Part 10
He entered one of the larger restaurants. While waiting for his dinner, he observed, from the shelter of an old newspaper supplement, the people who came in. Most of them were young men. Some had a challenging air, as if they would forbid all present to appropriate them as fellow sufferers, while others could not conceal their embarrassment at having no place to go on such an evening, but all showed a marked preference for distant corners and secluded tables. Many came in couples, and most of these were plainly brothers; Niels had never seen so many brothers all at once. Often they were very much unlike each other in dress and manner, and their hands testified even more clearly to their different positions in life. It was almost a rarity to see any particular intimacy between them, either when they came or after they had sat and talked for a while. Here, one was superior and the other full of admiration; there, one was cordial, while the other repelled advances. Others again betrayed a mutual watchfulness, or, worse yet, an unexpressed condemnation of each other’s aims and ambitions and methods. Most of them evidently needed the holiday and a certain amount of loneliness to make them remember their common origin and bring them together.
Niels sat thinking of this and marvelling at the patience all these people exhibited, neither ringing nor calling for the waiters, as if they had tacitly agreed to banish as much as possible of the restaurant atmosphere from the place. While he was engrossed in this, he saw just coming in a man whom he knew, and the sudden sight of a familiar face among all these strangers startled him so that he rose and met him with a pleased, though somewhat surprised, “Good evening.”
“Are you waiting for any one?” asked the other, looking for a place to hang his overcoat.
“No, I am alone.”
“That’s lucky for me!”
The newcomer was a Dr. Hjerrild, a young man whom Niels had met at the Neergaards, and whom he knew—not from anything he had said, but from certain innuendos of Mrs. Neergaard’s—to be very liberal in his religious views, though the political opinions he professed were quite the reverse. People of that type did not often frequent the home of the Neergaards, who were at once religious and liberal. The doctor, however, belonged by inclination as well as through the influence of his dead mother to one of the circles—rather numerous at that time—where the new liberal ideas were looked on with sceptical or even hostile eyes, while in religion their members were rather more than rationalists and rather less than atheists, when they were not mystics or indifferentists. These various circles had many shades of opinion, but, in general, they were agreed in feeling that Holstein was at least as near to their hearts as Slesvig, while the kinship with Sweden was ignored, and Danism in its newest forms was not altogether approved. Moreover, they knew their Molière better than their Holberg, Baggesen better than Oehlenschläger, and in their artistic taste they tended, perhaps, to the sentimental.
In such, or at least kindred influences, Hjerrild had developed. He sat looking a little dubiously at Niels, as the latter recounted his observations of the other diners and especially dwelt on their apparent shame at not having part in any home or semblance of home on such an evening.
“I understand that perfectly,” he said coldly, in a tone almost of rebuff. “People don’t come here on Christmas Eve because they like it, and necessarily they must have a sense of humiliation at being left out, no matter whether it’s other people’s doing or their own. Do you mind telling me why you are here? Don’t answer if you would rather not.”
Niels replied that it was only because he had spent last Christmas Eve with his mother, who had since died.
“I beg your pardon,” said Hjerrild; “it was very good of you to answer me, and you must forgive me for being so suspicious. Do you know, I could very well imagine that you might come here in order to administer a youthful kick to Christmas as an institution, but as for myself, I am really here out of respect for other people’s Christmas. It is the first Christmas Eve since I came here that I have not spent with a very kind family from my native town. It occurred to me, somehow, that I was in the way when they sang their Christmas carols, not that they were ashamed—they have too much character for that—but it made them uneasy to have any one there to whom these hymns were as sung into the empty air. At least that is what I imagined.”
Almost silently they finished their dinner, lighted their cigars, and agreed to go somewhere else for their toddy. Neither of them felt inclined, that evening, to gaze upon the same gilded mirror frames and red sofas that met their eyes on most of the other evenings of the year, and so they sought refuge in a little café which they did not usually frequent.
They soon realized that this was no place to stay in.
The host and the waiters, with a few friends, sat in the rear of the room, playing loo with two trumps. The host’s wife and daughters looked on and brought the refreshments, but not to the strangers; a waiter filled their order. They drank hurriedly, for they noticed that their entrance made an interruption; the conversation was hushed, and the host, who had been sitting in his shirt-sleeves, seemed embarrassed and put on his coat.
“We seem to be rather homeless to-night,” said Niels, as they walked down the street.
“Well, that is as it should be,” was Hjerrild’s rather pathetic answer.
They began to talk about the Christian religion, for the topic was in the air.
Niels argued vehemently, but in rather general terms, against Christianity.
Hjerrild was tired of treading again the beaten track of discussions that were old to him, and suddenly said, without any particular connection with what had gone before: “Take care, Lyhne; Christianity is in power. It is foolish to quarrel with the reigning truth by agitating for a crown prince truth.”
“Foolish or not foolish—what does it matter?”
“Don’t say that so lightly. I did not mean to tell you such a commonplace as that it is foolish in a material way; morally, too, it is foolish and worse. Take care; don’t associate yourself too closely with this particular movement in our time, unless it happens to be absolutely necessary to your own personality. As a poet you must have many other interests.”
“I don’t understand you. I can’t treat myself like a hurdy-gurdy from which I can take out an unpopular piece and put in a tune that everybody is whistling.”
“Can’t you? Many people can. But you can at least say: ‘We are not 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.