sun was about to rise and cast a red glow on the white shade curtains,
although the light coming in on either side was still blue, making blue
shadows in the folds of the white bed-spread and under Gerda’s pale,
thin hands, which lay clasped before her on the sheet. Her cap had
slipped off, and, as her head lay far back on the pillow, her features,
sharpened and refined by suffering, had an unfamiliar and strangely
distinguished air. She moved her lips as if to moisten them, and Niels
reached for a glass holding a dark red liquid, but she shook her head
faintly. Then suddenly she turned her face to him and gazed anxiously
into his mournful countenance. As she looked at the deep sorrow his
face revealed and the despair it could not hide, her uneasy foreboding
gradually changed to a terrible certainty.
She struggled to rise, but could not.
Niels bent over her quickly, and she caught his hand.
“Is it death?” she asked, lowering her weak voice as if she could not
bear to speak the words.
He could only look at her, while his breath came in a deep, moaning
sigh.
Gerda clutched his hand and threw herself over to him in her fear. “I
don’t dare to,” she said.
He slid down on his knees by the bed and put his arm under the pillow
so that he almost held her to his breast. He could hardly see her for
the tears that blinded him as they coursed down his cheeks one after
another, and he lifted her hand with a corner of the sheet to his eyes.
Then he mastered his voice. “Tell me everything, Gerda dear; never mind
me. Is it the pastor?” He could hardly believe it was that, and there
was a note of doubt in his voice.
She did not answer, but closed her eyes and drew her head back a little
as if to be alone with her thoughts.
A few minutes passed. The soft, long-drawn whistle of a blackbird
sounded underneath the windows; then another whistled and another; a
whole series of flute-like notes shot through the silence of the room.
Then she looked up again. “If you were with me,” she said, and she
leaned more heavily on the pillow that he supported. There was a caress
in her movement, and he felt it. “If you were with me! But alone!”
She drew his hand toward her feebly and dropped it again. “I don’t
dare to.“ Her eyes were full of fear. “You must fetch him, Niels, I
don’t dare to come up there alone like this. We had never thought
that I should die first; it was always you who went before. Yes, I
know—but suppose, after all, we have been mistaken; we _might_ have
been mistaken, Niels, mightn’t we? You don’t think so, but it would be
strange if _everybody_ should be wrong, and if there wasn’t anything
at all—those big churches and the bells when they bury people—I have
always been so fond of the bells.” She lay quite still as if she were
listening for them and could hear them.
“It is impossible, Niels, that it should all be over when we die. You
don’t feel it, you who are well, you think it must kill us quite,
because we are so weak, and everything seems to pass away, but it is
only the world outside, within us there is as much soul as before. It
is there, Niels; I have it all within me, everything that has been
given me, the same infinite world, but more quiet, more alone with
myself, as when you close your eyes. It is just like a candle, Niels,
that is being carried away from you into the darkness, into the
darkness, and it seems to you fainter and fainter and fainter, and you
can’t see it, but still it is shining over there where it is—far away.
I always thought I should live to be such an old, old woman, and that
I should stay here with you all, and now they won’t let me, they are
taking me away from house and home and making me go all alone. I am
afraid, Niels, that where I am going it is God who rules, and He cares
nothing for our cleverness here on earth. He wants His own way and
nothing else, but somehow everything of His is so far away from me. I
have not done anything very wicked, have I? But it isn’t that.... Go
and get the pastor, I want him so much.“
Niels rose and went for the pastor at once; he was grateful that this
had not come at the very last moment.
The pastor came and was left alone with Gerda.
He was a handsome, middle-aged man with finely cut, regular features
and large brown eyes. He knew, of course, Niels Lyhne’s attitude to the
church, and now and then some expressions of hostility that sprang from
the young wife’s fanaticism had been reported to him; but he never for
a moment thought of speaking to her as to a heathen or an apostate,
for he understood perfectly that it was only her love that had led her
astray, and he also understood the feeling that impelled her, now that
love could no longer follow her, to seek reconciliation with the God
she had once known. Therefore he tried in his talk with her to wake her
dormant memories by reading to her the passages from the Gospels and
the hymns that he thought would be most familiar to her.
He was not mistaken.
The words woke intimate and solemn echoes in her soul like the pealing
of bells on Christmas morning. Instantly there was spread before her
eyes the land where our fancy is first of all at home, where Joseph
dreamed and David sang, and where the ladder stands that reaches from
earth to heaven. It lay there with figs and mulberries, and the Jordan
gleamed like clearest silver in the morning mist; Jerusalem stood
red and sombre under the setting sun; but over Bethlehem there was
always glorious night with great stars in the deep blue vault. How her
childhood faith welled up once more! She was again the little girl who
went to church clinging to her mother’s hand and sat there shivering
with cold and wondering why people sinned so much. Then she grew to
full stature again under the lofty words of the Sermon on the Mount,
and she lay there like a prostrate sinner while the pastor spoke of the
sacred mysteries of baptism and of holy communion. At last the true
longing arose in her heart, the meek kneeling before the omnipotent
and judging God, the bitter tears of remorse before the betrayed and
reviled and tortured God, and the humbly audacious desire for the new
covenant of wine and bread with the hidden God.
The pastor left her. Toward noon he came back and gave her the
sacrament.
Her strength waned in a fitful flicker; yet at dusk, when Niels took
her in his arms for the last time to say farewell before the shadows of
death approached too near, she was fully conscious. But the love that
had been the purest joy of his life had died out of her eyes; she was
no longer his; even now her wings were growing, and she yearned only
for her God.
At midnight she died.
They were dreary months that followed. Time seemed to swell up into
something enormous and hostile; every day was an unending desert of
emptiness, every night a hell of memories. The summer was almost over
before the rushing, frothing torrent of his grief had hollowed out a
river-bed in his soul where it could flow in a turgid, murmuring stream
of sadness and longing.
Then it happened one day that he came home from the fields and found
his little boy very ill. The child had been ailing for the last few
days and had been restless in the night, but no one had believed it to
be anything serious; now he lay in his little bed hot and cold with
fever and moaning with pain.
The carriage was instantly sent to Varde for a physician, but none of
the doctors were at home, and it had to wait for hours. At bedtime it
had not yet returned.
Niels sat by the child’s cot. Every half hour or oftener he would send
some one out to listen and look for the carriage. A mounted messenger
was also despatched to meet it, but he failed to see any carriage and
rode all the way to Varde.
This waiting for help that did not come made it all the more agonizing
to watch the suffering of the sick child. The malady made rapid
progress. Toward eleven the first attack of convulsions set in, and
after that they came again and again at shorter and shorter intervals.
A little after one, the mounted messenger returned, saying that the
carriage could not be expected for some hours yet, as none of the
doctors had been at home when he rode out of town.
Then Niels broke down. He had fought against his despair as long as
there was any hope, but now he could fight no more. He went into the
dark parlor adjoining the sick-room and stared out through the dusky
panes, while his nails dug into the wood of the casement. His eyes
seemed to burrow into the darkness for some hope; his brain crouched
for a spring up toward a miracle; then suddenly all was still and clear
for an instant, and in the clearness he turned away from the window to
a table standing there, threw himself over it, and sobbed without tears.
When he came into the sick-room again, the child was in convulsions.
He looked at it as if he would stab himself to death with the sight:
the tiny hands, clenched and white, with bluish nails, the staring eyes
turning in their sockets, the distorted mouth, and the teeth grinding
with a sound like iron on stone—it was terrible, and yet that was not
the worst. No, but when the convulsions ceased and the body grew soft
again, relaxing with the happy relief of lessened pain, then to see the
terror that came into the child’s eyes when it felt the first faint
approach of the convulsions returning, the growing prayer for help when
the pain came nearer and yet nearer—to see this and not be able to
help, not with his heart’s blood, not with all he possessed! He lifted
his clenched hands threateningly to heaven, he caught up his child in a
mad impulse of flight, and then he threw himself down on the floor on
his knees, praying to the Lord Who is in heaven, Who keeps the earth
in fear through trials and chastisements, Who sends want and sickness,
suffering and death, Who demands that every knee shall bend to Him in
trembling, from Whom no flight is possible—either at the uttermost
ends of the ocean or in the depths of the earth—He, the God Who, if it
pleases Him, will tread the one you love best under His foot, torture
him back into the dust from which He himself created him.
With such thoughts, Niels Lyhne sent prayers up to the God; he
threw himself down in utter abandonment before the heavenly throne,
confessing that His was the power and His alone.
Still the child suffered.
Toward morning, when the old family physician drove in through the
gate, Niels was alone.
_Chapter XIV_
Autumn had come; there were no flowers any more on the graves up there
in the churchyard, and the fallen leaves lay brown and moldering in the
wet under the trees of Lönborggaard.
Niels Lyhne went about in the empty rooms in bitter despondency.
Something had given way in him the night the child died. He had lost
faith in himself, lost his belief in the power of human beings to
bear the life they had to live. Existence had sprung a leak, and its
contents were seeping out through all the cracks without plan or
purpose.
It was of no avail that he called the prayer he had prayed a father’s
frenzied cry for help for his child, even though he knew none could
hear his cry. He had known well what he did even in the depths of
his despair. He had been tempted and had fallen; for it was a fall,
a betrayal of himself and his ideal. No doubt tradition had been too
strong in his blood. Humanity had cried to heaven in its agony for many
thousands of years, and he had yielded to an inherited instinct. But
he ought to have resisted it, for he knew with the innermost fibres of
his brain that gods were dreams, and he knew that when he prayed he was
taking refuge in a dream, just as surely as he knew in the old days,
when he threw himself into the arms of his fancies, that they _were_
fancies. He had not been able to bear life as it was. He had taken
part in the battle for the highest, and in the stress of the fight he
had deserted the banner to which he had sworn allegiance; for after
all, the new ideal, atheism, the sacred cause of truth—what did it
all mean, what was it all but tinsel names for the one simple thing:
to bear life as it was! To bear life as it was and allow life to shape
itself according to its own laws!
It seemed to him as though his life had ended in that night of agony.
What came after was no more than meaningless scenes tacked on after the
fifth act when the action was already finished. He could, of course,
take up his old principles again, if he felt so inclined, but he had
once fallen the fall, and whether or not he would fall again mattered
absolutely nothing.
This was the mood that possessed him most frequently.
Then came the November day when the King died, and war seemed more and
more imminent.
He soon arranged his affairs in Lönborggaard and enlisted as a
volunteer.
The monotony of training was easy to bear, for it seemed wonderful only
to know that he was no longer superfluous, and when he was assigned
to active service, the everlasting fight against cold, vermin, and
discomforts of every kind drove his thoughts home and kept them from
going farther afield than to what was right before his door. He grew
almost cheerful over it, and his health, which had suffered under the
griefs of the past year, was fully restored.
On a gloomy day in March he was shot in the chest.
Hjerrild, who was a physician in the hospital, had him put into a small
room where there were only four beds. One of the men in there had been
shot in the spine and lay quite still. Another was wounded in the
breast and lay talking deliriously for hours at a time in quick, abrupt
phrases. The third, who lay nearest Niels, was a great, strong peasant
lad with fat, round cheeks; he had been struck in the brain by a
fragment of a shell, and incessantly, hour after hour, about every half
minute, he would lift his right arm and his right leg simultaneously
and then let them fall again, accompanying his movements with a loud
but dull and hollow “Hah-ho!” always in the same measure, always
exactly the same, “Hah” when he lifted his limbs, “ho” when he let them
fall.
There Niels Lyhne lay. The bullet had entered his right lung and had
not come out again. In war not much circumlocution can be used, and he
was told he had but little chance of life.
He was surprised; for he did not feel as though he were dying, and his
wound did not pain him much. But soon a faintness came over him and
warned him that the doctor was right.
So this was the end. He thought of Gerda, he thought of her constantly
the first day, but he was always disturbed by the strange, cool look in
her eyes the last time he had taken her in his arms. How beautiful it
would have been, how poignantly beautiful, if she had clung to him to
the very last and had sought his eye till her own was glazed in death;
if she had been content to breathe out her life upon the heart that
loved her so well instead of turning away from him at the last moment
to save herself over into more life and yet more life!
On the second day in the hospital, Niels felt more and more oppressed
by the heavy atmosphere in the room, and his longing for fresh air was
strangely intertwined in his mind with the desire to live. After all,
there had been so much in life that was beautiful, he thought, as he
remembered the fresh breeze along the shore at home, the cool soughing
of the wind in the beech forests of Sjaelland, the pure mountain air
of Clarens, and the evening zephyrs of Lake Garda. But when he began
to think of human beings, his soul sickened again. He summoned them in
review before him, one by one, and they all passed and left him alone,
and not one stayed with him. But how far had he held fast to them? Had
he been true? He had only been slower in letting go, that was all. No,
it was _not_ that. It was the dreary truth that a soul is always alone.
Every belief in the fusing of soul with soul was a lie. Not your mother
who took you on her lap, nor your friend, nor yet the wife who slept on
your heart....
Toward evening, inflammation set in, and the pain of his wound
increased.
Hjerrild came and sat by him for a few minutes in the evening, and
at midnight he returned and stayed a long time. Niels was suffering
intensely and moaned with pain.
“A word in all seriousness, Lyhne,” said Hjerrild. “Do you want to see
a clergyman?”
“I have no more to do with clergymen than you have,” Niels whispered
angrily.
“Never mind me! I am alive and well. Don’t lie there and torture
yourself with your opinions. People who are about to die have no
opinions, and those they have don’t matter. Opinions are only to live
by—in life they can do some good, but what does it matter whether you
die with one opinion or another? See here, we all have bright, tender
memories from our childhood; I have seen scores of people die, and it
always comforts them to bring back those memories. Let us be honest!
No matter what we call ourselves, we can never quite get that God out
of heaven; our brain has fancied Him up there too often, the picture
has been rung into it and sung into it from the time we were little
children.”
Niels nodded.
Hjerrild bent down to catch his words if he wished to say anything.
“You are very good,” Niels whispered, “but”—and he shook his head
decisively.
The room was still a long time except for the peasant lad’s everlasting
“Hah-ho!” hammering the hours to pieces.
Hjerrild rose. “Good-by, Lyhne,” he said. “After all, it is a noble
death to die for our poor country.”
“Yes,” said Niels, “and yet this is not the way we dreamed of doing our
part that time long, long ago.”
Hjerrild left him. When he came into his own room, he stood a long
while by the window looking up at the stars.
“If I were God,“ he said under his breath, and in his thoughts he
continued, “I would much rather save the man who was not converted at
the last moment.”
The pain in Niels’s wound grew more and more intense; it tore and
clutched at his breast, it persisted without mercy. What a relief it
would have been if he had had a god to whom he could have moaned and
prayed!
Toward morning he grew delirious, the inflammation was progressing
rapidly.
So it went on for two more days and two more nights.
The last time Hjerrild saw Niels Lyhne he was babbling of his armor and
of how he must die standing.
And at last he died the death—the difficult death.
THE END
PUBLICATIONS OF THE AMERICAN-SCANDINAVIAN FOUNDATION
_Committee on Publications_
WILLIAM HENRY SCHOFIELD, Professor of Comparative Literature in
Harvard University, _Chairman_.
MAURICE FRANCIS EGAN, late Minister to Denmark.
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Columbia University.
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SCANDINAVIAN CLASSICS
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Translated by OSCAR JAMES CAMPBELL, JR., and FREDERIC SCHENCK.
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Translated by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW and W. LEWERY BLACKLEY.
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IX. _Anthology of Swedish Lyrics, from 1750 to 1915._
Selections from the greatest of Swedish lyrists, translated
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The English translation of LILLIE TUDEER, completed and
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A Sentimental Journey with a practical ending, and the Tale of a
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A psychological novel, translated by HANNA ASTRUP LARSEN.
_Price_, $1.50 _each_
THE SCANDINAVIAN MONOGRAPHS
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A complete exposition, with illustrations and maps,
by WILLIAM HOVGAARD.
_Price_, $4.00
II. _Ballad Criticism in Scandinavia and Great Britain
during the Eighteenth Century_.
A comparative study, by SIGURD BERNARD HUSTVEDT.
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A famous treatise, translated from the Norwegian of the
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_In Preparation_
V. _A History of Scandinavian Art._
In three sections, each by the most competent authority:
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The first general work of this nature in any language.
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Transcriber's note:
Typographical errors have been silently corrected but other variations
in spelling and punctuation remain unaltered.