XII

For the better part of two years Niels Lyhne had roamed about on the Continent.

He was very lonely, without kith or kin or any close friend of his heart. Yet there was another and greater loneliness that encompassed him; for however desolate and forsaken a man may feel when he has no single spot on all this vast earth to which his affections can cling, which he can bless when the heart will overflow and yearn for when longing will spread its wings, there is no existence so lonely that he is utterly alone if he can only see the fixed bright star of a life goal shining overhead. But Niels Lyhne had no star. He did not know what to do with himself and his gifts. It was all very well to have talent if he could only have used it, but he went about like a painter without hands. How he envied the people, great and small, who always, whenever they reached out into life, found a handle to lay hold of; for he could never find any handle. It seemed as though he could do nothing but sing over again the old romantic songs, and in truth he had so far done nothing else. His talent was like something apart in him, a quiet Pompeii, or a harp that had to be taken out of its corner. It was not all-pervading, did not run down the street with him or tingle in his fingertips⁠—not in the least. His talent had no grip on him. Sometimes it seemed to him that he had been born half a century too late, sometimes that he had come altogether too early. His talent was rooted in something of the past; it could not draw nourishment from his opinions, his convictions, and his sympathies, could not absorb them and give them form. The two elements seemed always to be gliding apart like water and oil, which can be shaken together, but can never mix, never become one.

Gradually, as he began to realize this, he sank into a boundless dejection and grew inclined to take an ironic, suspicious view of himself and his whole past. There must be something wrong with him, he told himself, something incurably wrong in the very marrow of his being; for surely a man could fuse the varying elements in his own nature⁠—that he firmly believed.

This was the state of his mind when he settled down, in the month of September, toward the end of the second year of his exile, on the shores of Lake Garda, in the little town of Riva.

Not long afterward, the region was hedged about by difficulties that put a stop to travelling and kept all strangers away. Cholera had broken out round about Venice and down south in Descensano and in the north by the Trentino. Under these circumstances, Riva was not lively, for the hotels had been emptied at the first rumor, and tourists bound for Italy took another route.

Naturally, the few people who remained drew all the more closely together.

The most remarkable person among them was a famous opera singer, whose real name was Madame Odéro. Her stage name was far more celebrated. She and her companion, Niels, and a deaf doctor from Vienna were the only guests at the Golden Sun, the leading hotel in town.

Niels felt very much attracted to her, and she yielded to that warmth of manner in him which is often a characteristic of people who are at strife with themselves and therefore feel the need of establishing their relations with others on a safe basis.

Madame Odéro had lived there for nearly seven months, trying to recover, by complete rest, from the after-effects of a throat trouble that had threatened her voice. Her physician had told her to abstain for a year from singing and, in order to avoid temptation, from all music. Not until the year was over would he allow her to attempt to sing, and then, if no weariness followed, she might consider herself cured.

Niels acquired a kind of civilizing influence over Madame Odéro, who was a fiery, passionate nature with no fine shades. It had been a terrible sentence to her when she was condemned to live a whole year without applause and adoration, and at first she had been in despair, gazing horror-stricken at the twelve months stretching before her as upon a deep, black grave into which she was being thrust; but everybody seemed to think it was unavoidable, and one fine morning she suddenly fled to Riva. It would have been quite possible for her to have lived in a livelier and more frequented place, but that was the very thing she sought to avoid. She felt ashamed, as though she had been marked with an outward visible blemish, imagining that people pitied her because of this infirmity, and that they discussed her among themselves. Therefore she had shunned all society in her new abode and had lived almost entirely in her rooms, where she sometimes took revenge on the doors when her voluntary confinement became unbearable. Now that everybody had left, she appeared again and learned to know Niels Lyhne, for she was not at all afraid of people individually.

No one needed to be long in Madame Odéro’s presence before finding out whether she liked him or not, for she showed it with sufficient plainness. What she gave Niels Lyhne to see was very encouraging, and they had not been alone for many days in the magnificent hotel garden with its pomegranates and myrtles, with its arbors of blossoming nerias and its marvellous view, before they were on very friendly terms.

They were not at all in love with each other, or if they were, it was not very serious. It was one of the vague, pleasant intimacies that will sometimes grow up between men and women who are past the time of early youth when nature flames up and yearns toward an unknown bliss. It is a kind of waning summer, in which people promenade decorously side by side, gather themselves into graceful nosegays, each caressing himself with the other’s hand and admiring himself with the other’s eyes. They take out all their store of pretty secrets, all the exquisite useless trifles people accumulate like bric-a-brac of the soul, pass them from hand to hand, turn them round and hold them up, seeking the most artistic light-effect, comparing and analyzing.

It is, of course, only when life passes in a leisurely way that such Sunday friendships are possible, and here by the quiet lake these two had plenty of time. Niels had made a beginning by draping Madame Odéro in a becoming robe of melancholy. At first, she was several times on the point of tearing the whole thing off and revealing herself as the barbarian she was, but when she found that she could wear the drapery with patrician effect, she took her melancholy as a role, and not only stopped slamming the doors, but sought out the moods and emotions in herself that might suit her new pose. It was astonishing how she came to realize that she had actually known herself very little in the past. Her life had, in fact, been too eventful and exciting to give her time for exploring herself, and besides she was only now approaching the age when women who have lived much in the world and seen much commence to collect their memories, to look back at themselves and assemble a past.

From this beginning, their intimacy developed quickly and definitely until they had become quite indispensable to each other. Each led only a halfhearted existence without the other.

Then it happened one morning, as Niels was starting out for a sail, that he heard Madame Odéro singing in the garden. His first impulse was to turn back and scold her, but before he could make up his mind, the boat had carried him out of hearing; the wind tempted him to a trip to Limone, and he meant to be back by midday. So he sailed on.

Madame Odéro had descended into the garden earlier than usual. The fresh fragrance that filled the air, the round waves rising and sinking clear and bright as glass beneath the garden wall, and all this glory of color everywhere⁠—blue lake and sun-scorched mountains, white sails flitting across the lake and red flowers arching over her head⁠—all this and with it a dream she could not forget, which went on throbbing against her heart.⁠ ⁠… She could not be silent, she had to be a part of all this life.

Therefore she sang.

Fuller and fuller rose the exultant notes of her voice. She was intoxicated with its beauty, she trembled in a voluptuous sense of its power; and she went on, she could not stop, for she was borne blissfully along on wonderful dreams of coming triumphs.

No weariness followed. She could leave, leave at once, shake off the nothingness of the past months, come out of her hiding and live!

By midday everything was ready for her departure.

Then, just as the carriages drove up to the door, she remembered Niels Lyhne. She dived down into her pocket for a paltry little notebook, and scribbled it full of farewells to Niels, for the pages were so small that each could hold only three or four words. This she enclosed in an envelope for him and departed.

When Niels came back in the late afternoon, after being detained by the sanitary police in Limone, she had long since reached Mori and taken the train.

He was not surprised, only sorry, and not at all angry. He could even smile resignedly at this new hostile thrust of fate. But in the evening, when he sat in the empty moonlit garden telling the innkeeper’s little boy the story about the princess who found her wings again and flew away from her lover back to the land of fairies, he was seized with an intolerable longing for Lønborggård. He yearned to feel something closing around him like a home and holding him fast, no matter how. He could not bear the indifference of life any longer, could not endure being cast off and thrown back on himself again and again. No home on earth, no God in heaven, no goal out there in the future! He would at least have a home. He would make it his own by loving everything there, big and little, every rock, every tree, the animate and the inanimate; he would portion out his heart to it all so that it could never cast him off any more.