Part 8
“Do I remember! I was to bring hyacinths, because you loved hyacinths so much, and a palm like the one that died, and pillars of gold and marble. There were so many pillars in your stories, always. Do you remember?”
“I have been waiting for that ship—no, sit still, dear, you don’t understand me—it was not for myself, it was the ship of your fortune.... I hoped your life would be full and glorious, that you would travel on shining paths.... Fame—everything—No, not that, if you would only be one of those who fight for the greatest. I don’t know how it is, but I am so tired of commonplace happiness and commonplace goals. Do you understand me?”
“You wanted me to be a Sunday child, mother dear, one of those who do not pull in harness with others, but have their own heaven to be saved in, and their own place of damnation all to themselves, too.—We wanted to have flowers on board, didn’t we? Gorgeous flowers to strew over a bleak world; but the ship did not come, and they were poor birds, Niels and his mother, were they not?”
“Have I hurt you, dear? Why, it was nothing but dreams; don’t mind them!”
Niels was silent a long time, for he felt a shyness about what he wanted to say. “Mother,” he said, “we are not so poor as you think. Some day the ship will come in.—If you would only believe that and believe in me.... Mother—I am a poet—really—through my whole soul. Don’t imagine this is childish dreams or dreams fed by vanity. If you could feel my grateful pride in what’s best in me—my humble joy in saying this, so little personal, so far from vainglory, you would believe it just as I want you to believe it. Dearest, dearest! I _shall_ be one of those who fight for the greatest, and I promise you that I shall not fail, that I shall always be faithful to myself and my gift. Nothing but the best shall be good enough. No compromise, mother! When I weigh what I have done and feel that it isn’t sterling, or when I hear that it’s got a crack or a flaw—into the melting-pot it goes! Every single work must be my best! Do you see why I have to promise? It’s my gratitude for my riches that drives me to make vows, and you must receive them. Then if I fail, it will be a sin against you, for it’s all owing to you that my soul is like a high-vaulted room—your dreams and longings have given me the impulse to growth, and your sympathies and your unsatisfied thirst for beauty have consecrated me to my life-work.”
Mrs. Lyhne wept silently. She felt herself growing pale with rapture. Softly she laid both hands on her son’s head, but he drew them gently to his lips and kissed them.
“You have made me so happy, Niels! Then my life has not been one long, useless sigh, if I have helped to lead you on as I hoped and dreamed so ardently—good heavens! how often I have dreamed it!—And yet there is so much sadness mixed in my joy, Niels! To think that my fondest wish should be fulfilled, the thing I have longed for so many years.... Such things happen only when life is almost done.”
“You mustn’t talk like that, you mustn’t! Why, everything is going on well, and you are getting stronger every day, mother dear, are you not?”
“It is so hard to die,” she said under her breath. “Do you know what I was thinking of in those long sleepless nights, when death seemed so terribly near? I thought the bitterest of all was to know that there were so many great and beautiful things out in the world which I should have to leave behind without ever having seen them. I thought of the thousands and thousands of souls they had lifted up and filled with life and joy, while for me they had not existed. It seemed to me that my soul would fly away poverty-stricken on feeble wings, without any golden memories to carry with it as a reflection from the glories of its homeland, because it had only been sitting in the chimney-corner listening to stories about the wonderful world.—Niels, no one can imagine what agony it is to lie imprisoned in a dull, dark sick-room and struggle, in your feverish fancies, to call up before you the beauties of lands you have never seen—snowy Alpine peaks above blue-black mountain lakes, and sparkling rivers between vine-clad banks, and long lines of mountains with ruins peeping out of the woods, and then lofty halls with marble gods—and never to get it quite, but always to give up and start over again, because it seems so terribly hard to leave it without having had the slightest part in it.... O God, Niels, to long for it with your whole soul, while you feel that you are being slowly carried to the threshold of another world, to stand on the threshold and look back with a long, long gaze, while all the time you are being forced through that door where none of your longings have gone before you.... Niels, take me along in your thoughts, dear, when the time comes for you to share in all that glory which I shall never, never see!”
She wept.
Niels tried to comfort her. He laid bold plans for the journey they would take together as soon as she was quite well. He meant to go to the city to consult a doctor, and he was sure the doctor would agree with him that it was the best thing they could do; So-and-so had travelled and had recovered from his illness completely, simply through the change; a change often worked wonders. He began to trace their route in every detail, spoke of how warmly he would wrap her up, what short trips they would take at first, what a delightful journal they would keep, how they would notice even the smallest trifles, how amusing it would be to eat the queerest things in the loveliest spots, and what awful sins against grammar they would commit in the beginning.
He went on in this strain all that evening and on the days that followed, never wearying. She entered into his plan as into a pleasant fancy, but she was plainly convinced that it would never come to pass.
Nevertheless Niels, acting on the doctor’s advice, went on making all the necessary preparations for the trip, and she let him do as he pleased, even fix the day of departure—sure that _that_ would happen which would bring all his plans to naught. But when, finally, there were only a few days left, and when her youngest brother, who was to manage the farm in their absence, had really arrived, she grew uncertain, and now it was she who was most eager to be off, for there still lurked in her mind a fear that the obstacle would leap out and stand in their way at the very last moment.
So they set off.
The first day she was still nervous and uneasy with a lingering trace of her fear, and only when the day was happily ended could she begin to grasp the fact that she was actually on her way to all the glory she had longed for so sorely. Then a feverish joy came over her; her every thought and word was colored by extravagant anticipation, and her thoughts circled unceasingly around what the coming days would bring, one after the other.
And it all came to pass, all that she had hoped, but it did not fill her with rapture nor carry her away with the power or the fervor she had expected. She had imagined it all different, and had imagined herself different, too. In dreams and poems everything had been, as it were, beyond the sea; the haze of distance had mysteriously veiled all the restless mass of details and had thrown out the large lines in bold relief, while the silence of distance had lent its spirit of enchantment. It had been easy then to feel the beauty; but now that she was in the midst of it all, when every little feature stood out and spoke boldly with the manifold voices of reality, and beauty was shattered as light in a prism, she could not gather the rays together again, could not put the picture back beyond the sea. Despondently she was obliged to admit to herself that she felt poor, surrounded by riches that she could not make her own.
She yearned to go on and ever on, still hoping to find a spot she might recognize as a bit of the world she had dreamed, that world which, with every step she took to approach it, seemed to extinguish the magic glamor that had suffused it and to lie spread before her disappointed eyes in the commonplace light of everybody’s sun and everybody’s moon. But she sought in vain, and as the year was already far advanced, they hastened to Clarens, where the doctor had advised them to spend the winter, and where, moreover, a last faintly gleaming hope lured the tired, dream-wrapped soul; for was it not the Clarens of Rousseau, the Paradise of Julie!
There they remained, but it was of no avail that Winter made himself gentle and held his cold breath from touching her; against the fever in her blood he had no healing. And Spring, when he came on his triumphal march through the valley with the miracle of sprouting seeds and the gospel of budding leaves, he too had to pass her by and let her stand withering in the midst of all this exuberant renascence. The strength that welled out to her from light and air and earth and water could not be transformed to strength within her; it could not make her blood drunk with health nor force it to sing exultantly in the great hymn to the omnipotence of Spring. No, she could but wither, for the last dream that had appeared before her in the dimness of her home as a new reddening dawn, the dream of the glories of the distant world, had not been followed by day. Its colors seemed paler the nearer she came, and she felt that they were pale to her because she had longed for colors that life does not hold and for a beauty that earth cannot ripen. But her longing was not quenched; silent and strong it burned in her heart, hotter in its unstilled thirst, hot and consuming.
Round about her, Spring celebrated his feast pregnant with beauty. Snowdrops rang it in with their white bells, and crocuses welcomed it joyfully holding up their veined chalices. Hundreds of tiny mountain streams tumbled headlong down into the valley to report that Spring had come, but they were all too late, for when they trickled between green banks, primroses in yellow and violets in blue stood there and nodded: We know it, we know it; we knew it before you! The willows unfurled their yellow banners, and the curly ferns and the velvety moss hung green garlands over the naked walls of the vineyards, while down below dry nettles hid the stones with long borders of brown and green and faint purple. The grass spread its mantle of green far and wide, and no end of pretty flowers sat down upon it: there were hyacinths with blossoms like stars and blossoms like pearls, legions of daisies, gentians, anemones, dandelions, with a hundred others. And high above this bloom on the ground there floated in the air, borne up by the hoary trunks of aged cherry-trees, a thousand shining flower islands, where the light foamed against white shores dotted by blue and red butterflies bringing a message from the flower continent below.
Every day brought new flowers, forcing them out of the ground in motley patterns in the gardens by the sea, pouring them out over the branches of the trees down there—paullinias like giant violets and magnolias like huge purple-stained tulips. Along the paths the flowers advanced in blue and white phalanxes. They filled the meadows with yellow swarms, but nowhere was there such a maze of bloom as in the little sheltered valleys up among the hills, where the larch stood with glittering ruby cones amidst pale green needles, for there the narcissus blossomed in dazzling myriads, filling the air far and wide with the drowsy fragrance from their white orgies.
With all this beauty round about her, she still sat there with the old unanswered longing for beauty in her heart. It was only now and then, when the sun sank behind the gentle slopes of Savoy, and the mountains beyond the sea seemed made of brown opaque glass, as if their precipitous sides had drunk the light, that nature could hold her senses spellbound. Then, when the bright yellow mists of evening veiled the distant Jura Mountains, and the lake, like a copper mirror from which tongues of golden flame shot into the red sunset glow, seemed to melt with the sky into one vast, shining infinity,—then it would seem, once in a great while, as though the longing were silenced, and the soul had found the land it sought.
As spring advanced, her strength failed more and more. Soon she did not leave her bed, but she was no longer afraid of death; she awaited it eagerly, for she cherished the hope that beyond the grave she would be face to face with all the glory, be one in soul with the fullness of beauty which here on earth had drawn her in hope and yearning,—a yearning which had been clarified and transfigured by the increasing pain of long empty years and thus prepared to attain its goal. She dreamed many a gentle, wistful dream of how she would return in memory to what earth had given her, return from the land of immortality, where all the beauty of the earth would be always beyond the sea.
So she died, and Niels buried her in the friendly churchyard at Clarens, where the brown vineyard mould covers the children of so many lands, and where broken columns and veiled urns repeat the same words of mourning in so many languages.
They gleam white under dark cypresses and among the winter bloom of the viburnum; early roses strew their petals over many of them, and often the ground at their base is blue with violets, but over every mound and every stone creep the glossy-leaved vines of the gentle periwinkle, Rousseau’s favorite flower, sky blue as never a sky was blue.
_Chapter IX_
Niels Lyhne hurried home. He could not bear his loneliness among so many strangers, but the nearer he came to Copenhagen, the oftener he asked himself what he wanted there, and the more he regretted that he had not stayed abroad. For whom did he have in Copenhagen? Not Frithjof, and Erik was travelling in Italy on a scholarship, so he was not there. Mrs. Boye? It was a queer affair, this relation with Mrs. Boye. Now that he came straight from his mother’s grave, it seemed to him, not exactly a desecration or anything like that, and yet out of tune with the key in which his present moods were pitched. It was a discord. If he had been going to meet his fiancée, his young blushing bride, now that his soul had so long been bent on filial duties, it would not have conflicted with his feeling. It was of no use that he tried to take a superior tone with himself and call the change in his conception of his intimacy with Mrs. Boye Philistine and provincial. The word “Bohemian” formed itself subconsciously as an expression of a distaste that he could not reason away, and it was in line with this mood that his first visit, after he had engaged his old rooms at the embankment, was to the Neergaards and not to Mrs. Boye.
The following day he called on her, but did not find her in. The janitor said she had taken a villa at Emiliekilde, which surprised Niels, for he knew that her father’s country house was in that neighborhood.
Well, he would have to go out there in a day or two.
But the very next day he received a note from Mrs. Boye asking him to meet her in her apartment in town. The pale niece had seen him in the street. A quarter before one he was to come—he _must_ come. She would tell him why, _if he did not know it_. Did he know it? He must not misjudge her, and not be unreasonable. He knew her too well, and why should he take it as a plebeian nature would? He must not—please! After all, they were not like other people. Oh, if he only _would_ understand her! Niels, Niels!
This letter made him strangely excited, and he suddenly remembered with a sense of uneasiness that Mrs. Neergaard had looked at him with a sarcastic pitying expression and had smiled and said nothing in a curious meaning way. What could it be? What in the world could have happened?
The mood that had kept him away from Mrs. Boye had vanished so completely that he could not understand how he had ever felt it. He was alarmed. If they had only written to each other like sensible people! _Why_ had they not written? He certainly had not been so busy. It was queer how he would allow himself to be so absorbed in the place where he happened to be that he forgot what was far away, or if he did not forget it, at least pushed it into the distant background, where it was buried by the present—as under mountains. No one would think he had imagination.
At last! Mrs. Boye herself opened the door to the ante-room before he had time to ring. She said nothing, but gave him her hand in a long, sympathetic clasp; the newspapers had announced his bereavement. Niels said nothing either, and so they walked silently through the parlor, between the two rows of chairs in red-striped covers. The chandelier was wrapped in paper, and the window-panes were whitened. In the sitting-room everything was as usual, except that the Venetian blinds were rolled down before the opened windows, and as they moved to and fro in the slight breeze, they struck the casement with a faint, monotonous tapping. Rays of light reflected from the sunlit canal outside filtered in between the yellow slats and made squares of tremulous wavy lines in the ceiling, which quivered with the rippling of the waves outside. Otherwise all was hushed and still, silently waiting with bated breath....
Mrs. Boye could not make up her mind where she wanted to sit: finally she decided on the rocking-chair, and dusted it assiduously with her handkerchief, but instead of sitting down she stood behind the chair, resting her hands on its back. She still wore her gloves and had only drawn one arm out of her half-fitting black mantilla. Her dress was of silk tartan in a very tiny check matching the broad ribbons on the wide, round Pamela hat of light straw which half hid her face as she stood looking down and rocking the chair nervously.
Niels seated himself on the piano-stool at a distance from her, as if he expected something unpleasant.
“Then you know it, Niels?”
“No, but what is it I don’t know?”
The chair stopped. “I am engaged.”
“Are you engaged? But how—why—Mrs. Boye?”
“Oh, don’t call me Mrs. Boye, and don’t begin to be unreasonable right away!” She leaned against the back of the rocking-chair with a little air of defiance. “Surely you can understand that it isn’t the pleasantest thing in the world for me to stand here and explain to you. I will do it, but you might at least help me.”
“What do you mean? Are you engaged, or are you not?”
“I have just told you that I am,” she replied with gentle impatience, looking up.
“Then may I be allowed to wish you joy, Mrs. Boye, and to thank you very much for the time we have known each other.” He had risen to his feet and bowed sarcastically several times.
“And you can part from me like this, quite calmly? I am engaged, and then we are done, and everything that has been between us two is just a stupid old story which mustn’t be brought to mind any more. Past is past, and that is all—Niels, all the precious days—will the memory of them be silent from now on? Will you never, never think of me, never miss me? Won’t you call the dream forth again, on many a quiet evening, and give it the colors it might have glowed with? Can you keep from loving it all back to life again in your thoughts and ripening it to the fullness it might have had? Can you? Can you put your foot on it and crush it all out of existence, every bit of it? Niels!”
“I hope so; you have shown me that it can be done.—But this is nonsense, pure, unmitigated nonsense from beginning to end. Why did you arrange this comedy? I have no shadow of a right to reproach you. You have never loved me, never said that you loved me. You have given me leave to love you, that is all, and now you withdraw your permission. Or perhaps you will allow me to go on, though you have given yourself to another? I don’t understand you, if you can imagine that to be possible. We are not children. Or are you afraid I shall forget you too soon? Never fear. You are not one to be blotted easily out of a man’s life. But take care! A love like mine does not come to a woman twice in her life; take care that you do not bring misfortune upon yourself by casting me off! I don’t wish you any harm, no, no! May you never know want and sickness, and may you have all the happiness that comes with wealth, admiration, and social success, in measure full and overflowing, that is my wish for you. May all the world stand open to you, all but one little door, one single little door, however much you knock and try to open it—but otherwise everything as fully and widely as it is possible to wish it.”
He spoke slowly, almost sadly, not bitterly, but with a strangely tremulous note in his voice, a note that was new to her and moved her. She had grown a little pale and stood leaning stiffly against the chair. “Niels,” she said, “don’t predict misfortune! Remember you were not here, Niels, and my love—I did not know how real it was; it seemed more like something that just interested me. It breathed through my life like a delicate spiritual poem, it never caught me in strong arms; it had wings—only wings. At least I thought so. I did not know better until now, or until the moment I had done it—said Yes and all that. Everything was so difficult, there were so many things all at once and so many people to consider.... It began with my brother, Hardenskjold, the one who was in the West Indies, you know. He had been rather wild when he was here, but over there he settled down and became so sensible and went into partnership with some one and made a lot of money, and married a rich widow, a sweet little thing, I assure you, and he and father made up, for Hardie was so changed, oh, he is so respectable there is no end to it, and so susceptible to what people say—terribly bourgeoise, oh! Of course, he thought I ought to be taken up in the bosom of the family again, and every time he came here he lectured me and pleaded and palavered, and you see father is an old man now, and so at last I did it, and everything was just as in the old days.”
She paused for a moment and began to take off first her mantilla and then her hat and gloves, and, busy with all this, she turned a little away from Niels, while she went on talking.