniture and the walls. Outside the rain fell, evenly and
steadily, blotting out every other sound in its low, incessant patter.
She was still sleeping.
The fumes of the vinegar and the vanilla scent of the heliotrope,
mingling in a pungent odor like wine, filled the room. Warmed by their
breath, the air covered the gray window-panes with a dewy film, which
grew denser with the increasing coolness of the evening.
By this time, he was far away in memories and dreams, though a part
of his consciousness still watched over the sleeper and followed her
sleep. Gradually, as the darkness pressed in, his fancy wearied of
feeding these dreams that flickered up and died down, just as the soil
gets tired of bringing forth the same crop again and again; and the
dreams grew feebler, more sterile, and stiffer, losing the luxuriant
details that had entwined them like long shoots of clinging vines. His
thoughts left the distance and came homing back.—How quiet everything
was! Was it not as if they were together, he and she, on an island
of silence rising above the monotonous sea of sound made by the soft
patter of the rain? And their souls were still, calm and safe, while
the future seemed to slumber in a cradle of peace.
Would that it might never awaken, and that all might remain as now—no
more happiness than that of peace, but neither any misery nor irking
unrest! Would that the present might close as a bud closes around
itself, and that no spring would follow!
Fennimore called. She had been lying awake for some time, too happy in
being free from pain to think of speaking. Now she wanted to get up and
light the lamp, but Niels continued to act as physician, and compelled
her to lie still. It was not good for her to get up yet; he had matches
and could easily find the lamp.
When he had lit it, he put it on the flower stand in the corner, where
its milky white globe shone softly veiled by the delicate, slumbering
leaves of an acacia. The room was just light enough so that they could
see each other’s face.
He sat down in front of her, and they spoke about the rain and said how
lucky it was that Erik had taken his rain-coat, and how wet poor Trine
would be. Then their conversation came to a standstill.
Fennimore’s thoughts were not quite awake yet, and in her weakness it
seemed pleasant to lie thus musing without speaking. Nor was Niels
inclined to talk, for he was still under the spell of the afternoon’s
long silence.
“Do you like this house?” Fennimore asked at last.
“Why yes, fairly well.”
“Really? Do you remember the furniture at home?”
“At Fjordby? Yes indeed, perfectly.”
“You don’t know how I love it, and how I long for it sometimes. The
things we have here don’t belong to us—they are only rented—and have
no association with anything, and we are not going to live with them
any longer than we stay in this place. You may think it queer, but I
assure you, I often feel lonely here among all these strange pieces of
furniture that stand around here so indifferent and stupid and take
me for what I am without caring the least bit about me. And as I know
they are not going with me—that they will just stay here and be rented
by other people—I can’t get fond of them or interested in them as I
should if I knew that my home would always be theirs, and that whatever
came to me of good or ill would come in the midst of them. Do you think
it childish? Perhaps it is, but I can’t help it.”
“I don’t know what it is, but I have felt it too. When I was left alone
abroad, my watch stopped, and when it came back from the watchmaker and
was going as before, it was—just what you mean. I liked the feeling;
there was something peculiar about it, something genuinely good.”
“Yes indeed! Oh, I should have kissed it, if I had been you.”
“Would you?”
“Do you know,” she said suddenly, “you have never told me anything
about Erik as a boy? What was he like?”
“Everything that is good and fine, Fennimore. Splendid, brave—a boy’s
ideal of a boy, not exactly a mother’s or a teacher’s ideal, but the
other, which is so much better.”
“How did you get along together? Were you very fond of each other?”
“Yes, I was in love with him, and he didn’t mind—that is about how it
was. We were very different. I always wanted to be a poet and become
famous, but what do you suppose he said he wanted to be, one day when
I asked him?—An Indian, a real red Indian with war paint and all
the rest! I remember that I couldn’t understand it at all. It was
incomprehensible to me how any one could want to be a savage—civilized
creature that I was!”
“But was it not strange, then, that he should become an artist?” said
Fennimore, and there was something cold and hostile in her tone, as she
asked.
Niels noticed it with a little start. “Not at all,” he answered; “it is
really rare that people become artists with the whole of their nature.
And such strong fellows overflowing with vitality like Erik often have
an unutterable longing for what is fine-grained and delicate: for an
exquisite virginal coldness, a lofty sweetness—I hardly know how to
express it. Outwardly they may be robust and full-blooded enough, even
coarse, and no one suspects what strange, romantic, sentimental secrets
they carry about with them, because they are so bashful—spiritually
bashful, I mean—that no pale little maiden can be more shy about her
soul than are these big, hard-stepping menfolks. Don’t you understand,
Fennimore, that such a secret, which can’t be told in plain words
right out in common every-day air, may dispose a man to be an artist?
And they can’t express it in words, they simply can’t; we have to
believe that it is there and lives its quiet life within them, as the
bulb lives in the earth; for once in a while they do send fragrant,
delicately tinted flowers up to the light. Do you understand?—Don’t
demand anything for yourself of this blossoming strength, believe in
it, be glad to nourish it and to know that it is there.—Forgive me,
Fennimore, but it seems to me that you and Erik are not really good to
each other. Can’t you make a change? Don’t think of who is right or how
great the wrong is, and don’t treat him according to his deserts—how
would even the best of us fare if we got our deserts! No, think of him
as he was in the hour when you loved him most; believe me, he is worthy
of it. You must not measure and weigh. There are moments in love, I
know, full of bright, solemn ecstasy, when we would give our lives for
the beloved if need be. Is not that true? Remember it now, Fennimore,
for his sake and your own.”
He was silent.
She said nothing either, but lay very still with a melancholy smile on
her lips, pale as a flower.
Then she half rose and stretched out her hand to Niels. “Will you be my
friend?” she asked.
“I am your friend, Fennimore,” and he took her hand.
“Will you, Niels?”
“Always,” he replied, lifting the hand to his lips reverently.
When he rose, it seemed to Fennimore that he held himself more erect
than she had ever seen him before.
A little later Trine came in to announce her return, and then there was
tea, and at last the rowing back through the dreary rain.
Toward morning Erik came home, and when Fennimore saw him by the cold,
truthful light of dawn, preparing to go to bed, heavy and unsteady with
drink, his eyes glazed from gambling and his face dirty-pale after the
sleepless night, then all the fair words Niels had spoken seemed to her
quite visionary. The bright promises she had made to her own heart
fainted and paled before the oncoming day—vapory dreams and fumes of
fancy: a fairy flock of lies!
What was the use of struggling with this weight dragging them both
down? It was futile to lighten it by lies; their life would never have
its old buoyancy. The frost had been there, and the wealth of vines and
creepers and clustering roses and blossoms fairer than roses that had
entwined them had shed every tiny leaf, lost every blossom, and nothing
remained but the tough, naked withes binding them together in an
unbreakable tether. What did it avail that she roused the feelings of
former days to an artificial life by the warmth of memories, that she
put her idol up on its pedestal again, that she called back the light
of admiration to her eyes, the words of adoration to her lips, and the
flush of happiness to her cheeks! What did it all avail, when he would
not take upon himself to be the priest of the idol and so help her to
a pious fraud? He! He did not even remember her love. Not one of her
words echoed in his ears, not one of all their days was hidden in his
soul.
No, dead and cold was the ardent love of their hearts. The fragrance,
the glamor, and the tremulous tones—all had been wafted away. There
they sat, from force of habit, he with his arm around her waist, she
with her head resting on his shoulder, drearily sunk in silence,
forgetting each other; she, to remember the glorious hero he had never
been; he, to transform her in his dreams to the ideal which he now
always saw shining in the sky high above her head. Such was their life
together, and the days came and went without bringing any change, and
day after day they gazed out over the desert of their lives, and told
themselves that it was a desert, that there were no flowers nor any
hope of flowers or springs or green palms.
As the autumn advanced, Erik’s drinking-bouts became more frequent.
What was the use, he said to Niels, of sitting at home waiting for
ideas that never came, until his thoughts turned to stone in his head?
Moreover, he did not get much comfort from Niels’s society; he needed
people with some grit in them, people of lusty flesh and blood, not a
whim-wham of delicate nerves. Niels and Fennimore were therefore left
much alone, for Niels came over to Marianelund every day.
The covenant of friendship they had made and the talk they had had
on that Sunday afternoon put them at their ease with each other,
and, lonely as they both were, they drew closer together in a warm
and tender friendship, which soon gained a strong hold over both. It
absorbed them so that their thoughts, whether they were together or
apart, always turned to this bond, as birds building the same nest look
on everything they gather or pass by with the one pleasant goal of
making the nest snug and comfortable for each other and themselves.
If Niels came while Erik was away, they nearly always, even on rainy
and stormy days, took long walks in the woods behind the garden. They
had fallen in love with that forest, and grew fonder of it as they
watched the summer life die out. There were a thousand things to see.
First, how the leaves turned yellow and red and brown, then how they
fell off, whirling on a windy day in yellow swarms, or softly rustling
in still air, single leaf after leaf, down against the stiff boughs and
between the pliant brown twigs. And when the leaves fell from trees
and bushes, the hidden secrets of summer were revealed in nest upon
nest. What treasures on the ground and on the branches, dainty seeds
and bright-colored berries, brown nuts, shining acorns and exquisite
acorn cups, tassels of coral on the barberry, polished black berries
on the buckthorn, and scarlet urns on the dog-rose. The bare beeches
were finely dotted with prickly beechnuts, and the roan bent under the
weight of its red clusters, acid in fragrance like apple cider. Late
brambleberries lay black and brown among the wet leaves at the wayside;
red whortleberries grew among the heather, and the wild raspberries
brought forth their dull crimson fruit for the second time. The ferns
turned all colors as they faded, and the moss was a revelation, not
only the deep, luscious moss in the hollows and on the slopes, but the
faint, delicate growth on the tree-trunks, resembling what one might
imagine the cornfields of the elves to be as it sent forth the finest
of stalks with dark brown buds like ears of corn at the tip.
They scoured the forest from end to end, eager to find all its
treasures and marvels. They had divided it between them as children do;
the part on one side of the road was Fennimore’s property, and that
on the other side was Niels’s, and they would compare their realms
and quarrel about which was the more glorious. Everything there had
names—clefts and hillocks, paths and stiles, ditches and pools; and
when they found a particularly magnificent tree, they gave that too a
name. In this way they took complete possession and created a little
world of their own which no one else knew and no one else was at home
in, and yet they had no secret which all the world might not have heard.
As yet they had not.
But love was in their hearts, and was not there, as the crystals are
present in a saturated solution, and yet are not present, not until a
splinter or the merest particle of the right matter is thrown into the
solution, releasing the slumbering atoms as if by magic, and they rush
to meet one another, joining and riveting themselves together according
to unsearchable laws, and in the same instant there is crystal—crystal.
So it was a trifle that made them feel they loved.
There is nothing to tell. It was a day like all other days, when they
were alone together in the sitting-room, as they had been a hundred
times before; their conversation was about things of no moment, and
that which happened was outwardly as common and as every-day-like
as possible. It was nothing except that Niels stood looking out
of the window, and Fennimore came over to him and looked out too.
That was all, but it was enough, for in a flash like lightning, the
past and present and future were transformed for Niels Lyhne by the
consciousness that he loved the woman standing by his side, not as
anything bright and sweet and happy and beautiful that would lift him
to ecstasy or rapture—such was not the nature of his love—but he
loved her as something he could no more do without than the breath
of life itself, and he reached out, as a drowning man clutches, and
pressed her hand to his heart.
She understood him. With almost a scream, in a voice full of terror
and agony, she cried out to him an answer and a confession: “Oh,
_yes_, Niels!” and snatched away her hand in the same instant. A
moment she stood, pale and shrinking, then sank down with one knee in
an upholstered chair, hiding her face against the harsh velvet of the
back, and sobbed aloud.
Niels stood a few seconds as though blinded, groping around among the
bulb-glasses for support. It was only for a very few seconds; then he
stepped over to the chair where she was lying, and bent over without
touching her, resting one hand on the back of the chair.
“Don’t be so unhappy, Fennimore! Look up and let us talk about it. Will
you, or will you not? Don’t be afraid! Let us bear it together, my own
love! Come, try if you can’t!”
She raised her head slightly and looked up at him. “Oh, God, what shall
we do! Isn’t it terrible, Niels! Why should such a thing happen to me?
And how lovely it all could have been—so happy!” and she sobbed again.
“Should I not have spoken?” he moaned. “Poor Fennimore, would you
rather never have known it?”
She raised her head again and caught his hand. “I wish I knew it
and were dead. I wish I were in my grave and knew it, that would be
good—oh, so peaceful and good!”
“It is bitter for us both, Fennimore, that the first thing our love
brings us should be only misery and tears. Don’t you think so?”
“You must not be hard on me, Niels. I can’t help it. You can’t see it
as I do—I am the one that should be strong, because I am the one that
is bound. I wish I could take my love and force it back into the most
secret depth of my soul and lock it in and be deaf to all its wailing
and its prayers, and then tell you to go far, far away; but I can’t, I
have suffered so much, I can’t suffer that too—I can’t, Niels. I can’t
live without you—see, can I? Do you think I can?”
She rose and flung herself on his breast.
“Here I am, and I won’t let you go; I won’t send you away, while I sit
here alone in the old darkness. It is like a bottomless pit of loathing
and misery. I won’t throw myself into it. I would rather jump into the
fjord, Niels. Even if the new life brings other agonies, at least they
are new agonies, and haven’t the dull sting of the old, and can’t stab
home like the old, which know my heart so cruelly well. Am I talking
wildly? Yes, of course I am, but it is so good to talk to you without
any reserve and without having to be careful not to say what I have no
right to. For now you have the first right of all! I wish you could
take me wholly, so that I could belong to you utterly and not to any
one else at all. I wish you could lift me out of all relations that
hedge me in!”
“We must break through them, Fennimore. I will arrange everything as
well as possible. Don’t be afraid! Some day, before any one suspects
anything, we shall be far away.”
“No, no, we mustn’t run away, anything but that, anything else
rather than have my parents hear their daughter had run away. It is
impossible! I will never do it. By God in heaven, Niels, I will never
do it.”
“Oh, but you must, girlie, you must. Can’t you see all the baseness and
ugliness that will rise and close in around us everywhere, if we stay,
all the lies and deceptions that will entangle us and drag us down? I
won’t have you smooched by all that. I refuse to let it eat into our
love like corroding rust.”
But she was immovable.
“You don’t know what you are condemning us to,” he said sadly. “It
would be far better to crush under iron heels now instead of sparing.
Believe me, Fennimore, we must let our love be everything to us, the
first and only thing in the world, that which must be saved, even at
the cost of stabbing where we would rather heal and bringing sorrow
where we would rather keep every shadow of sorrow far away. If we
don’t do that, you will see that the yoke we bend our necks under now
will weigh on us and at last force us to our knees, unmercifully,
inexorably.—A fight on our knees, you don’t know how hard that
is! Shall we fight the fight anyway, girlie, side by side, against
everything?”
* * * * *
For the first few days Niels persisted in his attempts to persuade her
to flight. Then he began to picture to himself what a blow it would be
to Erik if he were to come home one day and find friend and wife gone
away together, and by degrees the whole thing took on an unnaturally
tragic air of the impossible. He accustomed himself not to think of it,
as he did with many other things that he might have wished different,
and threw himself with his whole soul into the situation as it was,
without any conscious attempts to make it over by dreams or cover its
defects with imaginary festoons and garlands. But, oh, how sweet it
was to love for once with the love of real life; for now he knew that
nothing of what he had imagined to be love was real love, neither the
turgid longing of the lonely youth, nor the passionate yearning of
the dreamer, nor yet the nervous foreboding of the child. These were
currents in the ocean of love, single reflections of its full light,
fragments of love as the meteors rushing through space are splinters of
a world—for that was love: a world complete in itself, fully rounded,
vast, and orderly. It was no medley of confused sensations and moods
rushing one upon another! Love was like nature, ever changing, ever
renewing; no feeling died and no emotion withered without giving life
to the seed of something still more perfect which was imbedded in it.
Quietly, sanely, with full, deep breaths—it was good to love so and
love with all his soul. The days fell, bright and new-coined, down from
heaven itself; they no longer followed one upon another as a matter
of course like the hackneyed pictures in a peep-show. Every one was a
revelation. With each day that passed, he felt stronger, greater, and
nobler. He had never known such strength and fullness of feeling; there
were moments when he seemed to himself titanic, much more than man, so
inexhaustible was the wellspring of his soul, so broad-winged the
tenderness that swelled his heart, so wondrous the sweep of his vision,
so infinite the gentleness of his judgments.
This was the beginning of happiness, and they were happy long.
The daily falsehood and deception and the atmosphere of dishonor in
which they lived had not yet gained power over them, and could not
touch them on those ecstatic heights to which Niels had lifted their
relationship and, with it, themselves. For he was not simply a man who
seduced his friend’s wife—or rather, so he told himself defiantly, he
was that man, but he was also the one who saved an innocent woman whom
life had wounded, stoned, and defiled, a woman who had lain down to let
her soul die. This woman he had given back her confidence in life, her
faith in the powers of good; he had lifted her spirit to noble heights,
had given her happiness. What, then, was best, the old blameless misery
or that which he had won for her? He did not ask, he had made his
choice.
He did not quite mean this, if the truth were told. Man often builds
for himself theories in which he refuses to dwell. Thoughts often run
faster than the sense of right and wrong is willing to follow. Yet the
conception was really present in his mind, and it took away some of the
cankerous venom inherent in the craftiness, falseness, and duplicity of
their lives.
Yet the evil effects were soon noticeable. The poison was working on
so many fine nerve filaments that it could not but do harm and cause
suffering, and the time was hastened when Erik, shortly after New Year,
announced that he had caught an idea—something with a green tunic and
a threatening attitude, he told Niels. Did he remember the green in
Salvator Rosa’s Jonah? Something on that order.
Although Erik’s work consisted chiefly in lying on the couch in his
studio, smoking shag and reading Marryat, it had at least the effect
of keeping him at home for the time being, thereby forcing them to use
more caution and necessitating new lies and artifices.