Читать книгу Niels Lyhne - J. P. Jacobsen - Страница 5

Table of Contents

The years passed. One Christmas trod upon the heels of another, leaving the air bright with its festive glow till long after Epiphany. Whitsun after Whitsun scampered over flower-decked meadows. One summer holiday after another drew near, celebrated its orgie of fresh air and sunshine, poured out its fiery wine from brimming goblets, and then vanished, one day, in a sinking sun; only memory lingered with sunburnt cheek and wondering eyes and blood that danced.

The years had passed, and the world was no longer the realm of wonder that it had been. The dim recesses behind the mouldering elder-bushes, the mysterious attic rooms, the gloomy stone passage under the Klastrup road—fancied terrors that once thrilled him no longer lurked there. The hillside that bloomed at the first trill of the lark, hiding the grass under starry, purple-rimmed daisies and yellow buttercups, the fantastic wealth of animals and plants in the river, the wild precipices of the sand-pit, its black rocks and bits of silvery granite—all these were just flowers, animals, and stones; the shining fairy gold had turned into withered leaves again.

One game after another grew old and silly, stupid and tiresome like the pictures in the A B C, and yet they had once been new, inexhaustibly new. Here they used to roll a barrel-hoop—Niels and the pastor’s Frithjof—and the hoop was a ship, which was wrecked when it toppled over, but if you caught it before it fell, then it was casting anchor. The narrow passage between the outhouses, where you could hardly squeeze through, was Bab-el-Mandeb or the Portal of Death. On the stable door “England” was written in chalk, and on the barn door “France.” The garden gate was Rio Janeiro, but the smithy was Brazil. Another game was to play Holger the Dane: you could play it among the tall burs behind the barn; but if you went up in the miller’s pasture, there were two sink-holes known as the gorges, and there were the haunts of the veritable Prince Burmand and his wild Saracens, with reddish gray turbans and yellow plumes in their helmets—burdocks and Aaron’s rod of the tallest. That was the only real Mauretania. That rank, succulent growth, that teeming mass of exuberant plant-life, excited their lust of destruction and intoxicated them with the voluptuous joy of demolishing. The wooden swords gleamed with the brightness of steel; the green sap stained the blade with red gore, and the cut stalks squashing under their feet were Turks’ bodies trampled under horses’ hoofs with a sound as of bones crunched in flesh.

Sometimes they played down by the fjord: mussel-shells were launched as ships, and when the vessel got stuck in a clump of seaweed, or went aground on a sand-bank, it was Columbus in the Sargasso Sea or the discovery of America. Harbors and mighty embankments were built; the Nile was dug out in the firm beach sand, and once they made Gurre Castle out of pebbles—a tiny dead fish in an oyster-shell was the corpse of Tove, and they were King Valdemar who sat sorrowing by her side.

But this was all past.

Niels was quite a lad now, twelve years old, nearing thirteen, and he no longer needed to hack thistles and burdocks in order to feed his knightly fancies, any more than he had to launch his explorer’s dreams in a mussel-shell. A book and a corner of the sofa were enough for him now, and if the book refused to bear him to the coast of his desires, he would hunt up Frithjof and tell him the tale which the book would not yield. Arm in arm, they would saunter down the road, one telling, both listening; but when they wanted to revel to the full and really give their imagination free play, they would hide in the fragrant dimness of the hayloft. After a while, these stories, which always ended just when you had really entered into them, grew into a single long story that never ended, but lived and died with one generation after the other; for when the hero had grown old, or you had been careless enough to let him die, you could always give him a son, who would inherit everything from the father, and whom, in addition, you could dower with any other virtues that you happened to value particularly just at the moment.

Whatever stamped itself on Niels’s mind, what he saw, what he understood and what he misunderstood, what he admired and what he knew he ought to admire—all was woven into the story. As running water is colored by every passing picture, sometimes holding the image with perfect clearness, sometimes distorting it or throwing it back in wavering, uncertain lines, then again drowning it completely in the color and play of its own ripples, so the lad’s story reflected feelings and thoughts, his own and those of other people, mirrored human beings and events, life and books, as well as it could. It was a play life, running side by side with real life. It was a snug retreat, where you could abandon yourself to dreams of the wildest adventures. It was a fairy garden that opened at your slightest nod, and received you in all its glory, shutting out everybody else. Whispering palms closed overhead; flowers of sunshine and leaves like stars on vines of coral spread at your feet, and among them a thousand paths led to all the ages and the climes. If you followed one, it would lead you to one place, and if you followed another, it would lead you to another place, to Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe, to Vaulunder and Henrik Magnard, to Niels Klim and Mungo Park, to Peter Simple and Odysseus—and the moment you wished it, you were home again.

About a month after Niels’s twelfth birthday, two new faces appeared at Lönborggaard.

One was that of the new tutor; the other was that of Edele Lyhne.

The tutor, Mr. Bigum, was a candidate for orders and was at the threshold of the forties. He was rather small, but with a stocky strength like that of a work-horse, broad-chested, high-shouldered, and slightly stooping. He walked with a heavy, slow, deliberate tread, and moved his arms in a vague, expressionless way that seemed to require a great deal of room. His high, wide forehead was flat as a wall, with two perpendicular lines between the eyebrows; the nose was short and blunt, the mouth large with thick, fresh lips. His eyes were his best feature, light in color, mild, and clear. The movements of his eye-balls showed that he was slightly deaf. Nevertheless, he loved music and played his violin with passionate devotion; for the notes, he said, were not heard only with the ears, but with the whole body, eyes, fingers, and feet; if the ear failed sometimes, the hand would find the right note without its aid, by a strange, intuitive genius of its own. Besides, the audible tones were, after all, false, but he who possessed the divine gift of music carried within him an invisible instrument compared to which the most wonderful Cremona was like the stringed calabash of the savage. On this instrument the soul played; its strings gave forth ideal notes, and upon it the great tone-poets had composed their immortal works.

The external music, which was borne on the air of reality and heard with the ears, was nothing but a wretched simulation, a stammering attempt to say the unutterable. It resembled the music of the soul as the statue modelled by hands, carved with a chisel, and meted with a measure resembled the wondrous marble dream of the sculptor which no eye ever beheld and no lip ever praised.

Music, however, was by no means Mr. Bigum’s chief interest. He was first of all a philosopher, but not one of the productive philosophers who find new laws and build new systems. He laughed at their systems, the snail-shells in which they dragged themselves across the illimitable field of thought, fondly imagining that the field was within the snail-shell! And these laws—laws of thought, laws of nature! Why, the discovery of a law meant nothing but the fixing of your own limitations: I can see so far and no farther—as if there were not another horizon beyond the first, and another and yet another, horizon beyond horizon, law beyond law, in an unending vista! No, he was not that kind of a philosopher. He did not think he was vain, or that he overvalued himself, but he could not close his eyes to the fact that his intellect had a wider span than that of other mortals. When he meditated upon the works of the great thinkers, it seemed to him that he strode forward through a region peopled by slumbering thought-giants, who awoke, bathed in the light of his spirit, to consciousness of their own strength. And so it was always; every thought, mood, or sentiment of another person which was vouchsafed the privilege of awakening within him rose up with his sign on its forehead, ennobled, purified, with wings strengthened, endowed with a power and a might that its creator had never dreamed of.

How often had he gazed with an almost humble amazement on the marvellous wealth of his soul and the divine assurance of his spirit! For it would often happen that different days would find him judging the world and the things of the world from entirely divergent points of view, looking at them through hypotheses that were as far apart as night and morning; yet these points of view and hypotheses, which he chose to make his own, never even for one second made him theirs, any more than the god who has taken on the semblance of a bull or a swan becomes a bull or a swan and ceases to be a god.

And no one suspected what dwelt within him—all passed him by unseeing. But he rejoiced in their blindness and felt his contempt for humanity growing. A day would come when the light of his eye would go out, and the magnificent structure of his mind would crumble to its foundations and become as that which had never been, but no work from his hand, no, not a line, would he leave to tell the tale of what had been lost in him. His genius should not be crowned with thorns by the world’s misjudgment, neither should it wear the defiling purple cloak of the world’s admiration. He exulted at the thought that generation after generation would be born and die, and the greatest men of all ages would spend years of their life in the attempt to gain what he could have given them if he had chosen to open his hand.

The fact that he lived in such a humble fashion gave him a curious pleasure, simply because there was such a magnificent extravagance in using his mind to teach children, such a wild incongruity in paying for his time with mere daily bread, and such a colossal absurdity in allowing him to earn this bread upon the recommendation of poor, ordinary mortals, who had vouched for him that he knew enough to take upon himself the miserable task of a tutor. And they had given him non in his examination for a degree!

Oh, there was rapture in feeling the brutal stupidity of an existence that cast him aside as poor chaff and valued as golden grain the empty husks, while he knew in his own mind that his lightest thought was worth a world!

Yet there were other times when the solitude of his greatness weighed upon him and depressed him.

Ah, how often, when he had communed with himself in sacred silence, hour after hour, and then returned again to consciousness of the audible, visible life round about him, had he not felt himself a stranger to its paltriness and corruptibility. Then he had often been like the monk who listened in the monastery woods to a single trill of the paradise bird and, when he came back, found that a century had died. Ah, if the monk was lonely with the generation that lived among the groves he knew, how much more lonely was the man whose contemporaries had not yet been born.

In such desolate moments he would sometimes be seized with a cowardly longing to sink down to the level of the common herd, to share their low-born happiness, to become a native of their great earth and a citizen of their little heaven. But soon he would be himself again.

The other newcomer was Edele Lyhne, Lyhne’s twenty-six-year-old sister. She had lived many years in Copenhagen, first with her mother, who had moved to the city when she became a widow, and, after her mother’s death, in the home of a wealthy uncle, Councillor of State Neergaard. The Neergaards entertained on a large scale and went out a great deal, so Edele lived in a whirl of balls and festivities.

She was admired wherever she went, and envy, the faithful shadow of admiration, also followed her. She was talked about as much as one can be without having done anything scandalous, and whenever men discussed the three reigning beauties of the town there were always many voices in favor of striking out one name and substituting that of Edele Lyhne, but they could never agree on which of two others should yield to her—as for the third, it was out of the question.

Yet very young men did not admire her. They were abashed in her presence, and felt twice as stupid as usual when she listened to them with her look of mild toleration—a maliciously emphasized toleration which crushed them with a sense that she had heard it all before and knew it by heart. They made efforts to shine in her eyes and their own by assuming blasés airs, by inventing wild paradoxes, or, when their desperation reached a climax, by making bold declarations; but all these attempts, jostling and crowding one upon the other in the abrupt transitions of youth, were met with the faint shadow of a smile, a deadly smile of boredom, which made the victim redden and feel that he was the one hundred and eleventh fly in the same merciless spider’s web.

Moreover, her beauty had neither the softness nor the fire to ensnare young hearts. On older hearts and cooler heads she exercised a peculiar fascination.

She was tall. Her thick, heavy hair was blonde with the faint reddish sheen of ripening wheat, but fairer and curling where it grew in two points low on the nape of her neck. Under the high, clean-cut forehead, her eyebrows were pale and indefinite. The light gray eyes were large and clear, neither accented by the brows nor borrowing fitful shadows from the thin, delicate lids. There was something indeterminate and indeterminable in their expression. They always met you with a full and open gaze, without any of the changeful play of sidelong glances or lightning flashes, but almost unnaturally wakeful, invincible, inscrutable. The vivacity was all in the lower part of the face, the nostrils, the mouth, and the chin. The eyes merely looked on. The mouth was particularly expressive. The lips met in a lovely bow with deep, gracious curves and flexible lines, but their beauty was a little marred by a hardness of the lower lip, which sometimes melted away in a smile, and then again stiffened into something akin to brutality.

The bold sweep of the back and the luxuriant fullness of the bosom, contrasted with the classic severity of the shoulders and arms, gave her an audacity, an exotic fascination, which was enhanced by the gleaming whiteness of her skin and the morbid redness of her lips. The effect was provocative and disquieting.

Her tall, slender figure had a subtle distinction, which she was clever enough to underscore, especially in her ball dresses, with sure and conscious art. In fact, her artistic sense applied to her own person would sometimes speak so loudly from her costume that it barely escaped a hint of bad taste even when most exquisitely tasteful. To many this seemed an added charm.

Nothing could be more punctiliously correct than her behavior. In what she said, and in what she permitted to be said, she kept within the strictest bounds of prudery. Her coquetry consisted in not being coquettish, in being incurably blind to her own power, and never making the slightest distinction between her admirers. For that very reason, they all dreamed intoxicating dreams of the face that must be hidden behind the mask; they believed in a fire under the snow and scented depravity in her innocence. None of them would have been surprised to hear that she had a secret lover, but neither would they have ventured to guess his name.

This was the way people saw Edele Lyhne.

She had left the city for Lönborggaard, because her health had suffered from the constant round of pleasures, the thousand and one nights of balls and masquerades. Toward the end of the winter, the doctor had declared her lungs to be affected, and had prescribed fresh air, quiet, and milk. All these things she found in abundance in her present abode, but she also found an unceasing boredom, which made her long for Copenhagen before a week had passed. She filled letter after letter with entreaties that she might be allowed to return from her exile, and hinted that homesickness did her more harm than the air did her good. But the doctor had so alarmed her uncle and aunt that they felt it their duty to turn a deaf ear to her lamentations, no matter how pathetic.

It was not so much the social diversions she pined for; it was rather that she craved the sense of feeling her own life mingling with the sound-filled air of the great city, whereas in the country the stillness in thoughts, in words, in eyes—in everything—made her feel as though she heard herself unceasingly and with inescapable distinctness, just as one hears a watch ticking through a sleepless night. And to know that over there they were living exactly as before—it was as if she were lying dead in the quiet night and heard the strains of music from a ballroom stealing on the air over her grave.

There was no one she could talk to. No one of them all ever caught just the shade of meaning that was the essence of what she said. Of course, they understood her after a fashion, inasmuch as she spoke Danish, but it was in a dull, general sort of a way, just as they might have understood a foreign language which they heard only once in a while. They never had the slightest idea of whom or what was meant by a particular intonation of a word, never dreamed that such a little phrase was a quotation, or that another, used in just such a way, was a new variation of a popular witticism. As for their own speech, it had a decent leanness through which one could positively feel the grammatical ribs, and the words were used with a literalness as if they had just come fresh from the columns of the dictionary. Even the way they said Copenhagen! Sometimes with a mysterious emphasis, as if it were a place where people ate little children; then again with a far-away expression, as if they were speaking of a town in central Africa, or in a festive voice tremulous with history, as they might have said Nineveh or Carthage. The pastor always said Axelstead with a reminiscent rapture, as if it had been the name of one of his old sweethearts. Not one of them could say Copenhagen so that it meant the city stretching from Vesterport to the Custom House on both sides of Östergade and Kongens Nytorv. And so it was with all they said and all they did.

There was not a thing at Lönborggaard that did not displease her; these mealtimes regulated by the sun, this smell of lavender in chests and presses, these Spartan chairs, all these provincial pieces of furniture that stood shrinking against the walls as if they were afraid of people! Even the very air was distasteful to her; she could never take a walk without bringing home a robust perfume of meadow-hay and wild flowers, as if she had been locked up in a haymarket.

And then to be called aunt, Aunt Edele. How it grated on her ears! She got used to it after a while, but in the beginning it made the relation between her and Niels rather cool.

Niels didn’t care.

Then came a Sunday in the early part of August, when Lyhne and his wife had gone out in the carriage to pay a visit, and Niels and Miss Edele were home alone. In the morning Edele had asked Niels to pick some corn-flowers for her, but he had forgotten it. Suddenly, in the afternoon, as he was walking with Frithjof, he remembered, gathered a bouquet, and ran up to the house with it.

Everything was so still that he imagined his aunt must be asleep, and crept silently through the house. At the threshold of the sitting-room he stopped, with bated breath, preparing to approach Edele’s door. The sitting-room was flooded with sunshine, and a blossoming oleander made the air heavy with its sweet fragrance. There was no sound except a muffled splash from the flower-stand whenever the goldfish moved in their glass dish.

Niels crossed the room, balancing himself with outstretched arms, his tongue between his teeth. Cautiously he grasped the door-knob, which was so hot with the sun that it burned his hand, and turned it slowly and carefully, knitting his brows and half closing his eyes. He pulled the door toward him, bent in through the narrow opening, and laid the flowers on a chair just within. The room was dark as if the shades were down, and the air seemed moist with fragrance, the fragrance of attar of roses. As he stooped, he saw only the light straw matting on the floor, the wainscoting under the window, and the lacquered foot of a Gueridon; but when he straightened himself to back out of the door, he caught sight of his aunt.

She was stretched full-length on a couch of sea-green satin, dressed in a fanciful gypsy costume. As she lay on her back, chin up, throat tense, and forehead low, her loosened hair flowed down over the end of the couch and along the rug. An artificial pomegranate flower looked as if it had been washed ashore on an island made by a little bronze-colored shoe in the midst of the dull golden stream.

The motley colors of her dress were rich and mellow. Dull blue, pale rose, gray, and orange were blended in the pattern of a little low-cut bodice of a thick, lustreless stuff. Underneath, she wore a white silk chemise with wide sleeves falling to the elbow. The white had a faint pinkish tone, and was shot with threads of reddish gold. Her skirt of pansy-colored velvet without any border was gathered loosely around her, and slid down over the side of the couch in slanting folds. Her feet and legs were bare, and around her crossed ankles she had wound a necklace of pale corals. An open fan was lying on the floor, showing its pattern of playing-cards arranged in a wheel, and a little farther away a pair of leaf-brown silk stockings had been thrown, one partly rolled up, the other spread out and revealing the red clock.

At the same moment that Niels caught sight of her, she saw him. Involuntarily she made a slight movement as if to rise, but checked herself and lay still as before, only turning her head a little to look at the boy with a questioning smile.

“I brought these,” he said, and went over to her with the flowers.

She held out her hand, glanced at them and then at her costume, comparing the colors, and dropped them with a wearily murmured “Impossible!”

Niels would have picked them up, but she stopped him with a motion of her hand.

“Give me that!” she said, pointing to a red flask that lay on a crumpled handkerchief at her feet.

Niels went to take it. His face was crimson, as he bent over the milk-white, gently rounded legs and the long, slender feet, which had almost the intelligence of a hand in their fine flexible curves. He felt dizzy, and when one foot suddenly turned and bent downward with a quick movement, he almost fell.

“Where did you pick the flowers?” Edele asked.

Niels pulled himself together and turned toward her. “I picked them in the pastor’s rye-field,” he said, in a voice that sounded strange to himself. He handed her the flask without looking up.

Edele noticed his emotion and looked at him astonished. Suddenly she blushed, raised herself on one arm, and drew her feet under her petticoat. “Go, go, go, go!” she said, half peevishly, half shyly, and at every word she sprayed him with the attar of roses.

Niels went. When he was out of the room, she let her feet glide slowly down from the couch and looked at them curiously.

Running with unsteady steps, he hurried through the house to his own room. He felt quite stunned; there was a strange weakness in his knees and a choking sensation in his throat. He threw himself down on the couch and closed his eyes, but it was of no avail, a strange restlessness possessed him; his breath came heavily as in fear, and the light tortured him in spite of his closed eyelids.

Little by little a change came over him. A hot, heavy breath seemed to blow on him and make him helplessly weak. He felt as one in a dream who hears some one calling and tries to go, but cannot move a foot, and is tortured by his weakness, sickens with his longing to get away, is lashed to madness by this calling which does not know one is bound. And he sighed impatiently as if he were ill and looked around quite lost. Never had he felt so miserable, so lonely, so forsaken, and so forlorn.

He sat down in the flood of sunlight from the window, and wept.

From that day Niels felt a timid happiness in Edele’s presence. She was no more a human being like any one else, but an exalted creature, divine by virtue of her strange, mystic beauty. His heart throbbed with rapture in merely looking at her, kneeling to her in his heart, crawling to her feet in abject self-effacement. Yet there were moments when his adoration had to have vent in outward signs of subjection. At such times he would lie in wait for a chance to steal into Edele’s room and go through a fixed rite of a certain interminable number of kisses lavished on the little rug in front of her bed, her shoe, or any other object that presented itself to his idolatry.

He regarded it as a piece of great good fortune that his Sunday jacket happened to be degraded, just then, to every-day use; for the lingering scent of attar of roses was like a mighty talisman with which he could conjure up in a magic mirror the image of Edele as he had seen her lying on the green couch wearing her masquerade costume. In the story he and Frithjof were telling each other, this image was ever present, and from now on the wretched Frithjof was never safe from bare-footed princesses. If he dragged himself through the dense primeval forest, they would call to him from hammocks of vines. If he sought shelter from the storm in a mountain cave, they would rise from their couches of velvety moss to welcome him, and when he dashed, bloody and smoke-blackened, into the pirate’s cabin, shivering the door with a tremendous blow of his sabre, he found them there too, resting on the captain’s green sofa. They bored him terribly, and he could not see why they should suddenly have become so necessary to their beloved heroes.

* * * * *

No matter in how exalted a place a human being may set his throne, no matter how firmly he may press the tiara of the exceptional, that is genius, upon his brow, he can never be sure that he may not, like Nebuchadnezzar, be seized with a sudden desire to go on all-fours and eat grass and herd with the common beasts of the field.

That was what happened to Mr. Bigum when he quite simply fell in love with Miss Edele, and it availed him nothing that he distorted history to find an excuse for his love by calling Edele Beatrice or Laura or Vittoria Colonna, for all the artificial halos with which he tried to crown his love were blown out as fast as he could light them by the stubborn fact that it was Edele’s beauty he was in love with; nor was it the graces of her mind and heart that had captivated him, but her elegance, her air of fashion, her easy assurance, even her graceful insolence. It was a kind of love that might well fill him with shamed surprise at the inconstancy of the children of men.

And what did it all matter! Those eternal truths and makeshift lies that were woven ring in ring to form the heavy armor he called his principles, what were they against his love? If they really were the strength and marrow and kernel of life, then let them show their strength; if they were weaker, let them break; if stronger—But they were already broken, plucked to pieces like the mesh of rotten threads they were. What did she care about eternal truths? And the mighty visions, how did they help him? Thoughts that plumbed the unfathomable, could they win her? All that he possessed was worthless. Even though his soul shone with the radiance of a hundred suns, what did it avail, when his light was hidden under the ugly fustian of a Diogenes’ mantle? Oh, for beauty! Take my soul and give me my thirty pieces of silver—Alcibiades’ body, Don Juan’s mantle, and a court chamberlain’s rank!

But, alas, he had none of these graces, and Edele was by no means attracted to his heavy, philosophic nature. His habit of seeing life in barbarously naked abstractions gave him a noisy dogmaticism, an unpleasant positiveness that jarred her like a misplaced drum in a concert of soft music. The strained quality of his mind, which always seemed to knit its muscles and strike an attitude before every little question like a strong man about to play with iron balls, seemed to her ridiculous. He irritated her by his censorious morality, which pounced on every lightly sketched feeling, indiscreetly tearing away its incognito, rudely calling it by name, just as it was about to flit past him in the course of conversation.

Bigum knew very well what an unfavorable impression he made and how hopeless his love was, but he knew it as we know a thing when we hope with all the strength of our soul that our knowledge is false. There is always the miracle left; and though miracles do not happen, they might happen. Who knows? Perhaps our intelligence, our instinct, our senses, in spite of their daylight clearness, are leading us astray. Perhaps the one thing needful is just that unreasoning courage which follows hope’s will-o’-the-wisp as it burns over seething passions pregnant with desire! It is only when we have heard the door of destiny slam shut that we begin to feel the iron-cold talons of certainty digging into our breast, gathering slowly, slowly around our heart, and fastening their clutches upon the fine thread of hope on which our world of happiness hangs: then the thread is severed; then all that it held falls and is shattered; then the shriek of despair sounds through the emptiness.

In doubt, no one despairs.

On a sunny afternoon in September, Edele was sitting on the landing of the half-dozen broad, old-fashioned steps that led down from the summer parlor into the garden. Behind her, the French windows were wide open, flung back against the motley wall-covering of bright red and bright green vines. She leaned her head against a chair piled high with large black portfolios, and held an etching up before her with both hands. Color prints of Byzantine mozaics in blue and gold were scattered on the pale green rush matting that covered the boards of the landing, on the threshold, and on the oak-brown parquet floor of the summer parlor. At the foot of the steps lay a white shade hat; for Edele’s hair was uncovered, with no ornament but a flower of gold filigree in a pattern to match the gold bracelet she wore high on her arm. Her white dress was of semi-transparent stuff with narrow silky stripes; it had an edging of twisted orange and black chenille and tiny rosettes in the same two colors. Light silk mitts covered her hands and reached to the elbow. They were pearl gray like her shoes.

The yellow sunlight was filtered through the drooping branches of an ancient ash. It pierced the cool dimness, forming distinct lines of light, powdering the air with gold dust, and painting the steps, the wall, and the doors with spots of light, spot of sun upon spot of sun, like a perforated shade. Through the tracery of shadow, each color rose to meet the light: white from Edele’s dress, blood-red from crimson lips, amber from yellow-blonde hair, and a hundred other tints round about, blue and gold, oak-brown, glitter of glass, red and green.

Edele dropped the etching and looked up despondently, her eyes expressing the silent plaint she was too weary to give vent to in a sigh. Then she settled down again as if to shut out her surroundings and withdraw within herself.

Just then Mr. Bigum appeared.

Edele looked at him with a drowsy blinking like that of a child who is too sleepy and comfortable to stir, but too curious to shut its eyes.

Mr. Bigum wore his new beaver hat. He was absorbed in his own thoughts, and gesticulated with his tombac watch in his hand, until the thin silver chain threatened to snap. With a sudden, almost vicious movement, he thrust the watch deep down into his pocket, threw back his head impatiently, caught the lapel of his coat in a peevish grasp, and would have gone on with an angry jerk of his whole body, his face darkened by all the hopeless rage that boils in a man when he is running away from his own torturing thoughts, and knows that he runs in vain.

Edele’s hat, lying at the foot of the steps and shining white against the black earth of the walk, stopped him in his flight. He picked it up with both hands, then caught sight of Edele, and as he stood trying to think of something to say, he held it instead of giving it to her. Not an idea could he find in his brain; not a word would be born on his tongue, and he looked straight ahead with a stupid expression of arrested profundity.

“It is a hat, Mr. Bigum,” said Edele carelessly, to break the embarrassed silence.

“Yes,” said the tutor eagerly, delighted to hear her confirm a likeness that had struck him also; but the next moment he blushed at his clumsy answer.

“It was lying here,” he added hurriedly, “here on the ground like this—just like this,” and he bent down to show where it had lain with an inconsequential minuteness born of his confusion. He felt almost happy in his relief at having given some sign of life, however futile. He was still standing with the hat in his hand.

“Do you intend to keep it?” asked Edele.

Bigum had no answer to that.

“I mean will you give it to me?” she explained.

Bigum came a few steps nearer and handed her the hat. “Miss Lyhne,” he said, “you think—you must not think—I beg you to let me speak; that is—I am not saying anything, but be patient with me!—I love you, Miss Lyhne, unutterably, unutterably, beyond all words I love you. Oh, if language held a word that combined the cringing admiration of the slave, the ecstatic smile of the martyr, and the gnawing homesickness of the exile, with that word I could tell you my love. Oh, listen to me, do not thrust me away yet! Do not think that I am insulting you with an insane hope! I know how insignificant I seem in your eyes, how clumsy and repulsive, yes, repulsive. I am not forgetting that I am poor,—you must know it,—so poor that I have to let my mother live in a charitable institution, and I can’t help it, can’t help it. I am so miserably poor. Yes, Miss Lyhne, I am only a poor servant in your brother’s house, and yet there is a world where I am ruler, powerful, proud, rich, with the crown of victory, noble by virtue of the passion that drove Prometheus to steal the fire from the heaven of the gods. There I am brother to all the great in spirit, whom the earth has borne, and who bear the earth. I understand them as none but equals understand one another; no flight that they have flown is too high for the strength of my wings. Do you understand me? Do you believe me? Oh, don’t believe me! It isn’t true, I am nothing but the Kobold figure you see before you. It is all past; for this terrible madness of love has paralyzed my wings, the eyes of my spirit have lost their sight, my heart is dried up, my soul is drained to bloodless poltroonery. Oh, save me from myself, Miss Lyhne, don’t turn away in scorn! Weep over me, weep, it is Rome burning!”

He had fallen to his knees on the steps, wringing his hands. His face was blanched and distorted, his teeth were clinched in agony, his eyes drowned in tears; his whole body shook under the suppressed sobs that were heard only as a gasping for breath.

“Control yourself, Mr. Bigum,” she said in a slightly too compassionate tone. “Control yourself; don’t give way so, be a man! Please get up and go down into the garden a little while and try to pull yourself together.”

“And you can’t love me at all?” groaned Mr. Bigum almost inaudibly. “Oh, it’s terrible! There is not a thing in my soul that I wouldn’t murder and degrade if I could win you thereby. No, no, even if any one offered me madness and I could possess you in my hallucinations, possess you, then I would say: Take my brain, tear down its wonderful structure with rude hands, break all the fine threads that bind my spirit to the resplendent triumphal chariot of the human mind, and let me sink in the mire of the physical, under the wheels of the chariot, and let others follow the shining paths that lead to the light! Do you understand me? Can you comprehend that even if your love came to me robbed of its glory, debased, befouled, as a caricature of love, as a diseased phantom, I would receive it kneeling as if it were the Sacred Host? But the best in me is useless, the worst in me is useless, too. I cry to the sun, but it does not shine; to the statue, but it does not answer—answer!... What is there to answer except that I suffer? No, these unutterable torments that rend my whole being down to its deepest roots, this anguish is nothing to you but an impertinence. You feel nothing but a little cold offence; in your heart you laugh scornfully at the poor tutor and his impossible passion.”

“You do me an injustice, Mr. Bigum,” said Edele, rising, while Mr. Bigum rose too. “I am not laughing. You ask me if there is no hope, and I answer: No, there is no hope. That is surely nothing to laugh at. But there is one thing I want to say to you. From the first moment you began to think of me, you must have known what my answer would be, and you did know it, did you not? You knew it all the time, and yet you have been lashing all your thoughts and desires on toward the goal which you knew you could not reach. I am not offended by your love, Mr. Bigum, but I condemn it. You have done what so many people do: they close their eyes to the realities and stop their ears when life cries ‘No’ to their wishes. They want to forget the deep chasm fate has placed between them and the object of their ardent longing. They want their dream to be fulfilled. But life takes no account of dreams. There isn’t a single obstacle that can be dreamed out of the world, and in the end we lie there crying at the edge of the chasm, which hasn’t changed and is just where it always was. But we have changed, for we have let our dreams goad all our thoughts and spur all our longings to the very highest tension. The chasm is no narrower, and everything in us cries out with longing to reach the other side, but no, always no, never anything else. If we had only kept a watch on ourselves in time! But now it is too late, now we are unhappy.”

She paused almost as if she woke from a trance. Her voice had been quiet, groping, as if she were speaking to herself, but now it hardened into a cold aloofness.

“I cannot help you, Mr. Bigum. You are nothing to me of what you wish to be. If that makes you unhappy, you must be unhappy; if you suffer, you must suffer—there are always some who have to suffer. If you make a human being your God and the ruler of your fate, you must bow to the will of your divinity, but it is never wise to make yourself gods, or to give your soul over to another; for there are gods who will not step down from their pedestals. Be sensible, Mr. Bigum! Your god is so small and so little worth your worship; turn from it and be happy with one of the daughters of the land.”

With a faint little smile, she went in through the summer parlor, while Mr. Bigum looked after her, crestfallen. For another fifteen minutes he walked up and down before the steps. All the words that had been spoken seemed to be still vibrating through the air; she had so lately gone, it seemed that her shadow must still linger there; it seemed that she could not yet be out of reach of his prayers, and everything could not be inexorably ended. But after a while the chambermaid came out and gathered up the engravings, carried in the chair, the portfolios, the rush matting—everything.

Then he could go too.

In the open gable window up above, Niels sat gazing after him. He had heard the whole conversation from beginning to end. His face had a frightened look, and a nervous trembling passed through his body. For the first time he was afraid of life. For the first time his mind grasped the fact that when life has sentenced you to suffer, the sentence is neither a fancy nor a threat, but you are dragged to the rack, and you are tortured, and there is no marvellous rescue at the last moment, no awakening as from a bad dream.

He felt it as a foreboding which struck him with terror.

* * * * *

Edele did not have a good autumn, and the winter drained her strength completely. Spring, when it came, did not find one poor little life-germ that it could warm and coax into growth; it found only a withering, which no gentleness and no warmth could arrest or even retard. But it could at least pour a flood of light over the paling life and caress the ebbing strength with fragrant, balmy air, as the evening crimson follows slowly in the wake of dying day.

The end came in May, on a day flooded with sunshine, one of the days when the lark is never silent, and you can almost see the rye grow. The great cherry-trees outside of her window were white with flowers—nosegays of snow, wreaths of snow, cupolas, arches, garlands, a fairy architecture against the bluest of skies.

She was very weak that day, and withal she felt a strange sense of lightness. She knew what was coming, for that morning she had sent for Bigum and said good-by to him.

Her uncle had come over from Copenhagen, and all that afternoon the handsome, white-haired man sat by her bedside with his hand folded in her hands. He did not speak, but once in a while he would move his hand, and she would press it; she would look up, and he would smile to her. Her brother, too, was in the room, gave her medicine, and helped her in other ways.

She lay very still with closed eyes, while familiar pictures from life over there flitted past her. Sorgenfri with hanging birches, the red church at Lyngby standing on a foundation of graves, and the white country house with the bit of sunken road leading down to the sea, where the paling always was green as if painted by the water,—the images took shape before her, grew clear, melted away, and vanished. And other pictures came. There was Bredgade when the sun went down, and the darkness closed in around the houses. There was the queer Copenhagen you found when you came in from the country in the forenoon. It seemed so weird with its hurry and bustle in the sunlight, with the whitened window-panes and the streets smelling of fruit. There was something unreal about the houses in the strong light; the noise and rattle of wheels could not chase away the silence that seemed to enfold them.... Then came the dim, quiet drawing-room in the autumn evenings, when she was dressed for the theatre, and the others were not down yet—the smell of incense, the wood fire from the stove lighting up the carpet—the rain whipping the windows—the horses stamping at the door—the melancholy cry of the mussel-venders ... and back of all this the theatre awaiting her with light and music and festive glow.

With such pictures the afternoon wore away.

Niels and his mother were in the parlor. Niels knelt by the sofa with his face pressed down against its brown velvet and his hands clasped over his head. He wept and wailed aloud, giving himself up to his grief without any attempt at self-control. Mrs. Lyhne sat beside him. The hymn-book lay on the table in front of her, open at the hymns usually sung at funerals. Now and then she read a few verses, and sometimes she would bend down over her son to speak a word of soothing or chiding, but Niels would not be comforted, and she could not stop his weeping or the wild prayers born of his despair.

Presently Lyhne appeared in the door of the sick-room. He made no sign, but looked at them so solemnly that both rose and followed him in to his sister. He took them by the hand and led them to the bed. Edele looked up and gazed at each one in turn, while her lips motioned for words. Then Lyhne took his wife over to the window and sat down there with her. Niels threw himself on his knees at the foot of the bed.

He wept softly and prayed with clasped hands, eagerly and incessantly, in a low, passionate whisper. He told God that he would not stop hoping. “I won’t let You go, Lord, I won’t let You go before You have said ‘Yes’! You mustn’t take her away from us; for You know how we love her—You mustn’t, You mustn’t! Oh, I can’t say, ‘Thy will be done;’ for Your will is to let her die, but, oh, let her live! I will thank You and obey You. I will do everything I know You want me to do. I’ll be so good and never offend You, if You will only let her live! Do You hear, God? Oh, stop, stop, and make her well before it’s too late! I will, I will, oh, what can I promise You?—Oh, I’ll thank You, never, never, forget You; oh, but hear me! Don’t You see she’s dying, don’t You see she’s dying? Do You hear? Take Your hand away! I can’t lose her, God, I can’t! Let her live, won’t You please, won’t You please? Oh, it’s wicked of You—”

Outside, beyond the window, the white flowers flushed to pink in the light of the setting sun. Arch upon arch, the blossoming sprays built of their gossamer bloom a rose-castle, a vaulted choir of roses, and through this airy dome the azure sky shone with a softened twilight blue, while golden lights and lights of gold flaming to crimson shot like the rays of a nimbus from every garlanded line of the ethereal temple.

White and still, Edele lay there with the old man’s hand between both of hers. Slowly she breathed out her life, breath by breath; fainter and fainter was the rising of her breast; heavier and heavier fell the eyelids.

“My love to Copenhagen!” was her last low whisper.

But her last message was heard by no one. It did not come from her lips even as a breath—her message to him, the great artist whom she had loved secretly with her whole soul, but to whom she had been nothing, only a name that his ear knew, only one unrecognized figure in the great admiring public.

The light faded into blue dusk, and her hands fell weakly apart. The shadows grew—shadows of night and of death.

The old man bent down over her bed and laid his hands on her pulse, waiting quietly, and when the last throb of life had ebbed away, when the last feeble pulse-beat was stilled, he lifted the pale hand to his lips.

“Little Edele!”