Part 6

This gospel of modernity, with its message of dissolution and perfection, did not sound only from the lips of his contemporaries. There were older men with names that carried weight whose eyes were likewise open to the glories of new ideas. These men used more pompous words and had more magnificent conceptions; the names of past centuries swept along in their train; history was with them—the history of the world and the human mind, the _Odyssey_ of thought. These were men who in their youth had been moved by the very things that now thrilled the young people and had borne witness to the spirit within them; but when they heard in their own voices the sound which tells a man crying in the wilderness that he _is_ alone, they were silenced. The young people, however, remembered only that these men had spoken, not that they had been silent; they were ready to bring laurel wreaths and martyr crowns, willing to admire and happy in their admiration. Nor did the objects of their homage repel this late-born appreciation; they put on the crowns in good faith, looked at themselves in a large and historic light, and poetized out of their past the less heroic features; as for the old conviction, which ill winds had cooled, they soon talked it into a glow again.

Niels Lyhne’s family in Copenhagen, more particularly the old Councillor Neergaards, were not at all pleased with the circle their young relative had entered. It was not the modern ideas that worried them, but rather the fact that some of the young men found long hair, great hunting-boots, and a slight slovenliness favorable to the growth of such ideas, and though Niels himself was not at all fanatical on this point, it was annoying to meet him, and even more annoying to have their friends meet him, in company with youths who could be thus characterized. These things, however, were trifles compared to his intimacy with Mrs. Boye and his frequenting the theatre in company with her and her pale niece.

Not that there was anything in particular to be said against Mrs. Boye, but people talked about her. They said a great many things.

She was well born, a Konneroy, and the Konneroys were among the oldest, most finely patrician families in town. Yet she had broken with them. Some said it was on account of a dissipated brother, whom they had sent off to the colonies to get rid of him. Certain it was that the break was complete, and there were even whispers that old Konneroy had cursed her, and afterwards had had an attack of his bad spring asthma.

All this had happened after she became a widow.

Mr. Boye, her husband, had been a pharmaceutist, an _assessor pharmacia_, and had been knighted. When he died he was sixty and owned a barrel and a half of gold. So far as any one knew, they had lived quite happily together. In the first three years of their marriage, the elderly husband had been very much in love, but later they had each lived their own life, he busy with his garden and with keeping up his reputation as a great man at stag parties, she with theatres, romantic music, and German poetry.

Then he died.

When the year of mourning was over, the widow went to Italy and lived there for two or three years, spending most of the time in Rome. There was nothing in the rumor that she had smoked opium in the French club, nor in the story that she had allowed herself to be modelled in the same manner as Paulina Borghese; and the little Russian prince who shot himself while she was in Naples did not commit suicide for her sake. It was true, however, that German artists never tired of serenading her; and it was true that one morning she had donned the dress of an Albanian peasant girl and had seated herself on the steps of a church high up in the Via Sistina, where a newly arrived artist had engaged her to stand as a model for him with a pitcher on her head and a little brown boy holding her hand. At least there was such a picture hanging on her wall.

On the way home from Italy she met a countryman, a noted clever critic, who would rather have been a poet. A negative, sceptical nature, people called him, a keen mind, one who dealt harshly and pitilessly with others because he dealt harshly and pitilessly with himself and supposed his brutality to be justified by that fact. Nevertheless, he was not quite what they believed him to be; he was not so repellently uncompromising nor so robustly consistent as he appeared. Although he was always in a state of strife against the idealistic tendencies of the age and called them by more disparaging names, still he felt drawn toward these dreamy, ethereal ideals, this blue-blue mysticism, these unattainable heights and evanescent lights; they appealed to him more than the earth-born opinions for which he did battle and in which, most of the time, he believed.

Rather against his will, he fell in love with Mrs. Boye, but he did not tell her so, for his was not a young and open love, nor a hopeful one. He loved her as a creature of another, a finer and happier race than his own, and there was in his love a rancor, an instinctive rage against everything in her that bore the marks of race.

He looked with hostile, jealous eyes upon her sentiments and opinions, her tastes and views of life. He fought with every weapon he possessed, with subtle eloquence, with heartless logic and harsh authority, with derision wrapped in pity, to bring her over to his side, and he won. But when truth had conquered, and she had become like him, he saw that the victory was too complete, that he had loved her as she was, with her illusions and prejudices, her dreams and her errors, and not as she had now become. Dissatisfied with himself, with her, and with everything in his own country, he went away and did not return. But then she had just begun to love him.

This relationship, of course, gave people food for talk, and they made the most of it. The Councillor’s wife told Niels about it in the tone that aged virtue uses in speaking of young error, but Niels took it in a manner that offended and horrified the old lady. He replied in a high strain about the tyranny of society and the freedom of the individual, about the plebeian respectability of the mob and the nobility of passion.

From that day on he went but seldom to the home of his solicitous relatives, but Mrs. Boye saw him all the more frequently.

_Chapter VII_

It was an evening in spring; the sun threw a red light into the room, as it sank toward the horizon. The wings of the windmill on the embankment drew shadows over the window-panes and the walls, coming, going, in a monotonous swinging from darkness to light: a moment of darkness, two moments of light.

At the window, Niels Lyhne sat gazing through the darkly burnished elms on the embankment to the fiery clouds beyond. He had been in the country, walking under blossoming beeches, past green rye-fields, over flower-decked meadows. Everything had been so fair and light, the sky so blue, the Sound so bright, the women he met so wondrously beautiful. Singing, he had followed the forest path, but soon the words had died out of his song, then the rhythm was lost, at last the tones were muted, and silence came over him like a fit of giddiness. He closed his eyes, and still he felt how his body drank the light, and his nerves vibrated with it. Every breath he drew of the cool, intoxicating air sent his blood rushing more wildly through the quivering, helpless veins. He felt as though all the teeming, budding, growing, germinating forces of spring were mysteriously striving to vent themselves through him in a mighty cry, and he thirsted for this cry, listened for it, till his listening grew into a vague, turgid longing.

Now, as he sat there by the window, the longing awoke in him again.

He yearned for a thousand tremulous dreams, for cool and delicate images, transparent tints, fleeting scents, and exquisite music from streams of highly strung, tensely drawn silvery strings—and then silence, the innermost heart of silence, where the waves of air never bore a single stray tone, but where all was rest unto death, steeped in the calm glow of red colors and the languid warmth of fiery fragrance.—This was not what he longed for, but the images glided forth from his mood and submerged all else until he turned from them to follow his own train of thought again.

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain-dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks—in a circle, of course. This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something—life, love, passion—so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!

Involuntarily he made a gesture as if to ward it off with his hand. After all, he was afraid in his inmost heart of this mighty thing called passion. This storm-wind sweeping away everything settled and authorized and acquired in humanity as if it were dead leaves. He did not like it! This roaring flame squandering itself in its own smoke—no, _he_ wanted to burn slowly.

And yet this living on at half speed in quiet waters, always in sight of land, seemed so paltry. Would that the storm and waves would come! If he only knew how, his sails should fly to the yards for a merry run over the Spanish Main of life! Farewell to the slowly dripping days, farewell to the pleasant little hours! Peace be with you, you dull moods that have to be furbished with poetry before you can shine, you lukewarm emotions that have to be clothed in warm dreams and yet freeze to death! May you go to your own place! I am headed for a coast where sentiments twine themselves like luxuriant vines around every fibre of the heart—a rank forest; for every vine that withers, twenty are in blossom; for each one that blossoms, a hundred are in bud.

Oh, that I were there!

He grew tired of his longing and sick of himself. He needed people. But of course Erik was not in now. Frithjof had been with him all morning, and it was too late for the theatre. Nevertheless he went out and strolled dejectedly through the streets.

Perhaps Mrs. Boye would be in. This was not one of her evenings and it was rather late. Suppose he try, anyway.

Mrs. Boye was in. She was home alone. Too tired from the spring air to go to a dinner party with her niece, she had preferred to lie on the sofa, drinking strong tea and reading Heine; but now she was tired of verses and wanted to play lotto.

So they played lotto. Fifteen, twenty, thirty-seven, a long series of figures, the rattling of dice in a bag, and an irritating sound of balls rolling on the floor in the apartment above them....

“This is not amusing,” said Mrs. Boye, when they had played for a long time without covering any numbers. “Is it?—No!” she answered herself and shook her head disconsolately. “But what else can we play?”

She folded her hands before her on the disks and looked at Niels with a hopeless, inquiring gaze.

Niels really did not know.

“Anything but music!” She bent her face down over her hands and touched her lips to the knuckles, one after the other, the whole row, then back again. “This is the most wretched existence in the world,” she said, looking up. “It isn’t possible to have anything like an adventure, and the small happenings that life has to offer are surely not enough to keep one’s spirits up. Don’t you feel that, too?”

“Well, I can’t suggest anything better than that we act like the Caliph in Arabian Nights. With that silk kimono you are wearing, if you would only wind a white cloth around your head, and let me have your large Indian shawl, we could easily pass for two merchants from Mossul.”

“And what should we two unfortunate merchants do?”

“Go down to Storm Bridge, hire a boat for twenty pieces of gold, and sail up the dark river.”

“Past the sand-chests?”

“Yes, with colored lamps on the masthead.”

“Like Ganem, the Slave of Love.—Oh, I know that line of thought so well! It’s exactly like a man—to get so terribly busy building up scenery and background, forgetting the action itself for the setting. Have you never noticed that women live much less in their imagination than men? We don’t know how to taste pleasure in our fancy or escape from pain with a fanciful consolation. What is, is. Imagination—it is so innocuous. When we get as old as I am now, then sometimes we content ourselves with the poverty-stricken comedy of imagination. But we ought never to do it—never!”

She settled herself languidly on the sofa, half reclining, her hand under her chin, her elbow supported by the cushions. She gazed dreamily out before her, and seemed quite lost in melancholy thoughts.

Niels was silent too, and the room was so quiet that the restless hopping of the canary bird was plainly heard; the great clock ticked and ticked its way through the silence, louder and louder, and a string in the open piano, suddenly vibrating, emitted a long, low, dying note that blended with the softly singing stillness.

She looked very young as she lay there, flooded from head to foot in the soft yellow light of the lamp above her. There was something alluring in the incongruity of her beautiful, strongly moulded throat and matronly Charlotte Corday cap with the frank child-eyes and the little mouth opening over milk-white teeth.

Niels looked at her admiringly.

“How strange it is to long for one’s self!” she said; “and yet I often, so often, long for myself as a young girl. I love her as one whom I had been very close to and shared life and happiness and everything with, and then had lost while I stood helpless. What a wonderful time that was! You cannot conceive the purity and delicacy of such a young girl’s soul when she is just beginning to love for the first time. It can only be told in music, but you can think of it as a festival in a fairy palace, where the air shines like blushing silver. It is filled with cool flowers, and they change color, their tints are slowly shifting. Everything is song, jubilant and yet soft. Dim presentiments gleam and glow like mystic wine in exquisite dream-goblets. It is all song and fragrance; a thousand scents are wafted through the palace. Oh, I could weep when I think of it, and when I think that if it could all come back to me, by a miracle, just as it was, it would no longer bear me up; I should fall through like a cow trying to dance on cobwebs.”

“No, quite the contrary,” said Niels eagerly, and his voice trembled, as he went on: “no, the love you could feel now would be much finer, much more spiritual than that young girl’s.”

“Spiritual! I hate this spiritual love. The flowers growing from that soil are made of cotton cloth; they don’t even grow, they are taken from the head and stuck in the heart, because the heart has no flowers of its own. That is exactly what I envy in the young girl: everything about her is genuine, she does not fill the goblet of her love with the makeshift of imagination. Do not suppose, because her love is shot through and shadowed over by imagined pictures and again pictures in a great, teeming vagueness, that she cares more for those images than for the earth she walks upon. It is only that all her senses and instincts and powers are reaching out for love everywhere—everywhere, without ever feeling weary. But she does not revel in her fancies, nor even so much as rest in them; no, she is very much more genuine, so genuine that in her own unwitting manner she very often becomes innocently cynical. You have no idea, for instance, of what intoxicating pleasure a young girl finds in breathing secretly the odor of cigars that clings to the clothes of the man she loves—that is a thousand times more to her than a whole conflagration of fancies. I despise imagination. What good is it, when our whole being yearns toward the heart of another, to be admitted only to the chilly ante-room of his imagination! And that is what happens so often. How often we have to submit to letting the man we love deck us out with his imagination, put a halo around our head, tie wings on our shoulders, and wrap us in a star-spangled robe! Then at last he finds us worthy of his love, when we masquerade in this costume; but then we can’t be ourselves, because we are too dressed up, and because men confuse us by kneeling in the dust and worshipping us instead of just taking us as we are and simply loving us.”

Niels was quite bewildered. He had picked up the handkerchief she dropped and sat there intoxicating himself with its perfume. He was not at all prepared to have her look at him in that impatient, questioning way, just as he was absorbed in studying her hand, but he managed to answer that he thought a man could not give a finer proof of his love than this—that he had to justify himself to himself for loving a human being so unutterably, and therefore set her so high and surrounded her with a nimbus of divinity.

“But that is just what I find so insulting,” said Mrs. Boye, “as if we were not divine enough in ourselves.”

Niels smiled complacently.

“No, you mustn’t smile, I’m not joking. It is really very serious, for this adoration is at bottom tyrannical in its fanaticism; it cramps us in a mould of man’s ideal. Slash a heel and clip a toe! Anything in us that doesn’t square with man’s conception has to be eliminated, perhaps not by force, but by ignoring it, systematically relegating it to oblivion, and never giving it a chance to develop, while the qualities we don’t possess or that aren’t in the least characteristic of us are forced to the rankest growth by lauding them to the skies, taking for granted that we have them in the fullest measure, and making them the cornerstone on which man builds his love. I say that we are subjected to a drill; man’s love puts us through a drill. And we submit to it, even those who love no one submit to it, contemptible minions that we are!”

She had risen from her reclining posture and looked threateningly at Niels.

“If I were beautiful!—oh, I mean ravishingly beautiful, more alluring than any woman who ever lived, so that all who saw me were struck with unquenchable, agonizing love as by witchcraft—then I would use the power of my beauty to make them adore _me_, not their traditional bloodless ideal, but myself, as I am, every inch, every line of _my_ being, every gleam of _my_ nature!”

She had risen now to her full height, and Niels thought he ought to go, but he stood turning over in his mind a great many audacious words, which, after all, he did not dare to utter. At last, summoning all his courage, he seized her hand and kissed it, but she gave him her other hand to kiss too, and then he could say nothing more than: “Good-night.”

Niels Lyhne had fallen in love with Mrs. Boye, and he was happy because of it.

When he went home through the same streets where he had strolled so dejectedly that same evening, it seemed to him that ages had passed since he walked there. His bearing had acquired a new poise, a grave decorum, and when he carefully buttoned his gloves, he did so with a subconscious sense that he had undergone a great change which somehow demanded that he should button his gloves—carefully.

Too much absorbed to think of sleep, he went up on the embankment.

It seemed to him that his thoughts flowed very quietly. He was surprised at his own calm, but he did not have perfect faith in it. He felt as though something in the very depths of his being were bubbling, very softly, but persistently: welling up, seething, pressing on, but far, far away. He was in a mood as one who waits for something that must come from afar, a distant music that must draw near, little by little, singing, murmuring, frothing, rushing, roaring, and whirling down over him, catching him up he knew not how, carrying him he knew not whither, coming on as a flood, breaking as a surf, and then—

But now he was calm. There was only the tremulous singing in the distance; otherwise all was peace and tranquillity.

He loved—he said it aloud to himself again and again. The words had such a strange ring of dignity, and held such deep meanings. They meant that he was no longer a captive in the imagined world of his childhood, nor was he the sport of aimless longings and misty dreams. He had escaped from the elf-land that had grown up with him and around him, encircling him with a hundred arms, blindfolding him with a hundred hands. He had broken away from its grasp and had become master of himself, and though it reached after him, implored him with dumb appealing eyes, and beckoned him with white fluttering garments, its power was dead as a dream killed by day, a mist dispelled by the sun. Was not his young love day and sun and all the world? He had been strutting about in royal purple not yet spun, and had taken his seat on a throne not yet built; but now he stood on a high mountain, looking out over the world that stretched before him like a plain. In this world thirsting for song he had as yet no existence and was not even awaited. What a rapturous thought it was that, in all this silent, wakeful infinity, not a breath of his spirit had stirred a leaf or raised a ripple. It was all his to win, and he knew that he could win it. He felt strong and all-conquering as only those can feel whose songs are still unsung, throbbing in their own breast.

The soft spring air was full of perfumes, not saturated with them as the summer nights may be, but rather as it were streaked—now with the pungent aroma from resinous young poplars, now with the cool breath of late violets, and again with the sweet almond odor of cherry-trees. The scents came and mingled, were wafted away and dissolved; sometimes one would quicken and free itself from the others, only to die as suddenly or to vanish slowly on a breath of wind. Light moods flitted across his mind like the shadows from this fitful dance of scents, and as the perfumes mocked his senses by coming and going as they listed, so his mind was baffled by his vain longing to be borne aloft, calmly resting in tranquil flight on the slowly gliding wings of a mood. For his moods were not yet birds with wings strong enough to carry him; they were down and feathers only, drifting on the wind, falling like snow, and melting.

He tried to recall the picture of her as she lay on the sofa and talked to him, but it would not come. He saw her vanishing in a lane of trees; or sitting and reading with her hat on, holding one of the large white leaves in her gloved fingers, just on the point of turning it, then turning leaf after leaf. He saw her entering her carriage in the evening after the theatre and nodding to him behind the pane; then the carriage drove away, and he stood looking after it; it kept on driving, and he still followed it with his eyes. Indifferent faces came and spoke to him, figures he had not seen for years passed down the street, turned and looked after him, and still the carriage kept on driving, and he could not get rid of it, could not think of other pictures because of that carriage. Then, just as he was getting nervous with impatience, it came: the yellow light from the lamp, the eyes, the mouth, the hand under the chin, as plainly as if it were all before him there in the darkness.