Part 2
In a way, the child brought the parents together again. Over his little cradle they would meet in a common hope, a common joy, and a common fear; of him they would think, and of him they would talk, each as often and as readily as the other, and each was grateful to the other for the child and for all the happiness and love he brought.
Yet they were still far apart.
Lyhne was quite absorbed in his farming and the affairs of the parish. Not that he took the position of a leader or even of a reformer, but he gave scrupulous attention to the existing order of things, looked on as an interested spectator, and carried out the cautious improvements recommended, after deliberate—very deliberate—consideration, by his old head servant or the elders of the parish.
It never occurred to him to make any use of the knowledge he had acquired in earlier days. He had too little faith in what he called theories and far too great respect for the time-hallowed, venerable dogmas of experience which other people called practical. In fact, there was nothing about him to indicate that he had not lived here and lived thus all his life—except one little trait. He had a habit of sitting for half hours at a time, quite motionless, on a stile or a boundary stone, looking out over the luscious green rye or the golden top-heavy oats, in a strange, vegetative trance. This was of the old Lyhne, the young Lyhne.
Bartholine, in her world, was by no means so ready to adapt herself quickly and with a good grace. No, she first had to voice her sorrow through the verses of a hundred poets, lamenting, in all the broad generalities of the period, the thousands of barriers and fetters that oppress humanity. Sometimes her lament would be clothed in lofty indignation, flinging its wordy froth against the thrones of emperors and the dungeons of tyrants; sometimes it would take the form of a calm, pitying sorrow, looking on as the effulgent light of beauty faded from a blind and slavish generation cowed and broken by the soulless bustle of the day; then again it would appear only as a gentle sigh for the freedom of the bird in its flight and of the cloud drifting lightly into the distance.
At last she grew tired of lamenting, and the impotence of her grief goaded her into doubt and bitterness. Like worshippers who beat their saint and tread him under foot when he refuses to show his power, she would scoff at the romance she once idolized, and scornfully ask herself whether she did not expect the bird Roc to appear presently in the cucumber bed, or Aladdin’s cave to open under the floor of the milk cellar. She would answer herself in a sort of childish cynicism, pretending that the world was excessively prosaic, calling the moon green cheese and the roses potpourri, all with a sense of taking revenge and at the same time with a half uneasy, half fascinated feeling that she was committing blasphemy.
These attempts at setting herself free were futile. She sank back into the dreams of her girlhood, but with the difference that now they were no longer illumined by hope. Moreover, she had learned that they were only dreams—distant, illusive dreams, which no longing in the world could ever draw down to her earth. When she abandoned herself to them now, it was with a sense of weariness, while an accusing inner voice told her that she was like the drunkard who knows that his passion is destroying him, that every debauch means strength taken from his weakness and added to the power of his desire. But the voice sounded in vain, for a life soberly lived, without the fair vice of dreams, was no life at all—life had exactly the value that dreams gave it and no more.
So widely different, then, were Niels Lyhne’s father and mother, the two friendly powers that struggled unconsciously for mastery over his young soul from the moment the first gleam of intelligence in him gave them something to work on. As the child grew older, the struggle became more intense and was waged with a greater variety of weapons.
The faculty in the boy through which the mother tried to influence him was his imagination. He had plenty of imagination, but even when he was a very small boy, it was evident that he felt a great difference between the fairy world his mother’s words conjured up and the world that really existed. Often his mother would tell him stories and describe the woeful plight of the hero, until Niels could not see any way out of all this trouble, and could not understand how the misery closing like an impenetrable wall tighter and tighter around him and the hero could be overcome. Then it happened more than eleven times that he would suddenly press his cheek against his mother’s and whisper, with eyes full of tears and lips trembling, “But it isn’t _really_ true?” And when he had received the comforting answer he wanted, he would heave a deep sigh of relief and settle down contentedly to listen to the end.
His mother did not quite like this defection.
When he grew too old for fairy tales, and she tired of inventing them, she would tell him, with some embroideries of her own, about the heroes of war and peace, choosing those that lent themselves to pointing a moral about the power dwelling in a human soul when it wills one thing only and neither allows itself to be discouraged by the short-sighted doubts of the moment nor to be enticed into a soft, enervating peace.
All her stories went to this tune, and when history had no more heroes that suited her, she chose an imaginary hero, one whose deeds and fate she could shape as she pleased—a hero after her own heart, spirit of her spirit, ay, flesh of her flesh and blood of hers too.
A few years after Niels was born, she had brought forth a still-born boy child, and him she chose. All that he might have been and done she served up before his brother in a confused medley of Promethean longings, Messianic courage, and Herculean might, with a naïve travesty, a monstrous distortion, a world of cheap fantasies, having no more body of reality than had the tiny little skeleton mouldering in the earth of Lönborg graveyard.
Niels was not deceived about the moral of all these tales. He realized perfectly that it was contemptible to be like ordinary people, and he was quite ready to submit to the hard fate that belonged to heroes. In imagination he willingly suffered the wearisome struggles, the ill fortune, the martyrdom of being misjudged, and the victories without peace; but at the same time he felt a wondrous relief in thinking that it was so far away, that nothing of all this would happen before he was grown up.
As the dream-figures and dream-tones of night may walk abroad in the wakeful day like vapory forms, mere shadows of sound, calling on thought and holding it for a fleeting second, as it listens and wonders whether any one really called—so the images of that dream-born future whispered softly through Niels Lyhne’s childhood, reminding him gently but ceaselessly of the fact that there was a limit set to this happy time, and that presently one day it would be no more.
This consciousness roused in him a craving to enjoy his childhood to the full, to suck it up through every sense, not to spill a drop, not a single one. Therefore his play had an intensity, sometimes lashed into a passion, under the pressure of an uneasy sense that time was flowing away from him before he could gather from its treasure-laden waters all they brought, as one wave broke upon another. He would sometimes throw himself down on the ground and sob with despair when a holiday hung heavy on his hands for the lack of one thing or another—playmates, inventiveness, or fair weather—and he hated to go to bed, because sleep was empty of events and devoid of sensation.
Yet it was not always so.
It would sometimes happen that he grew weary, and his imagination ran out of colors. Then he would be quite wretched and feel that he was too small and insignificant for these ambitious dreams. He seemed to himself a mean liar, who had brazenly pretended to love and understand what was great, though, if the truth were told, he cared only for the petty, loved only the commonplace, and carried all, all low-born wishes and desires fully alive within him. Sometimes he would even feel that he had the class-hatred of the rabble against everything exalted, and that he would joyfully have helped to stone these heroes who were of a better blood than he and knew that they were.
On such days, he would shun his mother, and, with a sense of following an ignoble instinct, would seek his father, turning a willing ear and receptive mind to the latter’s earth-bound thoughts and matter-of-fact explanations. He felt at home with his father and rejoiced in the likeness between them, well-nigh forgetting that it was the same father whom he was wont to look down upon with pity from the pinnacles of his dream-castle. Of course this was not present in his childish mind with the clearness and definiteness given it by the spoken word, but it was all there, though unformed, unborn, in a vague and intangible embryo form. It was like the curious vegetation at the bottom of the sea when seen through layers of ice. Break the ice, or draw that which lives in the dimness out into the full light of speech—what happens is the same: that which is now seen and now grasped is not, in its clearness, the shadowy thing that was.
_Chapter III_
The years passed. One Christmas trod upon the heels of another, leaving the air bright with its festive glow till long after Epiphany. Whitsun after Whitsun scampered over flower-decked meadows. One summer holiday after another drew near, celebrated its orgie of fresh air and sunshine, poured out its fiery wine from brimming goblets, and then vanished, one day, in a sinking sun; only memory lingered with sunburnt cheek and wondering eyes and blood that danced.
The years had passed, and the world was no longer the realm of wonder that it had been. The dim recesses behind the mouldering elder-bushes, the mysterious attic rooms, the gloomy stone passage under the Klastrup road—fancied terrors that once thrilled him no longer lurked there. The hillside that bloomed at the first trill of the lark, hiding the grass under starry, purple-rimmed daisies and yellow buttercups, the fantastic wealth of animals and plants in the river, the wild precipices of the sand-pit, its black rocks and bits of silvery granite—all these were just flowers, animals, and stones; the shining fairy gold had turned into withered leaves again.
One game after another grew old and silly, stupid and tiresome like the pictures in the A B C, and yet they had once been new, inexhaustibly new. Here they used to roll a barrel-hoop—Niels and the pastor’s Frithjof—and the hoop was a ship, which was wrecked when it toppled over, but if you caught it before it fell, then it was casting anchor. The narrow passage between the outhouses, where you could hardly squeeze through, was Bab-el-Mandeb or the Portal of Death. On the stable door “England” was written in chalk, and on the barn door “France.” The garden gate was Rio Janeiro, but the smithy was Brazil. Another game was to play Holger the Dane: you _could_ play it among the tall burs behind the barn; but if you went up in the miller’s pasture, there were two sink-holes known as the gorges, and there were the haunts of the veritable Prince Burmand and his wild Saracens, with reddish gray turbans and yellow plumes in their helmets—burdocks and Aaron’s rod of the tallest. That was the only _real_ Mauretania. That rank, succulent growth, that teeming mass of exuberant plant-life, excited their lust of destruction and intoxicated them with the voluptuous joy of demolishing. The wooden swords gleamed with the brightness of steel; the green sap stained the blade with red gore, and the cut stalks squashing under their feet were Turks’ bodies trampled under horses’ hoofs with a sound as of bones crunched in flesh.
Sometimes they played down by the fjord: mussel-shells were launched as ships, and when the vessel got stuck in a clump of seaweed, or went aground on a sand-bank, it was Columbus in the Sargasso Sea or the discovery of America. Harbors and mighty embankments were built; the Nile was dug out in the firm beach sand, and once they made Gurre Castle out of pebbles—a tiny dead fish in an oyster-shell was the corpse of Tove, and they were King Valdemar who sat sorrowing by her side.
But this was all past.
Niels was quite a lad now, twelve years old, nearing thirteen, and he no longer needed to hack thistles and burdocks in order to feed his knightly fancies, any more than he had to launch his explorer’s dreams in a mussel-shell. A book and a corner of the sofa were enough for him now, and if the book refused to bear him to the coast of his desires, he would hunt up Frithjof and tell him the tale which the book would not yield. Arm in arm, they would saunter down the road, one telling, both listening; but when they wanted to revel to the full and really give their imagination free play, they would hide in the fragrant dimness of the hayloft. After a while, these stories, which always ended just when you had really entered into them, grew into a single long story that never ended, but lived and died with one generation after the other; for when the hero had grown old, or you had been careless enough to let him die, you could always give him a son, who would inherit everything from the father, and whom, in addition, you could dower with any other virtues that you happened to value particularly just at the moment.
Whatever stamped itself on Niels’s mind, what he saw, what he understood and what he misunderstood, what he admired and what he knew he ought to admire—all was woven into the story. As running water is colored by every passing picture, sometimes holding the image with perfect clearness, sometimes distorting it or throwing it back in wavering, uncertain lines, then again drowning it completely in the color and play of its own ripples, so the lad’s story reflected feelings and thoughts, his own and those of other people, mirrored human beings and events, life and books, as well as it could. It was a play life, running side by side with real life. It was a snug retreat, where you could abandon yourself to dreams of the wildest adventures. It was a fairy garden that opened at your slightest nod, and received you in all its glory, shutting out everybody else. Whispering palms closed overhead; flowers of sunshine and leaves like stars on vines of coral spread at your feet, and among them a thousand paths led to all the ages and the climes. If you followed one, it would lead you to one place, and if you followed another, it would lead you to another place, to Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe, to Vaulunder and Henrik Magnard, to Niels Klim and Mungo Park, to Peter Simple and Odysseus—and the moment you wished it, you were home again.
About a month after Niels’s twelfth birthday, two new faces appeared at Lönborggaard.
One was that of the new tutor; the other was that of Edele Lyhne.
The tutor, Mr. Bigum, was a candidate for orders and was at the threshold of the forties. He was rather small, but with a stocky strength like that of a work-horse, broad-chested, high-shouldered, and slightly stooping. He walked with a heavy, slow, deliberate tread, and moved his arms in a vague, expressionless way that seemed to require a great deal of room. His high, wide forehead was flat as a wall, with two perpendicular lines between the eyebrows; the nose was short and blunt, the mouth large with thick, fresh lips. His eyes were his best feature, light in color, mild, and clear. The movements of his eye-balls showed that he was slightly deaf. Nevertheless, he loved music and played his violin with passionate devotion; for the notes, he said, were not heard only with the ears, but with the whole body, eyes, fingers, and feet; if the ear failed sometimes, the hand would find the right note without its aid, by a strange, intuitive genius of its own. Besides, the audible tones were, after all, false, but he who possessed the divine gift of music carried within him an invisible instrument compared to which the most wonderful Cremona was like the stringed calabash of the savage. On this instrument the soul played; its strings gave forth ideal notes, and upon it the great tone-poets had composed their immortal works.
The external music, which was borne on the air of reality and heard with the ears, was nothing but a wretched simulation, a stammering attempt to say the unutterable. It resembled the music of the soul as the statue modelled by hands, carved with a chisel, and meted with a measure resembled the wondrous marble dream of the sculptor which no eye ever beheld and no lip ever praised.
Music, however, was by no means Mr. Bigum’s chief interest. He was first of all a philosopher, but not one of the productive philosophers who find new laws and build new systems. He laughed at their systems, the snail-shells in which they dragged themselves across the illimitable field of thought, fondly imagining that the field was within the snail-shell! And these laws—laws of thought, laws of nature! Why, the discovery of a law meant nothing but the fixing of your own limitations: I can see so far and no farther—as if there were not another horizon beyond the first, and another and yet another, horizon beyond horizon, law beyond law, in an unending vista! No, he was not that kind of a philosopher. He did not think he was vain, or that he overvalued himself, but he could not close his eyes to the fact that his intellect had a wider span than that of other mortals. When he meditated upon the works of the great thinkers, it seemed to him that he strode forward through a region peopled by slumbering thought-giants, who awoke, bathed in the light of his spirit, to consciousness of their own strength. And so it was always; every thought, mood, or sentiment of another person which was vouchsafed the privilege of awakening within him rose up with his sign on its forehead, ennobled, purified, with wings strengthened, endowed with a power and a might that its creator had never dreamed of.
How often had he gazed with an almost humble amazement on the marvellous wealth of his soul and the divine assurance of his spirit! For it would often happen that different days would find him judging the world and the things of the world from entirely divergent points of view, looking at them through hypotheses that were as far apart as night and morning; yet these points of view and hypotheses, which he chose to make his own, never even for one second made him theirs, any more than the god who has taken on the semblance of a bull or a swan becomes a bull or a swan and ceases to be a god.
And no one suspected what dwelt within him—all passed him by unseeing. But he rejoiced in their blindness and felt his contempt for humanity growing. A day would come when the light of his eye would go out, and the magnificent structure of his mind would crumble to its foundations and become as that which had never been, but no work from his hand, no, not a line, would he leave to tell the tale of what had been lost in him. His genius should not be crowned with thorns by the world’s misjudgment, neither should it wear the defiling purple cloak of the world’s admiration. He exulted at the thought that generation after generation would be born and die, and the greatest men of all ages would spend years of their life in the attempt to gain what he could have given them if he had chosen to open his hand.
The fact that he lived in such a humble fashion gave him a curious pleasure, simply because there was such a magnificent extravagance in using his mind to teach children, such a wild incongruity in paying for his time with mere daily bread, and such a colossal absurdity in allowing him to earn this bread upon the recommendation of poor, ordinary mortals, who had vouched for him that he knew enough to take upon himself the miserable task of a tutor. And they had given him _non_ in his examination for a degree!
Oh, there was rapture in feeling the brutal stupidity of an existence that cast him aside as poor chaff and valued as golden grain the empty husks, while he knew in his own mind that his lightest thought was worth a world!
Yet there were other times when the solitude of his greatness weighed upon him and depressed him.
Ah, how often, when he had communed with himself in sacred silence, hour after hour, and then returned again to consciousness of the audible, visible life round about him, had he not felt himself a stranger to its paltriness and corruptibility. Then he had often been like the monk who listened in the monastery woods to a single trill of the paradise bird and, when he came back, found that a century had died. Ah, if the monk was lonely with the generation that lived among the groves he knew, how much more lonely was the man whose contemporaries had not yet been born.
In such desolate moments he would sometimes be seized with a cowardly longing to sink down to the level of the common herd, to share their low-born happiness, to become a native of their great earth and a citizen of their little heaven. But soon he would be himself again.
The other newcomer was Edele Lyhne, Lyhne’s twenty-six-year-old sister. She had lived many years in Copenhagen, first with her mother, who had moved to the city when she became a widow, and, after her mother’s death, in the home of a wealthy uncle, Councillor of State Neergaard. The Neergaards entertained on a large scale and went out a great deal, so Edele lived in a whirl of balls and festivities.
She was admired wherever she went, and envy, the faithful shadow of admiration, also followed her. She was talked about as much as one can be without having done anything scandalous, and whenever men discussed the three reigning beauties of the town there were always many voices in favor of striking out one name and substituting that of Edele Lyhne, but they could never agree on which of two others should yield to her—as for the third, it was out of the question.
Yet very young men did not admire her. They were abashed in her presence, and felt twice as stupid as usual when she listened to them with her look of mild toleration—a maliciously emphasized toleration which crushed them with a sense that she had heard it all before and knew it by heart. They made efforts to shine in her eyes and their own by assuming _blasés_ airs, by inventing wild paradoxes, or, when their desperation reached a climax, by making bold declarations; but all these attempts, jostling and crowding one upon the other in the abrupt transitions of youth, were met with the faint shadow of a smile, a deadly smile of boredom, which made the victim redden and feel that he was the one hundred and eleventh fly in the same merciless spider’s web.
Moreover, her beauty had neither the softness nor the fire to ensnare young hearts. On older hearts and cooler heads she exercised a peculiar fascination.