Part 5

Erik stayed at Lönborggaard only a little over a year. It happened that Lyhne, on a visit to Copenhagen, took occasion to speak about the boy to one of the leading sculptors there, and showed him some of Erik’s sketches, whereupon Mikkelsen, the sculptor, declared that this was talent, and further studying was a waste of time. It did not require much classical education to find a Greek name for a nude figure. So it was settled that Erik was to be sent at once to the city to attend the Academy and work in Mikkelsen’s studio.

On the last afternoon, Niels and Erik were sitting in their room, Niels looking at the pictures in a penny magazine, Erik deep in Spengler’s critical catalogue of the art collection at Christiansborg. How often he had turned the leaves of this book and tried to form a conception of the pictures from its naïve description! Sometimes he would get almost sick with longing to behold all this art and beauty with his own eyes, to grasp it in very truth and make that glory of line and color his own by the mere strength of his enthusiasm. And how often, too, he had closed the book, weary of gazing into that drifting, fantastic mist of words which refused to solidify and take shape, refused to give forth anything, but went on in a vague and confused shifting—flowing and slipping away—flowing and slipping away.

But to-day it was all different. Now he had the certainty that the shapes he read about would not be shadows from dreamland much longer, and he felt rich in the promise of the book. The pictures rose before him as never before, flashing out like brilliant, many-colored suns from a mist that was golden and dancing with gold.

“What are you looking at?” he asked Niels.

Niels pointed to a portrait in his book representing Lassen, the hero of the Second of April.

“How ugly he is!” commented Erik.

“Ugly! Why, he was a hero—would you call _him_ ugly, too?” Niels turned the leaves back to the picture of a great poet.

“Awfully ugly!” replied Erik decisively, making a grimace. “What a nose! And look at the mouth, and the eyes, and those tufts around his head!”

Then Niels saw that he was ugly, and he was silenced. It had never occurred to him that greatness was not always cast in a mould of beauty.

“While I think of it,” said Erik, closing his Spengler, “let me give you the key to the deck-house.”

Niels would have brushed him aside gloomily, but Erik hung a small padlock key around his friend’s neck on a broad piece of ribbon. “Shall we go down there?” he asked.

They went. Frithjof they found by the garden fence. He lay there eating green gooseberries, and had tears in his eyes because of the parting. Besides he was hurt that the others had not looked him up; for though he generally came uninvited, he felt that such a day demanded a certain amount of formality. Without speaking, he held out a handful of berries to them, but they had had their favorite dishes for dinner, and turned up their noses.

“Sour!” said Erik with a shudder.

“Indigestible truck!” added Niels, disdainfully looking down at the proffered berries. “How can you eat it? Chuck the stuff, we’re going down to the deck-house,” and he pointed with his chin at the key, for his hands were in his pockets.

At that they all three set forth.

The deck-house was an old green-painted ship’s cabin, which had once been bought at a beach auction. It had been put up by the fjord, and had served as a tool-house when the dam was being built, but now it was no longer in use. So the boys had taken possession of it, and concealed in it their ships, bows and arrows, leaping-poles, and other treasures, particularly such forbidden but indispensable things as powder, tobacco, and matches.

Niels opened the door of the deck-house with an air of gloomy solemnity. They went in and fumbled till they found their things in the dark corners of the empty bunks.

“Do you know,” said Erik, with his head deep in a distant corner, “I’m going to blow mine up.”

“Mine and Frithjof’s too!” cried Niels with a grand, consecrating gesture.

“Not mine, by Joe!” exclaimed Frithjof; “then what’d we have to sail with when Erik’s gone?”

“What indeed!” mocked Niels, turning away contemptuously.

Frithjof felt uncomfortable, but when the others had gone outside, he carefully moved his ship to a safer shelter.

Outside they quickly laid the powder in the ships imbedded in a nest of tarred oakum, set the sails, fixed the fuses, lighted them, and sprang back. Running along the beach, they signalled to the crew on board, loudly explaining to one another every chance turn of the ships as the result of the good captain’s nautical skill. But the ships ran aground at the point without the desired explosion having taken place, and this gave Frithjof an opportunity nobly to sacrifice the wadding of his cap to the manufacture of new and better fuses.

With all sails set, the ships stood in toward Sjaelland reef; the Britisher’s huge frigates came heavily lurching in a closed ring, while the foam blew white around the black bows, and the cannon mounted at the head filled the air with their harsh clamor. Nearer and nearer—glowing with red and blue, glittering with gold, the figure-heads of the _Albion_ and the _Conqueror_ rose fathom-high. Grayish masses of sails hid the horizon; the smoke rolled out in great white clouds, and drifted as a veiling mist low over the sun-bright glitter of the waves. Then the deck of Erik’s ship was splintered with a feeble little puff; the oakum caught fire, a red blaze burst forth, and the nimble flames licked the shrouds and ran along the spars, ate their way smouldering along the bolt-rope, then shot like long flashes of lightning into the sails, while the burning canvas shrivelled up, broke, and flew in large black flakes far out to sea. The Danebrog was still waving high on the slender top of the tall schooner-mast, the flag-staff was burned in two, the flag fluttered wildly like red wings eager for battle,—but the flame caught it, and the smoke-blackened ship drifted without rudder or helmsman, dead and powerless, the sport of the winds and breakers. Niels’s ship did not burn so well; the powder had caught fire and some smoke came out, but that was all, and it was not enough.

“Hey, there!” called Niels from the point, “sink her! Point the starboard cannon down the aft hatch and give her a volley!” He bent down and picked up a stone, “Ready, fire!” and the stone flew from his hand.

Erik and Frithjof followed suit, and soon the hull was in splinters. Then Erik’s ship shared the same fate. The wreckage was hauled ashore to make a bonfire. It was piled up with dry seaweed and grass into a burning heap, from which thick smoke issued, while the crystals that hung on the seaweed burst and crackled with the intense heat.

For a long time the boys sat quietly around the bonfire, but suddenly Niels, still gloomy, jumped up and brought all his things from the deck-house, broke them in little bits, and threw them into the flames. Then Erik brought his, and Frithjof also brought some. The flames of the sacrificial pyre leaped so high that Erik was afraid they might be seen from the pasture, and began to smother them with wet seaweed, but Niels stood still, gazing sorrowfully after the smoke that drifted along the beach. Frithjof kept in the background and hummed to himself a heroic lay, which he accompanied secretly, now and then, with a sweeping, bard-like gesture, as if he were playing on the strings of an invisible harp.

At last the fire died down, and Erik and Frithjof went home, while Niels stayed behind to lock the deck-house. That done, he looked cautiously after the others, and then threw key and ribbon far out into the fjord. Erik happened to look around at that moment and saw them fall, but he quickly turned his head away, and began to run a race with Frithjof.

The next day he left.

* * * * *

For a while they missed him sorely and bitterly, for their life had been gradually formed on the supposition that they were three to share it. Three were company, variety, change; two were boredom and nothing at all.

What in the world could two find to do?

Could two shoot at a target or two play ball? They could play Friday and Robinson Crusoe, to be sure, but then who would be the savages?

Such Sundays! Niels was so weary of existence that he began first to review and afterwards, with the aid of Mr. Bigum’s large atlas, to extend his geographical knowledge far beyond the prescribed bounds. Finally, he started to read the whole Bible through and to keep a diary. But Frithjof, in his utter loneliness, stooped so low as to seek consolation in playing with his sisters.

After a while the past became less vivid to them, the longing less keen. Sometimes on a quiet evening, when the sun reddened the wall in the lonely chamber, and the distant, monotonous calling of the cuckoo died down, making the stillness wider and larger, the longing would come creeping into Niels’s mind, stealing its power; but it no longer tortured, it was a vague thing that lay lightly on him and was half sweet like a pain that is passing.

His letters showed the same trend. In the beginning they were full of regrets, questions, and wishes loosely strung together, but soon they grew longer, dealt more with externals, narrated, and were written throughout in a well-formed style that hid between the lines a certain conscious pleasure in being able to write so well.

As time passed, many things that had not dared to show themselves while Erik was there began to raise their heads. Imagination strewed its bright flowers through the humdrum calm of an eventless life. A dream atmosphere enveloped Niels’s mind, bringing with it the provocative fragrance of life, and, hidden in the fragrance, the insidious poison of life-thirsting fancies.

So Niels grows up, and all the influences of his childhood work on the plastic clay. Everything helps to shape it; everything is significant, the real and the dreamed, what is known and what is foreshadowed—all add their touch, lightly but surely, to that tracery of lines which is destined to be first hollowed out and deepened and afterwards flattened out and smoothed away.

_Chapter VI_

“Mr. Lyhne—Mrs. Boye; Mr. Frithjof Petersen—Mrs. Boye.”

It was Erik who performed the introduction, and it took place in Mikkelsen’s studio, a light, spacious room with a floor of stamped clay and a ceiling twenty-five feet high. At one end of the room two portals led to the yard; at the other, a series of doors opened into the smaller studios within. Everything was gray with the dust of clay and plaster and marble. It had made the cobweb threads overhead as thick as twine and had drawn river maps on the large window-panes. It filled eyes and nose and mouth and outlined muscles, hair, and draperies on the medley of casts that filled the long shelves running round the room and made them look like a frieze from the destruction of Jerusalem. Even the laurels, high trees planted in big tubs in a corner near one of the portals, were powdered till they became grayer than gray olives.

Erik stood at his modelling in the middle of the studio wearing his blouse and with a paper cap on his dark, wavy hair. He had acquired a moustache and looked quite manly beside his two friends, who had just taken their bachelor’s degree and, still pale and tired from their examinations, looked provincially proper with their too new clothes and their too closely cropped heads in rather large caps.

At a little distance from Erik’s scaffolding, Mrs. Boye sat in a low high-backed chair, holding a richly bound book in one hand and a lump of clay in the other. She was small, quite small, and slightly brunette in coloring, with clear, light brown eyes. Her skin had a luminous whiteness, but in the shadows of the rounded cheek and throat it deepened to a dull golden tone which went well with the burnished hair of a dusky hue changing to a tawny blondness in the high lights.

She was laughing when they came in, as a child laughs—a long, merry peal, gleefully loud, delightfully free. Her eyes, too, had the artless gaze of a child, and the frank smile on her lips seemed all the more childlike because the shortness of her upper lip left the mouth slightly open revealing milk-white teeth.

But she was no child.

Was she a little and thirty? The fullness of the chin did not say “No,” nor the ripe glow of the lower lip. Her figure was well rounded with firm, luxuriant outlines accentuated by the dark blue dress, which fitted snugly as a riding-habit around her waist, arms, and bosom. A dull crimson silk kerchief lay in rich folds around her neck and over her shoulders, its ends tucked into the low pointed neck of her bodice. Carnations of the same color were fastened in her hair.

“I am afraid we interrupted a pleasant reading,” said Frithjof with a glance at the richly bound book.

“No, indeed—not in the least. We had been quarrelling for a full hour about what we read,” replied Mrs. Boye. “Mr. Refstrup is a great idealist in everything that has to do with art, while I think it’s dreadfully tiresome—all this about the crude reality that has to be purified and clarified and regenerated and what not until there is just pure nothingness left. Do me the favor of looking at that Bacchante of Mikkelsen’s—the one which deaf Traffelini over there is cutting in marble. If I were to enter her in a descriptive catalogue.... Good heavens! Number 77. A young lady in _negligé_ is standing thoughtfully on both her feet and doesn’t know what to do with a bunch of grapes. She should crush those grapes if I had my way—crush them till the red juice ran down her breast—now shouldn’t she? Don’t you agree with me?” and she caught Frithjof by the sleeve, almost shaking him in her childlike eagerness.

“Yes,” Frithjof admitted; “yes, I do think there is something lacking—something of freshness—of spontaneity—”

“It’s simply naturalness that’s lacking, and good heavens! _why_ can’t we be natural? Oh, I know perfectly well; it’s because we lack the courage. Neither the artists nor the poets are brave enough to own up to human nature as it is. Shakespeare was, though.”

“Well, you know,” came from Erik behind the figure he was modelling, “I never could get along very well with Shakespeare. It seems to me he does too much of it; he whirls you round till you don’t know where you are.”

“I shouldn’t go so far as to say that,” Frithjof demurred; “but on the other hand,” he added with an indulgent smile, “I cannot call the berserker ragings of the great English poet by the name of conscious and intelligent artistic courage.”

“Really? Gracious, how funny you are!” and she laughed long and heartily, laughed till she was tired. She had risen and was strolling about the studio, but suddenly she turned, held out her arms toward Frithjof, and cried, “God bless you!” and laughed again till she was almost bent double.

Frithjof was on the verge of getting offended, but it seemed too fussy to go away angry, especially as he knew himself to be in the right, and moreover the lady was very pretty. So he stayed and began to talk to Erik, all the while trying for Mrs. Boye’s benefit to infuse a tone of mature tolerance into his voice.

Meanwhile Mrs. Boye was roaming about at the other end of the studio, thoughtfully humming a tune, which sometimes rose in a few quick, laughing trills, then sank again into a slow, solemn recitative.

A head of the young Augustus was standing on a large packing-case. She began to dust it. Then she found some clay and made moustaches, a pointed beard, and finally ear-rings, which she fastened on it.

While she was busy with this, Niels managed to stroll in her direction under cover of examining the casts. She had not glanced toward him once, but she must have sensed that he was there, for, without turning, she held out her hand to him and asked him to bring Erik’s hat.

Niels put the hat into her outstretched hand, and she set it on the head of Augustus.

“Good old Shakespeareson,” she said, patting the cheek of the travestied bust, “stupid old fellow who didn’t know what he was doing! Did he just sit there and daub ink till he turned out a Hamlet head without thinking of it—did he?” She lifted the hat from the bust and passed her hand over the forehead in a motherly way as if she would push back its hair. “Lucky old chap, for all that! More than half lucky old poet boy!—For you must admit that he wasn’t at all bad as a writer, this Shakespeare?”

“I confess I have my own opinion of that man,” replied Niels, slightly vexed and blushing.

“Good gracious! Have you too got your own opinion about Shakespeare? Then what is your opinion? Are you for us or against us?” She struck an attitude by the side of the bust and stood there, smiling, with her arm resting on its neck.

“I am unable to say whether the opinion which you are astonished to learn I possess is so fortunate as to acquire significance from the fact of agreeing with your own, but I do think I may say that it is _for_ you and your _protégé_. At any rate I hold the opinion that he knew what he was doing, weighed what he was doing, and dared it. Many a time he dared in doubt, and the doubt is still apparent. At other times he only half dared, and then he blurred over with new features that which he did not have courage to leave as he first had it.”

And he went on in this strain.

While he was speaking, Mrs. Boye grew more and more restless. She looked nervously first to one side, then to the other, and drummed impatiently with her fingers, while her face was clouded by a troubled look which finally deepened to one of pain.

At last she could contain herself no longer.

“Don’t forget what you were going to say,” she exclaimed, “but I implore you, Mr. Lyhne, stop doing that with your hand—that gesture as if you were pulling teeth! Please do, and don’t let me interrupt you! Now I am all attention again, and I quite agree with you.”

“But then it’s of no use to say any more.”

“Why not?”

“When we agree?”

“When we agree!”

Neither of them meant anything in particular by these last words, but they said them in a significant tone, as if a world of delicate meanings were hidden in them, and looked at each other with a subtle smile, like an afterglow of the wit that had just flashed between them, while each wondered what the other meant and felt slightly annoyed at being so slow of comprehension.

They strolled back to the other end of the room, and Mrs. Boye took her seat on the low chair again.

Erik and Frithjof had talked till they were beginning to be bored with each other and were glad to be joined by the others. Frithjof approached Mrs. Boye and made himself agreeable, while Erik, with the modesty of the host, kept himself in the background.

“If I were curious,” said Frithjof, “I should inquire what the book was that made you and Refstrup quarrel just as we were coming in.”

“Do you inquire?”

“I do.”

“Ergo?”

“Ergo!” replied Frithjof with a humble, acquiescent bow.

She held up the book and solemnly announced: “_Helge_, Oehlenschläger’s _Helge_.—And what canto? It was ‘The Mermaid visits King Helge.’—And what verse? It was the lines telling of how Tangkjaer lay down by Helge’s side, and how he couldn’t control his curiosity any longer, but turned

—_and at his side, With white arms soft and round, The greatest beauty he espied That e’er on earth was found._

_The maid had doffed her cloak of gray; Her lovely limbs were bare, Save for the robe like silver spray That veiled her form so fair._

That is all he allows us to see of the mermaid’s charms, and that is what I am dissatisfied with. I want a luxuriant, glowing picture there; I want to see something so dazzling that it takes my breath away. I want to be initiated into the mysterious beauty of such a mermaid body, and I ask of you, what can I make of lovely limbs with a piece of gauze spread over them? Good heavens! No, she should have been naked as a wave and with the wild lure of the sea about her. Her skin should have had something of the phosphorescence of the summer ocean and her hair something of the black, tangled horror of the seaweed. Am I not right? Yes, and a thousand tints of the water should come and go in the changeful glitter of her eyes. Her pale breast must be cool with a voluptuous coolness, and her limbs have the flowing lines of the waves. The power of the maelstrom must be in her kiss, and the yielding softness of the foam in the embrace of her arms.”

She had talked herself into a glow, and stood there still animated by her theme, looking at her young listeners with large, inquiring child-eyes.

But they said nothing. Niels had flushed scarlet, and Erik looked extremely embarrassed. Frithjof was absolutely carried away and stared at her with the most open admiration, though of the three he was the one least aware how entrancingly beautiful she was, as she stood there with the glamor of her words about her.

Not many weeks had passed before Niels and Frithjof were as constant visitors in Mrs. Boye’s home as Erik Refstrup. Besides her pale niece, they met a great many young people, coming poets, painters, actors, and architects, all artists by virtue of their youth rather than their talent, all full of hope, valiant, lusting for battle, and easily moved to enthusiasm. It is true, there were among them some of those quiet dreamers who bleat wistfully toward the faded ideals of the past; but most of them were full of ideas that were modern at the time, drunk with the theories of modernity, wild with its powers, dazzled by its clear morning light. They were modern, belligerently modern, modern to excess, and perhaps not least because in their inmost hearts there was a strange, instinctive longing which had to be stifled, a longing which the new spirit could not satisfy—world-wide, all-embracing, all-powerful, and all-enlightening though it was.

But, for all that, the exultation of the storm was in their young souls. They had faith in the light of the great stars of thought; they had hope fathomless as the ocean. Enthusiasm bore them on the wings of the eagle, and their hearts expanded with the courage of thousands.

No doubt life would in time wear it all out, lull most of it to sleep; worldly wisdom would break down much, and cowardice would sweep away the rest—but what of it? The time that has gone with happiness does not come back with grief, and nothing the future may bring can wither a day or wipe out an hour in the life that has been lived.

To Niels the world, in those days, began to wear a different aspect. He heard his own vaguest, most secret thoughts loudly proclaimed by ten different mouths. He saw his own unique ideas, which to him had been a misty landscape, with lines blurred by fog, with unknown depths and muted notes,—he saw this landscape unveiled in the bright, clear, sharp colors of day, revealed in every detail, furrowed everywhere by roads, and with people swarming on the roads. There was something strangely unreal in the very fact that the creations of his fancy had become so real.

He was no longer a lonely child-king, reigning over lands that his own dreams had conjured up. No, he was one of a crowd, a man in an army, a soldier in the service of modern ideas. A sword had been placed in his hand, and a banner waved before him.

What a wonderful time full of promise! And how strange to hear with his ears the indistinct, mysterious whisper of his soul now sounding through the air of reality like wild, challenging trumpet-blasts, like the thunder of battering-rams against temple walls, like the whizzing of David’s pebble against Goliath’s brow, like exultant fanfares. It was as though he heard himself speaking with strange tongues, with a clarity and power not his own, about that which belonged to his deepest, innermost self.