Part 7
How lovely she was, how mild, how fair! He loved her with a desire that knelt at her feet, begging for all this seductive beauty. Cast yourself from your throne down to me! Make yourself my slave! Put the chain around your neck with your own hands, but not in sport,—I want to pull the chain, I demand submission in your every limb, bondage in your eyes! Oh, that I could draw you to me with a love-philtre, but, no, a love-philtre would compel you, you would yield to its power without volition, and I want none to be your master but myself. Your will must be broken in your hands, and you must hold it out humbly to me. You shall be my queen, and I your slave, but my slave’s foot must be on your queenly neck. There is no lunacy in this desire, for is it not in the nature of a woman’s love to be proud and strong and to bend? It is love, I know, to be weak and to reign.
He felt that he could never draw to himself the part of her soul that was one with the luxuriant, glowing, sensuous-soft aspect of her beauty; it would never clasp him in those gleaming Juno arms, never in passionate weakness give that voluptuous neck to his kisses—never in all eternity. He saw it all clearly. He could win, perhaps he already had won, the young girl in her, and he was sure that she, the full-blooded beauty, felt this fair young creature who had died within her mysteriously stirring in her living grave to clasp him with slender maiden arms and meet him with timid maiden lips. But his love was not that. He loved the very thing in her that he could not win, loved this neck with its warm, flower-like whiteness gleaming with a dew of gold under the dusky hair. He sobbed with yearning passion and wrung his hands with impotent desire, threw his arms around a tree, leaned his cheek against the bark, and wept.
_Chapter VIII_
There was in Niels Lyhne’s nature a lame reflectiveness, child of an instinctive shrinking from decisive action, grandchild of a subconscious sense that he lacked personality. He was always struggling against this reflectiveness, sometimes goading himself by calling it vile names, then again decking it out as a virtue that was a part of his inmost self and was bound up with all his possibilities and powers. But whatever he made of it, and however he looked upon it, he hated it as a secret infirmity, which he might perhaps hide from the world, but never from himself; it was always there to humiliate him whenever he was alone with himself. How he envied the audacity that rushes confidently into words, never heeding that words bring actions, and actions bring consequences—until those consequences are at its heels. People who possessed it always seemed to him like centaurs—man and horse cast in a single mould. With them impulse and leap were one, whereas he was divided into rider and horse—impulse one thing, leap something very different.
Whenever he pictured himself declaring his love for Mrs. Boye—and he always had to picture everything—he could plainly see himself in the scene, his attitude, his every motion, his whole figure from the front, from the side, and from the back. He could see himself falter with the feverish irresolution that robbed him of his presence of mind and paralyzed him, while he stood there awaiting her answer as if it were a blow forcing him to his knees, instead of a shuttlecock to be thrown back in ever so many ways and returned in as many more.
He thought of speaking, and he thought of writing, but he never managed simply to blurt it out. It was said only in veiled declarations and in a half-feigned lyric passion that made a pose of being carried away into hot words and fantastic hopes. Nevertheless, a certain intimacy of a strange kind grew up between them, born of a youth’s humble love, a dreamer’s ardent longing, and a woman’s pleasure in being the inaccessible object of romantic desire. Their relation took the form of a myth that arose, neither of them knew how, a pale, still myth bred in a drawing-room. Its heroine was a fair woman who had loved in her early youth one of the great men in the world of thought. He had gone away to die in a strange land, forgotten and forsaken. And the fair woman sat sorrowing for many long years, though none knew her suffering; solitude alone was sacred enough to look upon her grief. Then came a youth who called the departed great one master, who was filled with his spirit and enthusiastic for his work. And he loved the sorrowing woman. To her it seemed that the dead happy days rose from their grave and came to life again. A sweet, strange bewilderment came over her; past and present were blurred in the silvery mist of a shadowy dream-day, in which she loved the youth, partly as himself and partly as the image of another, and gave him the half of her soul. But he must tread softly, lest the dream-bubble should burst; he must put a stern bar to all hot earthly longings, lest they should dispel the tender twilight and wake her to sorrow again.
Sheltered by this myth, their intimacy gradually took on a stable form. They called each other by their Christian names and were Niels and Tema to each other when they were alone, while the presence of the niece was reduced to a minimum. To be sure, Niels sometimes tried to break through the accepted barriers, but Mrs. Boye was so much the stronger that she could easily and gently quell all such attempts at insubordination, and Niels had to submit and fall back for a time on this fanciful passion with real tableaux. Their relation never ran out into a platonic flatness; nor did it sink to rest in the monotony of habit. Rest was the word that least of all described it. Niels Lyhne’s hope was never weary, and though it was gently suppressed whenever it would flare up in a demand, that only made it smolder more hotly than ever in secret. And how Mrs. Boye would feed the fire by her thousand and one coquetries, her provocative simplicity, and her naked courage in discussing the most delicate subjects! Besides, the game was not entirely in her hands, for there were times when her blood would dream in its idleness of rewarding this half-tamed devotion by lavishing on it the fullest rapture of love in order to rejoice in its wondering happiness. But such a dream was not easily extinguished, and the next time Niels came she would meet him with the nervousness of conscious sin, a shyness born of wrongdoing, a sweet shame that made the air strangely tremulous with passion.
There was yet another thing that gave their intimacy a certain tension. Niels Lyhne’s love possessed so much virility that he chivalrously held himself back from taking in imagination what the reality denied him, and even in that separate world where everything did his bidding he respected Mrs. Boye as if she were actually present.
Hence their relation was well buttressed from both sides, and there was no immediate danger that it would fall to pieces. Indeed, it seemed made for a nature at once brooding and athirst for life such as Niels Lyhne’s, and though it was only a game, it was a game of realities, sufficient to give him that undercurrent of passion which he needed.
Niels Lyhne was bent upon being a poet, and there was much in the external circumstances of his life to lead his thoughts in that direction and stimulate his faculties for the task. So far, however, he had little but his dreams to write about, and nowhere is there more sameness and monotony than in the world of imagination; for in that dreamland, which seems so boundless and so infinitely varied, there are, in fact, only a few short beaten paths where everybody walks and from which no one ever strays. People may differ, but in their dreams they do not differ; there they always attain the three or four things that they desire—it may be with more or less speed and completeness, but they always attain them in the end. No one seriously dreams of himself as empty-handed. Therefore no one ever discovers himself in his dreams or becomes conscious through them of his individuality. Our dreams tell nothing of how we are satisfied when we win the treasure, how we relinquish it when lost, how we feast on it while it is ours, where we turn when it is taken from us.
Niels Lyhne’s poetry had hitherto been nothing but the expression of an esthetic personality which, in a general way, found spring teeming, the ocean wide, love erotic, and death melancholy. He himself was not in his poems; he merely put the verses together. But now a change came over him. Now that he wooed a woman and wanted her to love him,—him, Niels Lyhne of Lönborggaard, who was twenty-three years old, walked with a slight stoop, had beautiful hands and small ears, and was a little timid, wanted her to love him and not the idealized Nicolaus of his dreams, who had a proud bearing and confident manners, and was a little older,—now he began to take a vital interest in this Niels whom he had hitherto walked about with as a slightly unpresentable friend. He had been so busy decking himself with the qualities he lacked that he had not had time to take note of those he possessed, but now he began to piece his own self together from scattered memories and impressions of his childhood and from the most vivid moments of his life. He saw with pleased surprise how it all fitted together, bit by bit, and was welded into a much more familiar personality than the one he had chased after in his dreams. This figure was far more genuine, far stronger, and more richly endowed. It was no mere dead stump of an ideal, but a living thing, full of infinite shifting possibilities playing through it and shaping it to a thousandfold unity. Good God, he _had_ powers that could be used just as they were! He _was_ Aladdin, and there was not a thing he had been storming the clouds for but it had fallen right down into his turban.
Now came a happy time for Niels, the glorious time when the mighty impulse of growth sweeps us jubilantly past the dead points in our own nature; when we are filled to bursting with a strength that makes us eager to put our shoulders to mountains if need be, while we build away bravely on the Tower of Babel, which is meant to pierce the sky, but ends in being just a squatty structure that we go on all our lives adding to—now a timid spire, now a freakish bay window.
Everything was changed; his nature, his faculties, and his work fitted into one another like cogged wheels. He could never think of stopping to rejoice in his art, for a thing was no sooner finished than it was cast aside: he had outgrown it even while he worked on it, and it became a mere step that led upward to an ever-receding goal, one of many steps on a road he had left behind him and forgotten even while it resounded with his footfall.
While he felt himself borne along by new impulses and new thoughts to greater power and wider vision, he grew more and more solitary. One after another of his old friends and comrades fell back and vanished from his ken, for he lost interest in them when he saw less and less difference between these men of the opposition and that majority which they attacked. Everything seemed to him to melt together in one great hostile mass of boredom. What did they write when they gave the call to battle? Pessimistic verses in which they declared that dogs were often more faithful than men and jailbirds more honest than those who walked freely about, eloquent odes to the effect that green woods and brown heath were preferable to dusty cities, stories of peasant virtue and rich men’s vice, of red-blooded nature and anemic civilization, the narrowness of age and the divine right of youth. What modest demands they made when they wrote! They were at least bolder when they talked within four safe walls.
No, when his time came, he would give them music—a clarion call!
His older friendships suffered too, especially that with Frithjof. The fact was that Frithjof, who had a very positive nature, a good head for systems, and a broad back for dogmas, had read a little too much Heiberg, and had taken it all for gospel truth, never suspecting that the makers of systems are clever folk who fashion their systems from their books and not their books from their systems. It is a well-known fact that young people who have committed themselves to a system generally become great dogmatists, because of the praiseworthy affection youth often bears to what is finished and finite. And when you have become the possessor of the whole truth, it would be unpardonable to keep it for yourself alone and to allow less fortunate fellow creatures to go their own misguided way, instead of leading and instructing them, pruning away their wild shoots with loving severity, forcing them up against the wall with gentle coercion, and pointing out to them the lines along which they must grow, in order that they may sometime, when they have been formed into correct and artistic espaliers, thank you, even if tardily, for the trouble you have taken.
Niels was fond of saying that he liked nothing better than criticism, but the truth was that he preferred admiration, and he certainly would not brook criticism from Frithjof, whom he had always regarded as his serf, and who had always been delighted to wear the livery of his opinions and his principles. And here he was trying to play the equal and to masquerade in a self-chosen mantle! Of course he must be snubbed, and Niels first tried, in a tone of good-natured superiority, to make Frithjof ridiculous in his own eyes, but when that would not work he had recourse to insolent paradoxes, which he would scorn to discuss, simply throwing them out in all their grotesque hideousness and then retiring behind a teasing silence.
In this way they grew apart.
With Erik he got on better. Their boyish friendship had always kept a certain reserve, a kind of spiritual modesty, and this had saved them from the too great familiarity that is so dangerous to friendship. They had been enthusiastic together in the festival hall of their souls and had chatted intimately in the drawing-room, but they had never made free with each other’s bed-rooms, bath-rooms, and other private places in the mansion of their souls.
It was the same now; indeed, the reserve was, if anything, stricter, at least on Niels’s part, but that did not lessen their friendship, the cornerstone of which, now as of old, was Niels Lyhne’s admiration for Erik’s spirit and audacity, his way of seeming at home with life, and his readiness to grasp and hold. Yet Niels could not conceal from himself that the friendship was extremely one-sided. Not that Erik was wanting in real affection or faith in him—far from it. No one could think more highly of Niels than Erik did; he considered him so vastly his own superior in intellect that he never dreamed of criticizing, but this blind admiration led him to place Niels and his work and interests too far beyond the horizon his own eyes could scan. He was sure that Niels would go far along the road he had chosen, but he was equally sure that his own feet had nothing to do on that path, nor did he ever attempt to set them there.
Niels felt that this was rather hard; for though Erik’s ideals were not his, and though Erik in his art tried to express a romanticism or a romantic sentimentalism with which he was not in accord, he could still feel a broader sympathy by virtue of which he faithfully followed his friend’s development, rejoiced with him when he gained a step, and helped him to hope when he stood still.
In this way their friendship was one-sided, and it was not strange that Niels should have his eyes opened to the lack in it just at the time when his own mind was struggling with new ideas, and he felt the need of pouring out his thoughts to a sympathetic listener. It made him bitter, and he began to examine more closely this friend whom he had always judged so leniently. A dreary sense of loneliness came over him as he realized how everything he had brought with him from home and from the old days seemed to fall away from him and let him go his own way, forgotten and forsaken. The door to the past was barred, and he stood outside, empty-handed and alone; whatever he needed and desired he must win for himself—new friends and new shelter, new affections and new memories.
* * * * *
For more than a year, Mrs. Boye had been Niels’s only real companion, when a letter from his mother, telling him that his father was dangerously ill, called him back to Lönborggaard.
When he arrived, his father was dead.
The consciousness that for several years he had longed very little for his home weighed on Niels almost like a crime. He had often enough visited it in his thoughts, but always as a guest with the dust of other lands on his clothes and the memories of other places in his heart: he had never longed for it in passionate homesickness as for the fair sanctuary of his life, nor pined to kiss its soil and rest under its roof. Now he repented that he had been faithless to his home, and, oppressed as he was by his grief, he felt his remorse darkened by a sense that in some mysterious way he was an accessory to what had happened, as though his faithlessness had called death in. He wondered how he could ever have lived contentedly away from this home which now drew him with such strange power. With every fibre of his being he clung to it, in an infinite, desolate longing, uneasy because he could not become one with it as fully as he would, miserable because the thousand memories that called from every corner and every bush, from sounds and myriad scents, from the play of light and from the silence itself,—because all these things called with such distant voices that he could not grasp them in the strength and fullness he craved; they seemed only to whisper in his soul like the rustling of leaves that fall to the ground and the lapping of waves that flow on and ever on....
Happy in his sorrow is he who at the death of one dear to him can weep all his tears over the emptiness, the desolation, and the loneliness. Sorer and bitterer are the tears with which you try to atone for the past when you have failed in love toward one who is gone and to whom you can never make amends for what you have sinned. For now they come back to you: not only the hard words, the subtly poisoned retorts, the harsh censure, and the unreasoning anger, but even unkind thoughts that were not put into words, hasty judgments that merely passed through your mind, unseen shruggings of the shoulder, and hidden smiles full of contempt and impatience, they all come back like malign arrows, sinking their barb deep in your own breast, their dull barb, for the point has been broken off in the heart that is no more. There is nothing you can expiate any more, nothing. Now there is abundance of love in your heart, now that it is too late. Go now to the cold grave with your full heart! Does it bring you any nearer? Plant flowers and bind wreaths—does that help you?
At Lönborggaard they were binding wreaths; there, too, they were haunted by memories of hours when love had been silenced by harsher voices; to them, too, the stern lines about the closed mouth of the grave spoke of remorse.
It was a dark, sad time, but it held a ray of light in that it brought mother and son more closely together than they had been for many, many years; for in spite of the great love they bore to each other, they had always been, as it were, on their guard each toward the other, and there had been a certain reserve in their intercourse, from the time when Niels grew too large to sit on his mother’s knee. He had shrunk from the excitable and high-strung side of her nature, while she had felt something alien in the timidity and hesitation of his. But now life itself, which keys up and tones down and harmonizes, had prepared their hearts, and would soon give them wholly to each other.
Scarcely two months after the funeral, Mrs. Lyhne fell violently ill, and for a long time her life was in danger. The anxiety that filled these weeks seemed to force their earlier grief into the background, and when Mrs. Lyhne began to get better, it seemed to both her and Niels that years had been thrust in between them and the freshly made grave. Especially to Mrs. Lyhne the time seemed long. While she was ill she had been sure that she was going to die and had been very much afraid of death. Even now that she had begun to recover, and the doctor had declared the danger to be past, she could not rid herself of her gloomy thoughts.
It was a dreary convalescence, in which her strength returned as it seemed reluctantly, drop by drop. She felt no gentle and healing drowsiness, but rather a restless languor with a depressing sense of weakness and an incessant, impotent longing for strength.
After a while there was a change; her recovery was more rapid, and her strength came back. Still the idea that she and life were soon to part did not leave her, but lay like a shadow over her and held her captive in a perturbed and yearning melancholy.
One evening she was sitting alone in the summer parlor, gazing out through the wide-open doors. The trees of the garden hid the gold and crimson of the sunset, but in one spot the trunks parted to reveal a bit of fiery sky, from which a sunburst of long, deep golden rays shot out, waking green tints and bronze-brown reflections in the dark leafy masses.
High above the restless tree-tops, the clouds drifted dark against a smoke-red sky, and as they hurried on, they left behind them little loosened tufts, tiny little strips of cloud which the sunlight steeped in a wine-colored glow.
Mrs. Lyhne sat listening to the wind in the trees. Her head moved very slightly in time with the uneven swelling and sinking of each gust, as it came rushing, swept on boisterously, and died away. But her eyes were far away, farther even than the clouds they gazed on. Pale in her black widow’s garb, she sat there with a piteous expression of unrest about her faintly colored lips, while her hands fidgeted with the thick little book on her lap. It was Rousseau’s _Héloïse_. Other books were piled up around her: Schiller, Staffeldt, Evald, and Novalis, and large portfolios with prints of old churches and ruins and mountain lakes.
Now she heard doors opening and shutting, then steps that seemed to seek some one in the inner rooms, and presently Niels came in. He had been for a long walk by the fjord. His cheeks were ruddy from the fresh air, and the wind was still in his hair.
Outside, the blue-gray colors had prevailed in the sky, and a few heavy drops of rain splashed against the windows.
Niels told of how high the waves came rolling in and how they had washed the seaweed up on the beach, and about what he had seen and whom he had met. As he talked, he gathered up the books, closed the doors to the garden, and fastened the windows. Then he sat down on the low stool at his mother’s feet, took her hand in his, and laid his cheek on her knee.
It had grown quite black outside; the rain beat like hail and ran in streams down casements and panes.
“Do you remember,” said Niels after a long silence,—“do you remember how often we sat like this in the dusk and went out in search of adventures, while father was talking to Jens Overseer in his office, and Duysen was rattling the teacups in the dining-room? And when the lamp was brought in, we both woke up from our strange adventures to the sheltered comfort around us, yet I can well remember that I always thought the story did not stop when we did, but went on unfolding somewhere under the hills on the way to Ringkjöbing.”
He did not see his mother’s wistful smile, but he felt her hand passing gently over his hair.
“Do you remember,” she said after a while, “how often you promised me that when you grew up you would sail out in a big ship and bring me back all the treasures of the world?”