XI

Three years had passed; Erik and Fennimore had been married for two years, and made their home in a little villa at Mariagerfjord. Niels had not seen Fennimore since that summer at Fjordby. He lived in Copenhagen and went out a great deal, but had no intimate friends except Dr. Hjerrild, who called himself old because touches of gray had begun to appear in his dark hair.

That unexpected engagement had been a hard blow to Niels. It had a benumbing effect on him. He grew more bitter and less confiding, and had no longer so much enthusiasm to pit against Hjerrild’s pessimism. Though he still pursued his studies, their plan was less and less definite, while his purpose of some time completing them and beginning his real lifework flickered uncertainly. He lived much among people, but very little with them. They interested him, but he did not in the least care to have them be interested in him; for he felt the force that should have driven him to do his part with the others or against them slowly ebbing out of him. He could wait, he told himself, even if he had to wait till it was too late. Whoever has faith is in no hurry⁠—that was his excuse to himself. For he believed that, when he came down to the bedrock of his own nature, he did have faith strong enough to move mountains⁠—the trouble was that he never managed to set his shoulder to them. Once in a while, the impulse to create welled up in him, and he longed to see a part of himself freed in work that should be his very own. For days he would be excited with the happy, titanic effort of carting the clay for his Adam, but he never formed it in his own image. The willpower necessary to persistent self-concentration was not in him. Weeks would pass before he could make up his mind to abandon the work, but he did abandon it, asking himself, in a fit of irritation, why he should continue. What more had he to gain? He had tasted the rapture of conception; there remained the toil of rearing, cherishing, nourishing, carrying to perfection⁠—Why? For whom? He was no pelican, he told himself. But argue as he might, he was dissatisfied with himself and felt that he had not fulfilled his own expectations; nor did it avail him to carp at these expectations and ask whether they were well founded. He had reached the point where he had to choose, for when first youth is past⁠—early or late in accordance with each person’s individuality⁠—then, early or late, dawns the day when Resignation comes to us as a temptress, luring us to forego the impossible and be content. And Resignation has much in her favor; for how often have not the idealistic aspirations of youth been beaten back, its enthusiasms been shamed, its hopes laid waste!⁠—The ideals, the fair and beautiful, have lost nothing of their radiance, but they no longer walk here among us as in the early days of our youth. The broad, firmly planted stairway of worldly wisdom has conveyed them back, step by step, to that heaven whence our simpler faith once brought them down; and there they sit, radiant but distant, smiling but weary, in divine quiescence, while the incense of a slothful adoration rises, puff on puff, in festive convolutions.

Niels Lyhne was tired. These repeated runnings to a leap that was never leaped had wearied him. Everything seemed to him hollow and worthless, distorted and confused, and, oh, so petty! He preferred to stop his ears and stop his mouth and to immerse himself in studies that had nothing to do with the busy everyday world, but were like an ocean apart, where he could wander peacefully in silent forests of seaweed among curious animals.

He was tired, and the root of his weariness sprang from his baffled hope of love; thence it had spread, quickly and surely, through his whole being, to all his faculties and all his thoughts. Now he was cold and passionless enough, but in the beginning, after the blow had fallen, his love had grown, day by day, with the irresistible power of a malignant fever. There had been moments when his soul was almost bursting with insane passion; it swelled like a wave in its infinite longing and frothing desire; it rose and went on rising and rising, till every fibre in his brain and every cord in his heart was strung tense to the breaking-point. Then weariness had come, soothing and healing, making his nerves dull against pain, his blood too cold for enthusiasm, and his pulse too weak for action. And more than that, it had protected him against a relapse by giving him all the prudence and egoism of the convalescent. When his thoughts went back to those days in Fjordby, he had a sense of immunity akin to the feeling of a man who has just passed through a severe illness and knows that now, when he has endured his allotted agony, and the fever has burned itself to ashes within him, he will be free for a long, long time.

Then it happened, one summer day, after Erik and Fennimore had been married for two years, that he received a half-whining, half-boasting letter from Erik, in which he blamed himself for having wasted his time of late. He did not know what the matter was, but he had no ideas. The people he met in the neighborhood were fine, jolly fellows, no conventionality or nonsense about them, but they were perfect dromedaries with regard to art. There was not a human being he could talk with, and he had gotten himself into a slough of laziness and stagnation which he could not pull out of. He never had a glimmering of an idea or a mood, and never felt inspired. Sometimes he was afraid that his power had run out, and that he never would do anything any more. But this could not possibly go on forever! It must come back; he had been too rich to end like this, and when it came he would show them what art was, those fellows who painted away all the time as if they had learned it by rote. For the present, however, he was as if bewitched, and it would be an act of friendship if Niels would visit Mariagerfjord. They would make him as comfortable as circumstances allowed, and he could just as well spend his vacation there as any other place. Fennimore sent her love and would be glad to see him.

This letter was so unlike Erik that Niels saw at once there must be something serious amiss or he would not complain in this fashion. He was aware, too, of how little volume there was in the wellspring of Erik’s production⁠—a slender stream only, which unfavorable circumstances could easily dry out. He would go at once! For all that had happened, Erik should find him a faithful friend; whatever the years had loosened of old ties and uprooted of old illusions, he would at least know how to guard this old friendship of their childhood. He had helped Erik before, and he would help him now. A fanaticism of friendship possessed him. He would renounce his future, fame, ambitious dreams, everything, for Erik’s sake. All that he owned of smoldering enthusiasm and creative ferment should be Erik’s; he would merge himself in Erik with his whole self and all his ideas, holding nothing back, keeping nothing for himself. He dreamed of greatness for the friend who had torn his life asunder so roughly, and saw himself blotted out, forgotten, impoverished, deprived of his intellectual heritage; and he went on dreaming that his gift to Erik should become no longer a loan, but Erik’s very own, as he coined it into works and deeds and gave it his stamp. Erik in honor and glory, and he himself one of the many, many commonplace folk and nothing else; poor, at last, by necessity, not by choice; a real beggar, not a prince in disguise.⁠ ⁠… And it was sweet to dream himself so bitterly humble.

But dreams are dreams, and he laughed at himself, as he thought that people who neglect their own work always have no end of time to interest themselves in that of others. It also occurred to him that, when he came face to face with Erik, the latter would, of course, disclaim his letter and pass it off as a joke. He certainly would think it extremely absurd if Niels were actually to present himself with the announcement that he was ready to help him recover his creative power. Nevertheless he went. In his inmost heart he believed that he could do some good, and no matter how much he tried to explain it away or cast doubts upon it, he could not rid himself of the feeling that it really was the friendship of their boyhood which had reasserted itself in all its old simplicity and warmth, in spite of the years and what the years had brought.

The villa at Mariagerfjord belonged to an elderly couple who had been forced by ill-health to make their home in the south for an indefinite period. They had not intended to rent the place, as they had started out with the idea of returning after six months, and therefore had left everything just as it was. So when Erik leased the house fully furnished, this was so literally true that he got it with bric-a-brac, family portraits, and everything else, even to an attic full of decrepit furniture with old letters in the drawers of the secretaries.

Erik had discovered the villa when he left Fjordby after his engagement. As it contained everything they needed, and as he hoped to go to Italy in a year or two, he had persuaded Consul Claudi to postpone the purchase of household furnishings for a while. They had moved into Marianelund very much as into a hotel, except that they brought a few more trunks than travellers usually carry.

The house fronted the fjord, less than twenty feet from the water, and was rather ordinary in appearance. It had a balcony above, a veranda below, and at the back a young garden with trees no thicker than walking-sticks, but from the garden one could step right into a magnificent bit of beech woods with heathery glades and wide clefts opening between banks of white clay, and that made up for many shortcomings.

This was Fennimore’s new home, and for a while it was as bright as happiness could make it, for they were both young and in love, strong and healthy, and without a care for their means of subsistence, either spiritual or material.

But every palace of joy that rises heavenward has sand mixed in the earth on which it is founded, and the sand will collect and run away, slowly perhaps, imperceptibly perhaps, but it runs and runs, grain by grain.⁠ ⁠… And love? Even love is not a rock, however much we may wish to believe it.

She loved him with her whole soul, with the hot, tremulous passion born of fear. He was to her much more than a god, much nearer⁠—he was an idol, whom she worshipped without reason and without reserve.

His love was strong as hers, but it lacked the fine, manly tenderness that protects the loved woman against herself and watches over her dignity. Dimly he felt it as a duty, which called him sometimes in a faint, low voice, but he would not hear. She was too alluring in her blind love; her beauty, which had the provocative luxuriance and the humble seductiveness of the female slave, incited him to a passion that knew neither bounds nor mercy.

In the old myth about Amor, is it not told somewhere that he puts his hand over Psyche’s eyes before they fly away, rapturously, into the glowing night?

Poor Fennimore! if she could have been consumed by the fire of her own heart, he who should have guarded her would have fanned the flames; for he was like that drunken monarch who swung the incendiary torch, shouting with joy to see his imperial city burn, intoxicating himself with the sight of the leaping flames, until the ashes made him sober.

Poor Fennimore! She did not know that the hymn of joy can be sung so often that both melody and words are lost, and nothing remains but a twaddle of triviality. She did not know that the intoxication which uplifts today takes its strength from the wings of tomorrow, and when at length sobriety dawned, gray and heavy, she realized tremblingly that they had loved themselves down to a sweet contempt for themselves and each other⁠—a sweet contempt which day by day lessened in sweetness and became, at last, utterly bitter. They turned away from each other as far as they could; he, to dream about his betrayed ideal of lofty coldness and scornful grace; she, to gaze with longing despair at the dim, quiet shores of her girlhood days, now so immeasurably far away. With each day that passed, it seemed harder to bear; shame burned madly in her veins, and a suffocating disgust with herself made everything seem wretched and hopeless. There was a small deserted room containing nothing but the trunks she had brought from home, and there she would often sit, hour after hour, until the sun sank over the world out there and filled the room with reddish light. There she tortured herself with thoughts sharper than thorns and scourged herself with words more stinging than whips, until she was stupefied by misery and tried to deaden her pain by throwing herself down on the floor as something too full of corruption and dregs⁠—a carrion of herself⁠—too foul to be the seat of a soul. Her husband’s mistress! That thought was never out of her mind; with that she threw herself in the dust and trampled on herself; with that she barred every hope of regeneration and turned every happy memory to stone.

Gradually a hard, brutal indifference came over her, and she ceased to despair, as she had long ceased to hope. Her heaven had fallen, but she did not try to raise the vault again in her dreams. The earth was good enough for her, since she was but of earth, earthy. She did not hate Erik, nor did she draw away from him. No, she accepted his kisses; she despised herself too much to repulse them, and besides, was she not his wife⁠—his woman?

For Erik, too, the awakening was bitter, although his man’s prosaic common sense had warned him that some time it must come. When it really came, however, when love no longer gave boot for every bane, and the veil of gleaming gold in which it had descended to earth for him had been wafted away, he felt such a sinking of his spirits and such a sluggishness creeping over all his powers that he was angered and alarmed. Feverishly he turned to his work to assure himself that he had lost nothing else besides happiness, but art did not give him the answer he hoped for. He got hold of some unlucky ideas which he could not do anything with and yet could not make up his mind to abandon. Though they refused to take shape, they continued to tease his mind, and prevented other ideas from breaking through or absorbing his energy. He grew despondent and dissatisfied and sank into a moody idleness, since work was so confoundedly perverse, and since, of course, he had only to wait for the spirit to move him again. But time passed; his talent was still barren, and here by the quiet fjord there was nothing that could fructify it; nor were there any fellow artists whose triumphs could spur him on either to emulation or to creative opposition.

This inactivity grew unbearable. He was seized with a violent craving to feel himself, no matter how or in what, and since nothing else offered, he turned to a crowd of older and younger men about the neighborhood who enlivened the dullness of country life by such dissipations as their limited fancy could invent and their rather one-sided taste could savor. The kernel of their pleasures was always drinking and cards, no matter whether the shell enclosing them was called a market-day or a hunt. Nor did it make any particular difference that the scene was occasionally laid in a small neighboring town, and certain real or imagined business was transacted with the tradesmen during the afternoon; for the bargain was always closed at night in the tavern, where the discriminating landlord always showed persons of the right stripe into Number Caveat. If there happened to be strolling players in town, the tradesmen were let go, for the players were more sociable, did not shy at the bottle, and were usually ready to undergo the miraculous⁠—though never quite successful⁠—cure of drinking themselves sober in gin after getting drunk on champagne.

The leader of the crowd was a hunting squire of sixty, and its main stock was made up of small landowners and country gentlemen in the neighborhood, though it also included a massive young dandy of a brandy-distiller and a white-necked tutor, who had not been a tutor for twenty years or more, but had gone as a vagrant from house to house with a sealskin bag and an old gray mare, which he used to say he had bought from a horse-butcher. He was a silent drinker, a virtuoso on the flute, and was supposed to know Arabic. Among those whom the squire called his “staff” were also a solicitor, who always had new stories to tell, and a doctor, who knew only a single one from the siege of Lübeck in the year 6.

The members of this band were widely scattered, and it scarcely ever happened that they were all together at one time, but whenever anyone stayed away from the company too long the squire would issue a summons to the faithful to inspect the renegade’s oxen, which all understood to mean that they should quarter themselves upon the unfortunate man for two or three days and turn his house upside down with drinking, gambling, and whatever rustic amusements the season afforded. During such a punitive visit, it once happened that the whole party was snowbound, and the host’s supply of coffee, rum, and sugar ran out, so that they were reduced to drinking a coffee punch boiled of chicory, sweetened with syrup, and strengthened with brandy.

It was a coarse-grained crowd of boon companions that Erik had fallen in with, but perhaps people of such tremendous animal vitality could hardly find sufficient outlet in more civilized amusements, and their unfailing good humor and broad, bruin-like joviality really took away much of the grossness. If Erik’s talent had been akin to that of Brouwer or Ostade, this choice band of revellers would have been a perfect gold mine to him. As it was, he got nothing out of it except that he enjoyed it very much, too much in fact, for soon this wild racketing became indispensable to him and took up nearly all his time. Now and then, he would blame himself for his idling and vow to end it, but whenever he made an attempt at working, the sense of blankness and spiritual impotence would come over him again and drive him back to the old life.

The letter to Niels had been framed one day when his everlasting barrenness had made him wonder if his talent had been attacked by a wasting disease. As soon as it was sent, he regretted it, and hoped that Niels would let his plaint go in at one ear and out at the other.

But Niels he came, the knight-errant of friendship personified, and was met with that mixture of rebuff and pity which knights-errant in all times have encountered from those in whose behalf they have dragged Rosinante out of her snug stable. As Niels was tactful, however, and bided his time, Erik thawed before long, and the old intimacy was soon established between them; for Erik’s need of pouring himself out in complaint and confession had grown into an almost physical craving.

One evening after bedtime, when Fennimore had retired, they sat over their cognac and water in the dark sitting-room. Only the glow of their cigars showed where they were, and once in a while, when Niels leaned far back in his chair, his upturned profile would stand out black against the dark windowpane. They had been drinking a good deal, Erik especially, while they sat talking of the time when they were boys at Lønborggård. Now Fennimore’s departure had made a pause which neither of them seemed inclined to break, for their thoughts came stealing upon them in a pleasant languor, as they listened drowsily to the singing of their blood, warm from the cognac.

“What fools we were when we were twenty,” came Erik’s voice at last. “God knows what we expected and how we had got it into our heads that such things were on earth. We called them by the same names that they bear in reality, but we meant something entirely above and beyond comparison with this tame sufficiency that we’ve got. There isn’t much to life, really. Do you think so?”

“Oh, I don’t know; I take it for what it is worth. We don’t generally live very much. Most of the time we only exist. If you could get life handed to you in one whole large, appetizing cake that you could set your teeth in⁠ ⁠… but doled out in bits!⁠—no, it’s not amusing.”

“Tell me, Niels⁠—it’s only to you I can talk of such absurd things; I don’t know how it is, but you’re so queer. Tell me⁠—is there anything in your glass? All right!⁠—Have you ever thought of death?”

“Have I? Why, yes. Have you?”

“I don’t mean at funerals or when a man is sick, but sometimes when I’m just sitting here comfortably it comes over me like⁠—like a despair simply. When I sit here and mope and don’t do anything and can’t do anything, then I actually feel the time slipping away from me. Hours and weeks and months rush past with nothing in them, and I can’t nail them to the spot with a piece of work. I don’t know if you understand what I mean, but I want to get hold of it with something achieved. When I paint a picture, the time I use for it remains mine forever; it isn’t lost, even though it’s past. I am sick when I think of the days as they go⁠—incessantly. And I have nothing, or I can’t get at it. It’s torture! I sometimes get into such a rage that I have to get up and walk the floor and sing some idiotic thing to keep myself from crying, and then when I stop I am almost mad to think that the time has gone meanwhile, and is going while I think, and going and going. There is nothing more wretched than to be an artist. Here I am, strong and healthy; I have eyes to see; my blood is warm and red; my heart beats, and there is nothing the matter with my head, and I want to work, but I can’t. I am struggling and groping for something that eludes me, something that I can’t grasp even if I toil and moil till I sweat blood. What can a man do for inspiration or to get an idea? It is all one whether I concentrate or whether I go out and pretend I am not looking for anything, never, never anything except the sense that now Time is standing up to the waist in eternity and hauling in the hours, and they rush past, twelve white and twelve black, never stopping, never stopping. What shall I do? What do people do when they feel like that? Surely, I can’t be the first. Have you nothing to suggest?”

“Travel.”

“No, anything but that. What made you think of that? You don’t believe I’m done for, do you?”

“Done for! No, but I thought the new impressions⁠—”

“The new impressions! Exactly. Have you never heard about people who had plenty of talent in their first youth while they were fresh and full of hope and plans, but when youth had passed their talent was gone too⁠—and never came back?”

They were silent for a long time.

“They travelled, Niels, to get new impressions, that was their fixed idea. The south, the Orient⁠—it was all in vain; it slid off from them as from a looking-glass. I have seen their graves in Rome⁠—two of them, but there are many, many others. One of them went mad.”

“I have never heard that about painters before.”

“It’s true. What can it be, do you think? A hidden nerve that’s given way? Or something we have failed in or sinned against in ourselves, perhaps⁠—who knows? A soul is such a fragile thing, and no one knows how far the soul extends in a human being. We ought to be good to ourselves⁠—Niels!” His voice had grown low and soft. “I have often longed to travel, because I felt so empty. You have no idea how I have longed for it, but I simply don’t dare to, for suppose it didn’t help, and that I was one of those people I was telling you of. What then! Think of standing face to face with the certainty that I was done for, didn’t possess anything, couldn’t do anything⁠—think of it⁠—couldn’t do anything! A paltry wretch, a cursed dog of a cripple, a miserable eunuch! What do you think would become of me? And after all it is not impossible. My first youth is past, and as for illusions and that sort of thing, I can assure you I haven’t many left. It’s terrible how we go through them, and yet I was never one of those who’re anxious to get rid of them. I was not like you and the rest of the people who used to foregather at Mrs. Boye’s⁠—you were always so busy plucking the fine feathers from one another, and the balder you got, the more you crowed. Still what’s the difference⁠—sooner or later we all start molting.”

They were silent again. The air was bitter with cigar smoke and heavy with cognac, and they sighed drearily, oppressed by the stuffiness of the room and by their own very sad hearts.

Niels had travelled two hundred miles to bring aid, and here he sat feeling his impulse put to shame, while the colder side of his nature looked on. For what could he do, when it came to the point? What if he tried to talk picturesquely to Erik, in many words of purple and ultramarine, dripping with light and wading in shadow! There had been a dream of something like that in his brain when he started out. How utterly absurd! To bring aid! You might perhaps drive away the goddess with the closed hands from an artist’s door, but that was certainly the utmost; you could no more help him to create than you could help him, if he were paralyzed, to lift his little finger by his own strength. No, not though your heart overflowed with affection and sympathy and devotion and everything else that was generous.⁠ ⁠… What you ought to do was to mind your own affairs; that was useful and healthy, but of course it was easier to let your heart run amuck in a large and generous way. The only trouble was that it was so lamentably impracticable and so utterly ineffective. Minding your own affairs and doing it well did not insure you paradise, but at least you did not have to cast down your eyes before either God or man.

Opportunity was abundant for Niels to make melancholy reflections on the impotence of a kind heart, for all that he accomplished was to keep Erik at home a little more than usual for a month or so. Nevertheless, he did not care to return to Copenhagen during the hot season, and as he did not wish to remain a guest indefinitely, he engaged a room with a family a little above the peasant class, on the opposite shore of the fjord, so near that he could row over to Marianelund in fifteen minutes. Now that he was accustomed to the neighborhood, he would just as lief stay there as any other place, for he was one of the susceptible people over whom outward surroundings easily acquire a hold. Besides, his friend and his cousin Fennimore were there, and that was reason enough, especially as there was not a human being anywhere else expecting him.

During the trip from Copenhagen, he had carefully thought out his behavior to Fennimore and how he would show her that he had forgotten so completely that he did not remember there was anything to forget; above all, no coldness, but a friendly indifference, a superficial cordiality, a polite sympathy; that was the proper attitude.

But it was all thrown away.

The Fennimore he met was a different person from the one he had left. She was still lovely; her form was luxuriant and beautiful as before, and she had the same slow, languid movements that charmed him in former days, but there was a dreary thoughtlessness in the expression of her mouth as of one who had thought too much, and a pitiful, tortured cruelty in her gentle eyes. He did not understand it at all, but one fact was at least clear, and that was that she had had other things to think of than remembering him, and that she was quite callous to any memories he could awaken. She looked like one who had made her choice and done the worst she could do with it.

Little by little, he began to spell and put things together, and one day, when they were walking along the shore, he began to understand.

Erik was cleaning up his studio, and as they were strolling by the water, the maid came out with an apronful of refuse which she threw on the beach. There was a litter of old brushes, fragments of casts, broken palette knives, bits of oil bottles, and empty paint tubes. Niels poked the heap with his foot, and Fennimore looked on with the vague curiosity people often feel in turning over old rubbish. Suddenly Niels drew his foot away as if something had burned it, but caught himself as quickly, and gave the pile another kick.

“Oh, let me see it,” begged Fennimore, and put her hand on his arm as if to stop him. He bent down and pulled out a plaster cast of a hand holding an egg.

“It must be a mistake,” he said.

“Why no, it is broken,” she replied quietly, as she took it from him. “See, the forefinger is gone,” she added, pointing, but when she suddenly became aware that the egg had been cut in two and a yolk painted inside it with chrome yellow, she blushed, and, bending down, she slowly and deliberately knocked the hand against a stone, until it was broken into little bits.

“Do you remember the time it was cast?” Niels asked, in order to say something.

“I remember that my hand was smeared with green soap so the plaster should not stick to it. Is that what you were thinking of?”

“No, I mean the time when Erik passed the cast around at the tea-table. Don’t you remember, when it came to your old aunt, how her eyes filled with tears, and she embraced you with the deepest compassion and kissed you on the brow, as if some harm had been done to you?”

“Yes, people are so sensitive.”

“No, we all laughed at her, but there was a delicacy in it nevertheless, although it was so nonsensical.”

“Yes, there is much of that nonsensical delicacy in the world.”

“I believe you want to quarrel with me today.”

“No, I don’t, but there is something I want to say to you. You won’t take offence at a little frankness?⁠—Well, then⁠—suppose a man tells a story that is not very nice in his wife’s presence and perhaps otherwise shows what appears to you a lack of consideration for her; don’t you think it is unnecessary for you then to express your protest by your emphatic fastidiousness and your exceeding great chivalry? It is fair to assume that the man knows his own wife best, and knows that it won’t offend or wound her; otherwise he would not do it. Is not that true?”

“No, it is not true, generally speaking, but in this case, and on your authority, I don’t mind saying yes.”

“That’s right. You may be sure that women are not the ethereal creatures many a good youth fancies; they are really no more delicate than men, and not very different from them. Take my word for it, there has been some filthy clay used in the shaping of them both.”

“Dearest Fennimore! Thank God you don’t know what you are saying, but you are very unjust to women and to yourself. I believe in woman’s purity.”

“Woman’s purity! What do you mean by woman’s purity?”

“I mean⁠—that is⁠—”

“You mean⁠—I will tell you; you mean nothing, for that is another piece of nonsensical delicacy. A woman can’t be pure, and isn’t supposed to be⁠—how could she? It is against nature! And do you think God made her to be pure? Answer me!⁠—No, and ten thousand times no. Then why this lunacy! Why fling us up to the stars with one hand, when you have to pull us down with the other! Can’t you let us walk the earth by your side, one human being with another, and nothing more at all? It is impossible for us to step firmly on the prose of life when you blind us with your poetic will-o’-the-wisps. Let us alone! For God’s sake, let us alone!”

She sat down and wept.

Niels understood much. Fennimore would have been miserable had she known how much. Was it not partly the old story of love’s holiday fare which refuses to turn into daily bread, but goes on being holiday fare, only more tasteless, more insipid, and less nourishing, day by day? One can’t perform a miracle, and the other can’t perform it, and there they sit in their banqueting clothes, careful to smile and to use festive words, but underneath they feel the agony of hunger and thirst, while their eyes shrink from each other, and hatred begins to grow in their hearts. Was not that the first chapter, and was not the other the equally dreary tale of a woman’s despair at not being able to recover herself after finding out that the demigod, whose bride she became so joyously, was only an ordinary mortal? First the despair, the bootless despair, and then the merciful stupor⁠—that must be the explanation. It seemed to Niels that he understood everything: the hardness in her, the dreary humility, and her coarseness, which was the bitterest drop in the whole goblet. By degrees he came to see also that his delicacy and deferential homage must oppress and irritate her, because a woman who has been hurled from the purple couch of her dreams to the pavement below will quickly resent any attempt to spread carpets over the stones which she longs to feel in all their hardness. In her first despair she is not satisfied to tread the path with her feet: she is determined to crawl it on her knees, choosing the way that is steepest and roughest. She desires no helping hand and will not lift her head⁠—let it sink down with its own heaviness, so that she may put her face to the ground and taste the dust with her tongue!

Niels pitied her with all his heart, but he left her alone as she desired.

It was hard to look on and not help, to sit apart and dream her happy, in stupid dreams, or to wait and calculate, with the cold knowledge of the physician, how long she had to suffer. He told himself, in this dreary wisdom, that there could be no relief until her old hope in the fair, gleaming treasures of life had bled to death and a more sluggish stream had entered her veins, making her dull enough to forget, blunt enough to accept, and, at last, at last, coarse enough to rejoice in the thick atmosphere of a bliss many heavens lower than that which she had meekly hoped and humbly prayed for wings to reach.⁠—He was full of disgust with all the world when he thought that she, to whom he had once knelt in adoration, had come to such a pass that she had been forced to a slave’s estate, and stood at the gate shivering with cold, while he rode past on his high horse with the large coins of life jingling in his pocket.

One Sunday afternoon, in the latter part of August, Niels rowed across the fjord. Fennimore was at home alone when he came; he found her lying on a sofa in the corner room, and very miserable. Her breath came with that low, monotonous moaning which seems to afford relief from pain, and she said that she had a frightful headache. There was no one to help her, for she had given the maid leave to go home to Hadsund, and soon afterward someone had come and carried off Erik; she could not understand where they had gone in the rain. Now she had been lying there for two hours trying to sleep, but it was impossible, the pain was so bad. She had never had it before, and it had come on so suddenly⁠—at dinnertime there had been nothing the matter. First it was in the temples, and then it seemed to dig deeper and deeper and deeper in; now it seemed to be behind her eyes⁠—if it only was not anything dangerous. She was not used to being ill, and was very frightened and unhappy.

Niels comforted her as well as he could, telling her to lie still, close her eyes, and not speak. He found a heavy shawl, which he wrapped around her feet, fetched vinegar from the buffet, and made a cold compress, which he laid on her brow. Then he sat down quietly by the window, and looked out at the rain.

From time to time, he stole over to her on tiptoe and changed the compress without speaking, merely nodding to her, as she looked up at him gratefully between his hands. Sometimes she wanted to speak, but he hushed her with a look, shaking his head, and returned to his seat again.

At last she fell asleep.

One hour passed and another, and she was still sleeping. Slowly one quarter slipped into the other, while the melancholy daylight faded, and the shadows in the room waxed larger, as if they were growing out of the furniture and the walls. Outside the rain fell, evenly and steadily, blotting out every other sound in its low, incessant patter.

She was still sleeping.

The fumes of the vinegar and the vanilla scent of the heliotrope, mingling in a pungent odor like wine, filled the room. Warmed by their breath, the air covered the gray windowpanes with a dewy film, which grew denser with the increasing coolness of the evening.

By this time, he was far away in memories and dreams, though a part of his consciousness still watched over the sleeper and followed her sleep. Gradually, as the darkness pressed in, his fancy wearied of feeding these dreams that flickered up and died down, just as the soil gets tired of bringing forth the same crop again and again; and the dreams grew feebler, more sterile, and stiffer, losing the luxuriant details that had entwined them like long shoots of clinging vines. His thoughts left the distance and came homing back.⁠—How quiet everything was! Was it not as if they were together, he and she, on an island of silence rising above the monotonous sea of sound made by the soft patter of the rain? And their souls were still, calm and safe, while the future seemed to slumber in a cradle of peace.

Would that it might never awaken, and that all might remain as now⁠—no more happiness than that of peace, but neither any misery nor irking unrest! Would that the present might close as a bud closes around itself, and that no spring would follow!

Fennimore called. She had been lying awake for some time, too happy in being free from pain to think of speaking. Now she wanted to get up and light the lamp, but Niels continued to act as physician, and compelled her to lie still. It was not good for her to get up yet; he had matches and could easily find the lamp.

When he had lit it, he put it on the flower stand in the corner, where its milky white globe shone softly veiled by the delicate, slumbering leaves of an acacia. The room was just light enough so that they could see each other’s face.

He sat down in front of her, and they spoke about the rain and said how lucky it was that Erik had taken his raincoat, and how wet poor Trine would be. Then their conversation came to a standstill.

Fennimore’s thoughts were not quite awake yet, and in her weakness it seemed pleasant to lie thus musing without speaking. Nor was Niels inclined to talk, for he was still under the spell of the afternoon’s long silence.

“Do you like this house?” Fennimore asked at last.

“Why yes, fairly well.”

“Really? Do you remember the furniture at home?”

“At Fjordby? Yes indeed, perfectly.”

“You don’t know how I love it, and how I long for it sometimes. The things we have here don’t belong to us⁠—they are only rented⁠—and have no association with anything, and we are not going to live with them any longer than we stay in this place. You may think it queer, but I assure you, I often feel lonely here among all these strange pieces of furniture that stand around here so indifferent and stupid and take me for what I am without caring the least bit about me. And as I know they are not going with me⁠—that they will just stay here and be rented by other people⁠—I can’t get fond of them or interested in them as I should if I knew that my home would always be theirs, and that whatever came to me of good or ill would come in the midst of them. Do you think it childish? Perhaps it is, but I can’t help it.”

“I don’t know what it is, but I have felt it too. When I was left alone abroad, my watch stopped, and when it came back from the watchmaker and was going as before, it was⁠—just what you mean. I liked the feeling; there was something peculiar about it, something genuinely good.”

“Yes indeed! Oh, I should have kissed it, if I had been you.”

“Would you?”

“Do you know,” she said suddenly, “you have never told me anything about Erik as a boy? What was he like?”

“Everything that is good and fine, Fennimore. Splendid, brave⁠—a boy’s ideal of a boy, not exactly a mother’s or a teacher’s ideal, but the other, which is so much better.”

“How did you get along together? Were you very fond of each other?”

“Yes, I was in love with him, and he didn’t mind⁠—that is about how it was. We were very different. I always wanted to be a poet and become famous, but what do you suppose he said he wanted to be, one day when I asked him?⁠—An Indian, a real red Indian with war paint and all the rest! I remember that I couldn’t understand it at all. It was incomprehensible to me how anyone could want to be a savage⁠—civilized creature that I was!”

“But was it not strange, then, that he should become an artist?” said Fennimore, and there was something cold and hostile in her tone, as she asked.

Niels noticed it with a little start. “Not at all,” he answered; “it is really rare that people become artists with the whole of their nature. And such strong fellows overflowing with vitality like Erik often have an unutterable longing for what is fine-grained and delicate: for an exquisite virginal coldness, a lofty sweetness⁠—I hardly know how to express it. Outwardly they may be robust and full-blooded enough, even coarse, and no one suspects what strange, romantic, sentimental secrets they carry about with them, because they are so bashful⁠—spiritually bashful, I mean⁠—that no pale little maiden can be more shy about her soul than are these big, hard-stepping menfolks. Don’t you understand, Fennimore, that such a secret, which can’t be told in plain words right out in common everyday air, may dispose a man to be an artist? And they can’t express it in words, they simply can’t; we have to believe that it is there and lives its quiet life within them, as the bulb lives in the earth; for once in a while they do send fragrant, delicately tinted flowers up to the light. Do you understand?⁠—Don’t demand anything for yourself of this blossoming strength, believe in it, be glad to nourish it and to know that it is there.⁠—Forgive me, Fennimore, but it seems to me that you and Erik are not really good to each other. Can’t you make a change? Don’t think of who is right or how great the wrong is, and don’t treat him according to his deserts⁠—how would even the best of us fare if we got our deserts! No, think of him as he was in the hour when you loved him most; believe me, he is worthy of it. You must not measure and weigh. There are moments in love, I know, full of bright, solemn ecstasy, when we would give our lives for the beloved if need be. Is not that true? Remember it now, Fennimore, for his sake and your own.”

He was silent.

She said nothing either, but lay very still with a melancholy smile on her lips, pale as a flower.

Then she half rose and stretched out her hand to Niels. “Will you be my friend?” she asked.

“I am your friend, Fennimore,” and he took her hand.

“Will you, Niels?”

“Always,” he replied, lifting the hand to his lips reverently.

When he rose, it seemed to Fennimore that he held himself more erect than she had ever seen him before.

A little later Trine came in to announce her return, and then there was tea, and at last the rowing back through the dreary rain.

Toward morning Erik came home, and when Fennimore saw him by the cold, truthful light of dawn, preparing to go to bed, heavy and unsteady with drink, his eyes glazed from gambling and his face dirty-pale after the sleepless night, then all the fair words Niels had spoken seemed to her quite visionary. The bright promises she had made to her own heart fainted and paled before the oncoming day⁠—vapory dreams and fumes of fancy: a fairy flock of lies!

What was the use of struggling with this weight dragging them both down? It was futile to lighten it by lies; their life would never have its old buoyancy. The frost had been there, and the wealth of vines and creepers and clustering roses and blossoms fairer than roses that had entwined them had shed every tiny leaf, lost every blossom, and nothing remained but the tough, naked withes binding them together in an unbreakable tether. What did it avail that she roused the feelings of former days to an artificial life by the warmth of memories, that she put her idol up on its pedestal again, that she called back the light of admiration to her eyes, the words of adoration to her lips, and the flush of happiness to her cheeks! What did it all avail, when he would not take upon himself to be the priest of the idol and so help her to a pious fraud? He! He did not even remember her love. Not one of her words echoed in his ears, not one of all their days was hidden in his soul.

No, dead and cold was the ardent love of their hearts. The fragrance, the glamor, and the tremulous tones⁠—all had been wafted away. There they sat, from force of habit, he with his arm around her waist, she with her head resting on his shoulder, drearily sunk in silence, forgetting each other; she, to remember the glorious hero he had never been; he, to transform her in his dreams to the ideal which he now always saw shining in the sky high above her head. Such was their life together, and the days came and went without bringing any change, and day after day they gazed out over the desert of their lives, and told themselves that it was a desert, that there were no flowers nor any hope of flowers or springs or green palms.

As the autumn advanced, Erik’s drinking-bouts became more frequent. What was the use, he said to Niels, of sitting at home waiting for ideas that never came, until his thoughts turned to stone in his head? Moreover, he did not get much comfort from Niels’s society; he needed people with some grit in them, people of lusty flesh and blood, not a whim-wham of delicate nerves. Niels and Fennimore were therefore left much alone, for Niels came over to Marianelund every day.

The covenant of friendship they had made and the talk they had had on that Sunday afternoon put them at their ease with each other, and, lonely as they both were, they drew closer together in a warm and tender friendship, which soon gained a strong hold over both. It absorbed them so that their thoughts, whether they were together or apart, always turned to this bond, as birds building the same nest look on everything they gather or pass by with the one pleasant goal of making the nest snug and comfortable for each other and themselves.

If Niels came while Erik was away, they nearly always, even on rainy and stormy days, took long walks in the woods behind the garden. They had fallen in love with that forest, and grew fonder of it as they watched the summer life die out. There were a thousand things to see. First, how the leaves turned yellow and red and brown, then how they fell off, whirling on a windy day in yellow swarms, or softly rustling in still air, single leaf after leaf, down against the stiff boughs and between the pliant brown twigs. And when the leaves fell from trees and bushes, the hidden secrets of summer were revealed in nest upon nest. What treasures on the ground and on the branches, dainty seeds and bright-colored berries, brown nuts, shining acorns and exquisite acorn cups, tassels of coral on the barberry, polished black berries on the buckthorn, and scarlet urns on the dog-rose. The bare beeches were finely dotted with prickly beechnuts, and the roan bent under the weight of its red clusters, acid in fragrance like apple cider. Late brambleberries lay black and brown among the wet leaves at the wayside; red whortleberries grew among the heather, and the wild raspberries brought forth their dull crimson fruit for the second time. The ferns turned all colors as they faded, and the moss was a revelation, not only the deep, luscious moss in the hollows and on the slopes, but the faint, delicate growth on the tree-trunks, resembling what one might imagine the cornfields of the elves to be as it sent forth the finest of stalks with dark brown buds like ears of corn at the tip.

They scoured the forest from end to end, eager to find all its treasures and marvels. They had divided it between them as children do; the part on one side of the road was Fennimore’s property, and that on the other side was Niels’s, and they would compare their realms and quarrel about which was the more glorious. Everything there had names⁠—clefts and hillocks, paths and stiles, ditches and pools; and when they found a particularly magnificent tree, they gave that too a name. In this way they took complete possession and created a little world of their own which no one else knew and no one else was at home in, and yet they had no secret which all the world might not have heard.

As yet they had not.

But love was in their hearts, and was not there, as the crystals are present in a saturated solution, and yet are not present, not until a splinter or the merest particle of the right matter is thrown into the solution, releasing the slumbering atoms as if by magic, and they rush to meet one another, joining and riveting themselves together according to unsearchable laws, and in the same instant there is crystal⁠—crystal.

So it was a trifle that made them feel they loved.

There is nothing to tell. It was a day like all other days, when they were alone together in the sitting-room, as they had been a hundred times before; their conversation was about things of no moment, and that which happened was outwardly as common and as everyday-like as possible. It was nothing except that Niels stood looking out of the window, and Fennimore came over to him and looked out too. That was all, but it was enough, for in a flash like lightning, the past and present and future were transformed for Niels Lyhne by the consciousness that he loved the woman standing by his side, not as anything bright and sweet and happy and beautiful that would lift him to ecstasy or rapture⁠—such was not the nature of his love⁠—but he loved her as something he could no more do without than the breath of life itself, and he reached out, as a drowning man clutches, and pressed her hand to his heart.

She understood him. With almost a scream, in a voice full of terror and agony, she cried out to him an answer and a confession: “Oh, yes, Niels!” and snatched away her hand in the same instant. A moment she stood, pale and shrinking, then sank down with one knee in an upholstered chair, hiding her face against the harsh velvet of the back, and sobbed aloud.

Niels stood a few seconds as though blinded, groping around among the bulb-glasses for support. It was only for a very few seconds; then he stepped over to the chair where she was lying, and bent over without touching her, resting one hand on the back of the chair.

“Don’t be so unhappy, Fennimore! Look up and let us talk about it. Will you, or will you not? Don’t be afraid! Let us bear it together, my own love! Come, try if you can’t!”

She raised her head slightly and looked up at him. “Oh, God, what shall we do! Isn’t it terrible, Niels! Why should such a thing happen to me? And how lovely it all could have been⁠—so happy!” and she sobbed again.

“Should I not have spoken?” he moaned. “Poor Fennimore, would you rather never have known it?”

She raised her head again and caught his hand. “I wish I knew it and were dead. I wish I were in my grave and knew it, that would be good⁠—oh, so peaceful and good!”

“It is bitter for us both, Fennimore, that the first thing our love brings us should be only misery and tears. Don’t you think so?”

“You must not be hard on me, Niels. I can’t help it. You can’t see it as I do⁠—I am the one that should be strong, because I am the one that is bound. I wish I could take my love and force it back into the most secret depth of my soul and lock it in and be deaf to all its wailing and its prayers, and then tell you to go far, far away; but I can’t, I have suffered so much, I can’t suffer that too⁠—I can’t, Niels. I can’t live without you⁠—see, can I? Do you think I can?”

She rose and flung herself on his breast.

“Here I am, and I won’t let you go; I won’t send you away, while I sit here alone in the old darkness. It is like a bottomless pit of loathing and misery. I won’t throw myself into it. I would rather jump into the fjord, Niels. Even if the new life brings other agonies, at least they are new agonies, and haven’t the dull sting of the old, and can’t stab home like the old, which know my heart so cruelly well. Am I talking wildly? Yes, of course I am, but it is so good to talk to you without any reserve and without having to be careful not to say what I have no right to. For now you have the first right of all! I wish you could take me wholly, so that I could belong to you utterly and not to anyone else at all. I wish you could lift me out of all relations that hedge me in!”

“We must break through them, Fennimore. I will arrange everything as well as possible. Don’t be afraid! Some day, before anyone suspects anything, we shall be far away.”

“No, no, we mustn’t run away, anything but that, anything else rather than have my parents hear their daughter had run away. It is impossible! I will never do it. By God in heaven, Niels, I will never do it.”

“Oh, but you must, girlie, you must. Can’t you see all the baseness and ugliness that will rise and close in around us everywhere, if we stay, all the lies and deceptions that will entangle us and drag us down? I won’t have you smooched by all that. I refuse to let it eat into our love like corroding rust.”

But she was immovable.

“You don’t know what you are condemning us to,” he said sadly. “It would be far better to crush under iron heels now instead of sparing. Believe me, Fennimore, we must let our love be everything to us, the first and only thing in the world, that which must be saved, even at the cost of stabbing where we would rather heal and bringing sorrow where we would rather keep every shadow of sorrow far away. If we don’t do that, you will see that the yoke we bend our necks under now will weigh on us and at last force us to our knees, unmercifully, inexorably.⁠—A fight on our knees, you don’t know how hard that is! Shall we fight the fight anyway, girlie, side by side, against everything?”

For the first few days Niels persisted in his attempts to persuade her to flight. Then he began to picture to himself what a blow it would be to Erik if he were to come home one day and find friend and wife gone away together, and by degrees the whole thing took on an unnaturally tragic air of the impossible. He accustomed himself not to think of it, as he did with many other things that he might have wished different, and threw himself with his whole soul into the situation as it was, without any conscious attempts to make it over by dreams or cover its defects with imaginary festoons and garlands. But, oh, how sweet it was to love for once with the love of real life; for now he knew that nothing of what he had imagined to be love was real love, neither the turgid longing of the lonely youth, nor the passionate yearning of the dreamer, nor yet the nervous foreboding of the child. These were currents in the ocean of love, single reflections of its full light, fragments of love as the meteors rushing through space are splinters of a world⁠—for that was love: a world complete in itself, fully rounded, vast, and orderly. It was no medley of confused sensations and moods rushing one upon another! Love was like nature, ever changing, ever renewing; no feeling died and no emotion withered without giving life to the seed of something still more perfect which was imbedded in it. Quietly, sanely, with full, deep breaths⁠—it was good to love so and love with all his soul. The days fell, bright and new-coined, down from heaven itself; they no longer followed one upon another as a matter of course like the hackneyed pictures in a peepshow. Everyone was a revelation. With each day that passed, he felt stronger, greater, and nobler. He had never known such strength and fullness of feeling; there were moments when he seemed to himself titanic, much more than man, so inexhaustible was the wellspring of his soul, so broad-winged the tenderness that swelled his heart, so wondrous the sweep of his vision, so infinite the gentleness of his judgments.

This was the beginning of happiness, and they were happy long.

The daily falsehood and deception and the atmosphere of dishonor in which they lived had not yet gained power over them, and could not touch them on those ecstatic heights to which Niels had lifted their relationship and, with it, themselves. For he was not simply a man who seduced his friend’s wife⁠—or rather, so he told himself defiantly, he was that man, but he was also the one who saved an innocent woman whom life had wounded, stoned, and defiled, a woman who had lain down to let her soul die. This woman he had given back her confidence in life, her faith in the powers of good; he had lifted her spirit to noble heights, had given her happiness. What, then, was best, the old blameless misery or that which he had won for her? He did not ask, he had made his choice.

He did not quite mean this, if the truth were told. Man often builds for himself theories in which he refuses to dwell. Thoughts often run faster than the sense of right and wrong is willing to follow. Yet the conception was really present in his mind, and it took away some of the cankerous venom inherent in the craftiness, falseness, and duplicity of their lives.

Yet the evil effects were soon noticeable. The poison was working on so many fine nerve filaments that it could not but do harm and cause suffering, and the time was hastened when Erik, shortly after New Year, announced that he had caught an idea⁠—something with a green tunic and a threatening attitude, he told Niels. Did he remember the green in Salvator Rosa’s Jonah? Something on that order.

Although Erik’s work consisted chiefly in lying on the couch in his studio, smoking shag and reading Marryat, it had at least the effect of keeping him at home for the time being, thereby forcing them to use more caution and necessitating new lies and artifices.

Fennimore’s ingenuity in this direction was what brought the first cloud to their heaven. It was scarcely perceptible at first, only a doubt, light as thistledown, flitting through Niels’s mind as to whether his love were not nobler than the one he loved. It had not yet taken shape as a thought, it was only a dim foreboding which pointed in that direction, a vague giving way in his mind, a leaning to that side.

Yet it came again and brought others in its wake, thoughts at first vague and indistinct, then clearer and sharper for each time they appeared. It was astonishing with what furious haste these thoughts could undermine, debase, and take away the glamor. Their love was not lessened. On the contrary, it glowed more passionately while it sank, but these handclasps stolen under table-covers, these kisses snatched in passages and behind doors, these long looks right under the eyes of him they deceived, took away all the lofty tenor. Happiness no longer stood still above their heads; they had to filch her smiles and her light as best they could, and after a while their wiles and cunning were no longer necessary evils, but amusing triumphs. Deception became their natural element and made them contemptible and petty. There were degrading secrets, too, over which they had hitherto grieved separately, assuming ignorance in each other’s eyes, but which they now had to share; for Erik was not bashful, and would often caress his wife in Niels’s presence, kiss her, take her on his lap, and embrace her, while Fennimore had neither courage nor dignity sufficient to repel these caresses; the consciousness of her guilt made her uncertain and afraid.

So it sank and went on sinking, that lofty castle of their love, from the pinnacles of which they had gazed so proudly out over the world, and within which they had felt so strong and noble.

Still they were happy among the ruins.

When they walked in the woods now, it was usually on gloomy days, when the fog hung under the dark branches and thickened between the wet trunks, so that none should see how they kissed and embraced, both here and there, and none should hear how their frivolous talk rang with peals of wanton laughter.

The melancholy of eternity, which had exalted their love, was gone; now there was nothing but smiles and jests between them. With feverish haste they snatched greedily at the fleeting seconds of joy, as though they must hurry in their love and had not a lifetime before them.

It brought no change when Erik, after a while, grew tired of his idea and again began his carousing so eagerly that he was rarely at home for forty-eight hours at a stretch. Where they had fallen, there they lay. Once in a great while, perhaps, in lonely hours, they gazed regretfully toward the heights from which they had fallen, or perhaps they only wondered, and thought what a strain it must have been to stay on that level, and felt themselves more snugly housed where they were. There was no change. At least there was no return to the former days, but the flabby uncleanness of living as they did and not running away together became more present in their consciousness and linked them together in a closer and baser union through the common sense of guilt; for neither of them wished any change in things as they were. Nor did they pretend to each other that they did, for there had developed a cynical intimacy between them such as often exists between fellow criminals, and there was nothing in their relations that they shrank from putting into words. With sinister frankness, they called things by their right names and, as they put it to themselves, faced the facts as they were.

In February it had seemed that the winter was over, but then Mother March had come shaking her white mantle with its loose lining, and snowstorm after snowstorm covered the ground with thick layers. Then followed calm weather and hard frost, and the fjord settled under a crust of ice six inches thick, which lay there a long time.

One evening toward the end of the month, Fennimore was sitting alone in her parlor after tea and waiting.

The room was brightly illumined; the piano stood open with candles lit, and the silk shade had been taken from the lamp. The gilded moldings caught the light, and the pictures on the walls seemed to stand out with a kind of vigilance. The hyacinths had been moved from the windows to the writing-table, where they made a mass of delicate colors, filling the air with a penetrating fragrance that seemed cool in its purity. The fire in the stove burned with a pleasant subdued crackle.

Fennimore was walking up and down the room almost as if she were balancing on a dark red stripe in the carpet. She wore a somewhat old-fashioned black silk dress with a heavily embroidered edge that weighed it down and trailed, first on one side, then on the other, with every step she took.

She was humming to herself and holding with both hands a string of large pale yellow amber beads that hung from her neck. Whenever she wavered on the red stripe, she would stop humming, but still grasped the necklace. Perhaps she was making an omen for herself: if she could walk a certain number of times up and down without getting off the red stripe and without letting go with her hands, Niels would come.

He had been there in the morning, when Erik went away, and had stayed till late in the afternoon, but he had promised to come again as soon as the moon was up and it was light enough to see the holes in the ice on the fjord.

Fennimore had obtained her omen, whatever it was, and stepped over to the window.

It looked as if there would not be any moon tonight; the sky was very black, and the darkness must be more intense out there on the gray-blue fjord than on land where the snow lay. Perhaps it was best that he did not attempt it. She sat down at the piano with a sigh of resignation, then got up again to look at the clock. She came back and resolutely propped up a big book of music before her, but did not play, merely turning the leaves absentmindedly, lost in her own thoughts.

Suppose, after all, that he was standing on the opposite shore this very moment, fastening on his skates. He could be here in an instant! She saw him plainly, a little bit out of breath after skating, and blinking with his eyes against the light on coming from the darkness outside. He would bring a breath of cold air, and his beard would be full of tiny little bright drops. Then he would say⁠—what would he say?

She smiled and glanced down at herself.

And still the moon did not appear.

She went over to the window again and stood gazing out, till the darkness seemed to be filled before her eyes with tiny white sparks and rainbow-colored rings. But they were only a vague glimmer. She wished they would be transformed into fireworks out there, rockets shooting up in long, long curves and then turning to tiny snakes that bored their way into the sky and died in a flicker; or into a great, huge pale ball that hung tremulous in the sky and slowly sank down in a rain of myriad-colored stars. Look! Look! Soft and rounded like a curtsy, like a golden rain that curtsied.⁠—Farewell! Farewell! There went the last one.⁠—Oh dear, if he would only come! She did not want to play⁠—and at that she turned to the piano, struck an octave harshly, and held the keys down till the tones had quite died away, then did the same again, and again, and yet again. She did not want to play, did not want to.⁠—She would rather dance! For a moment she closed her eyes, and in imagination she felt herself whirling through a vast hall of red and white and gold. How delicious it would be to have danced and to be hot and tired and drink champagne! Suddenly she remembered how she and a school friend had concocted champagne from soda water and eau de cologne, and how sick it had made them when they drank it.

She straightened herself and walked across the room, instinctively smoothing her dress as after a dance.

“And now let us be sensible!” she said, took her embroidery and settled herself in a large armchair near the lamp.

Yet she did not work; her hands sank down into her lap, and soon she snuggled down into the chair with little lazy movements, fitting herself into its curves, her face resting on her hand, her dress wrapped around her feet.

She wondered curiously whether other wives were like her, whether they had made a mistake and been unhappy and then had loved someone else. She passed in review the ladies at home in Fjordby, one by one. Then she thought of Mrs. Boye. Niels had told her about Mrs. Boye, and she had always been a tantalizing riddle to her⁠—this woman whom she hated and felt humiliated by.

Erik, too, had once told her that he had been madly in love with Mrs. Boye.

Ah, if one could know everything about her!

She laughed at the thought of Mrs. Boye’s new husband.

All the time, while her thoughts were thus engaged, she was longing and listening for Niels, and imagined him coming, always coming out there on the ice. She little guessed that for the last two hours a tiny black dot had been working its way over the snowy meadows with a message for her very different from the one she was expecting from across the fjord. It was only a man in homespun and greased boots, and now he tapped on the kitchen window, frightening the maid.

It was a letter, Trine said when she came in to her mistress. Fennimore took it. It was a telegram. Quietly she gave the maid the receipt and dismissed her; she was not in the least alarmed, for Erik of late had often telegraphed that he would bring one or two guests home with him the following day.

Then she read.

Suddenly she turned white and darted wildly from her seat out into the middle of the room, staring at the door with expectant terror.

She would not let it come into the house, did not dare to, and with one bound she threw herself against the door, pressing her shoulder against it, and turned the key till it cut her hand. But it would not turn, no matter how hard she tried. Her hand dropped. Then she remembered that the thing was not here at all⁠—it was far away from her in a strange house.

She began to shake, her knees would no longer support her, and she slid along the door to the floor.

Erik was dead. The horses had run away, had overturned the carriage at a street corner, and hurled Erik with his head against the wall. His skull had been fractured, and now he lay dead at Aalborg. That was the way it had happened, and most of this story was told in the telegram. No one had been with him in the carriage except the white-necked tutor known as the Arab. It was he who had telegraphed.

She crouched on the floor moaning feebly, both palms spread out on the carpet, her eyes staring with a fixed, empty look, as she swayed helplessly to and fro.

Only a moment ago everything had been light and fragrance around her, and, however much she tried, she could not instantly put all this out of her consciousness to admit the inky black night of grief and remorse. It was not her fault that her mind was still haunted by fitful, dazzling gleams of love’s happiness and love’s pleasure; that intense, foolish desires would force their way out of the whirl, seeking the bliss of forgetfulness, or trying to stop with a frenzied wrench the revolving wheel of fortune.

But it soon passed.

In black swarms, from everywhere, dark thoughts came flying like ravens, lured by the corpse of her happiness, and hacked it beak by beak, even while the warmth of life still lingered in it. They tore and slashed and made it hideous and unrecognizable, until the whole thing was nothing but a carrion of loathing and horror.

She rose and walked about, supporting herself by chairs and tables like one who is ill. Desperately she looked around for some cobweb of help, if it were only a comforting glance, a sympathetic pat of the hand, but her eyes met nothing but the glaring family portraits, all the strangers who had been witnesses of her fall and her crime⁠—sleepy old gentlemen, prim-mouthed matrons, and their ever-present gnome child, the girl with the great round eyes and bulging forehead. It had acquired memories enough at last, this strange furniture, the table over there, and that chair, the footstool with the black poodle-dog, and the portière like a dressing-gown⁠—she had saturated them all with memories, adulterous memories, which they now spewed out and flung after her. Oh, it was terrible to be locked in with all these spectres of crime and with herself. She shuddered at herself; she pointed accusing fingers at herself, at this dishonored Fennimore who crouched at her feet; she pulled her dress away from between her imploring hands. Mercy? No, there was no mercy! How could there be mercy before those dead eyes in the strange town, those eyes which had become seeing, now that they were glazed in death, and saw how she had thrown his honor in the mud, lied at his lips, been faithless at his heart.

She could feel those dead eyes riveted on her; she did not know whence they came, but they followed her, gliding down her body like two ice-cold rays. As she looked down, while every thread of the carpet, every stitch in the footstools, seemed unnaturally clear in the strong, sharp light, she felt something walking about her with the footsteps of dead men, felt it brushing against her dress so distinctly that she screamed with terror, and darted to one side. But it came in front of her like hands and yet not like hands, something that clutched at her slowly, clutched derisively and triumphantly at her heart, that marvel of treachery, that yellow pearl of deceit! And she retreated till she backed up against the table, but it was still there, and her bosom gave no protection against it; it clutched through her skin and flesh.⁠ ⁠… She almost died of terror, as she stood there, helplessly bending back over the table, while every nerve contracted with fear, and her eyes stared as if they were being murdered in their sockets.

Then that passed.

She looked around with a haunted look, then sank down on her knees and prayed a long time. She repented and confessed, wildly and unrestrainedly, in growing passion, with the same fanatic self-loathing that drives the nun to scourge her naked body. She sought fervently after the most grovelling expressions, intoxicating herself with self-abasement and with a humility that thirsted for degradation.

At last she rose. Her bosom heaved violently, and there was a faint light in the pale cheeks, which seemed to have grown fuller during her prayer.

She looked around the room as if she were taking a silent vow. Then she went into the adjoining room, closed the door after her, stood still a moment as though to accustom herself to the darkness, groped her way to the door which opened on the glass-enclosed veranda, and went out.

It was lighter there. The moon had risen, and shone through the close-packed frozen crystals on the glass; the light came yellowish through the panes, blue and red through the squares of colored glass that framed them.

She melted a hole in the ice with her hand and carefully wiped away the moisture with her handkerchief.

As yet there was no one in sight out on the fjord.

She began to walk up and down in her glass cage. There was no furniture out there except a settee of cane and bent wood, covered with withered ivy leaves from the vines overhead. Every time she passed it, the leaves rustled faintly with the stirring of the air, and now and then her dress caught a leaf on the floor, drawing it along with a scratching sound over the boards.

Back and forth she walked on her dreary watch, her arms folded over her breast, hardening herself against the cold.

He came.

She opened the door with a quick wrench, and stepped out into the frozen snow in her thin shoes. She had no pity on herself, she could have gone barefooted to that meeting.

Niels had slowed up at the sight of the black figure against the snow and was skating toward land with hesitating, tentative strokes.

That stealthy figure seemed to burn into her eyes. Every familiar movement and feature struck her as a shameless insult, as a boast of degrading secrets. She shook with hatred; her heart swelled with curses, and she could scarcely control her anger.

“It is I!” she cried out to him jeeringly, “the harlot, Fennimore!”

“But for God’s sake, sweetheart?” he asked, astonished, as he came within a few feet of her.

“Erik is dead.”

“Dead! When?” He had to step out into the snow with his skates to keep from falling. “Oh, but tell me!” Eagerly he took a step nearer.

They were now standing close together, and she had to restrain herself from striking that pale, distorted face with her clenched fist.

“I will tell you, never fear,” she cried. “He is dead, as I said. He had a runaway in Aalborg and got his head crushed, while we were deceiving him here.”

“It is terrible!” Niels moaned, pressing his hands to his temples. “Who could have dreamed⁠—Oh, I wish we had been faithful to him, Fennimore! Erik, poor Erik!⁠—I wish I were in his place!” He sobbed aloud, writhing with pain.

“I hate you, Niels Lyhne!”

“Oh, what does it matter about us?” Niels groaned; “if we could only get him back! Poor Fennimore!” he said with a change of feeling. “Never mind me. You hate me, you say? You may well hate me.” He rose suddenly. “Let us go in,” he said. “I don’t know what I am saying. Who was it that telegraphed, did you say?”

“In!” Fennimore screamed, infuriated by his failure to notice her hostility. “In there! Never shall you set your craven, despicable foot inside that house again. How dare you think of it, you wretch, you false dog, who came sneaking in here and stole your friend’s honor, because it was too poorly hidden! What, did you not steal it under his very eyes, because he thought you were honest, you house-thief!”

“Hush, hush, are you mad? What is the matter with you! What sort of language are you using?” He had caught her arm firmly, drawing her to him, and looked straight into her face in amazement. “You must try to come to your senses, child,” he said in a gentler tone. “You can’t mend matters by slinging ugly words.”

She wrenched her arm away with such force that he staggered and almost lost his uncertain foothold.

“Can’t you hear that I hate you!” she screamed shrilly. “And isn’t there so much of a decent man’s brain left in you that you can understand it! How blind I must have been when I loved you, you patched together with lies, when I had him at my side, who was ten thousand times better than you. I shall hate and despise you to the end of my life. Before you came, I was honest, I had never done anything wicked; but then you came with your poetry and your rubbish and dragged me down with your lies, into the mud with you. What have I done to you that you could not leave me alone⁠—I who should have been sacred to you above all others! Now I have to live day after day with this shameful blot on my soul, and I shall never meet anyone so base but that I know myself to be baser. All the memories of my girlhood you have poisoned. What have I to look back on that is clean and good now! You have tainted everything. It is not only he that is dead, everything bright and good that has been between us is dead, too, and rotten. Oh, God help me, is it fair that I can’t get any revenge on you after all you have done? Make me honest again, Niels Lyhne, make me pure and good again! No, no⁠—but it ought to be possible to torture you into undoing the wrong you have done. Can you undo it with lies? Don’t stand there and crouch under your own helplessness. I want to see you suffer, here before my eyes, and writhe in pain and despair and be miserable. Let him be miserable, God, do not let him steal my revenge too! Go, you wretch, go! I cast you off, but be sure that I drag you with me through all the agonies my hate can call down over you.”

She had stretched out her arms menacingly. Now she turned and went in, and the veranda door rattled softly, as she closed it.

Niels stood looking after her in amazement, almost with disbelief. That pale, vengeful face seemed to be still there before him, so strangely base-souled and coarse, all its delicate beauty of contour gone, as if a rough, barbarous hand had ploughed up all its lines.

He stumbled cautiously down to the ice and began to skate slowly toward the mouth of the fjord, with the moonlight in front of him and the wind in his back. Gradually he increased his speed, as his thoughts took his attention from the surroundings, till the ice splinters flew from the runners of his skates and rattled on the smooth surface, blown along with him by the rising frost wind.

So that was the end! So that was the way he had saved this woman soul and lifted it and given it happiness! It was certainly beautiful, his relation to the dead friend, his childhood friend, for whom he would have sacrificed his future, his life, his all! He with his sacrificing and his saving! Let heaven and earth behold in him a man who preserved his life on the heights of honor without spot or blemish in order not to cast a shadow over the Idea he served and was called to promulgate.

No doubt that was another of his boastful fancies that his paltry little life could put spots on the sun of the Idea. Good God, he was always taking these high and mighty views of himself, it was bred in his bone. If he could not be anything better, he must at least be a Judas and call himself Iscariot in grandiose gloom. That sounded like something. Was he forever going to put on airs as if he were a responsible minister to the Idea, a member of its privy council, getting everything concerning humanity at first hand! Would he never learn to do his duty in barrack service for the Idea with all simplicity as a private of a very subordinate class?

There were red fires out on the ice, and he skated so near them that a gigantic shadow shot out for a moment from his feet, turned forward, and disappeared again.

He thought of Erik and of what kind of a friend he had been to Erik. He! His childhood memories wrung their hands over him; his youthful dreams covered their heads and wept over him; his whole past stared after him with a long look full of reproach. He had betrayed it all for a love as small and mean as himself. There had been exaltation in this love, but he had betrayed that too.

Whither could he flee to escape these attempts that always ended in the ditch? All his life had been nothing else, and it would never be anything else in the future; he knew that and felt it with such certainty that he sickened at the thought of all this futile endeavor, and he wished with all his soul that he could run away and escape this meaningless fate. If only the ice would break under him now as he skated, and all would be over with a gasp and a spasm in the cold water!

He stopped, exhausted, and looked back. The moon had gone down, and the fjord stretched long and dark between the white hills on either side. Then he turned and worked his way back against the wind. It was very strong now, and he was tired. He skated closer to the shore to get the shelter of the hills, but, as he struggled thus, he came on a hole in the ice made by the winds sweeping down from the hills, and he felt the thin, elastic crust give way under him with a crackling sound.

Ah, he breathed more easily, in spite of all, when he set foot on the firm ice again! Under the stimulus of fear, his exhaustion had almost left him, and he skated on vigorously.

While he was struggling out there, Fennimore sat in the lighted room, baffled and miserable. She felt herself cheated out of her revenge. She hardly knew what she had expected, but it was something entirely different; she had had a vision of something mighty and majestic, something of swords and red flames, or⁠—not that, but something that would sweep her along and lift her to a throne, but instead it had all turned out so small and paltry, and she had felt more like a common scold than like one who utters curses.⁠ ⁠…

After all, she had learned something from Niels.

Early in the morning of the following day, while Niels, overcome with exhaustion, was still asleep, she left the house.