XIV

Autumn had come; there were no flowers any more on the graves up there in the churchyard, and the fallen leaves lay brown and moldering in the wet under the trees of Lønborggård.

Niels Lyhne went about in the empty rooms in bitter despondency. Something had given way in him the night the child died. He had lost faith in himself, lost his belief in the power of human beings to bear the life they had to live. Existence had sprung a leak, and its contents were seeping out through all the cracks without plan or purpose.

It was of no avail that he called the prayer he had prayed a father’s frenzied cry for help for his child, even though he knew none could hear his cry. He had known well what he did even in the depths of his despair. He had been tempted and had fallen; for it was a fall, a betrayal of himself and his ideal. No doubt tradition had been too strong in his blood. Humanity had cried to heaven in its agony for many thousands of years, and he had yielded to an inherited instinct. But he ought to have resisted it, for he knew with the innermost fibres of his brain that gods were dreams, and he knew that when he prayed he was taking refuge in a dream, just as surely as he knew in the old days, when he threw himself into the arms of his fancies, that they were fancies. He had not been able to bear life as it was. He had taken part in the battle for the highest, and in the stress of the fight he had deserted the banner to which he had sworn allegiance; for after all, the new ideal, atheism, the sacred cause of truth⁠—what did it all mean, what was it all but tinsel names for the one simple thing: to bear life as it was! To bear life as it was and allow life to shape itself according to its own laws!

It seemed to him as though his life had ended in that night of agony. What came after was no more than meaningless scenes tacked on after the fifth act when the action was already finished. He could, of course, take up his old principles again, if he felt so inclined, but he had once fallen the fall, and whether or not he would fall again mattered absolutely nothing.

This was the mood that possessed him most frequently.

Then came the November day when the King died, and war seemed more and more imminent.

He soon arranged his affairs in Lønborggård and enlisted as a volunteer.

The monotony of training was easy to bear, for it seemed wonderful only to know that he was no longer superfluous, and when he was assigned to active service, the everlasting fight against cold, vermin, and discomforts of every kind drove his thoughts home and kept them from going farther afield than to what was right before his door. He grew almost cheerful over it, and his health, which had suffered under the griefs of the past year, was fully restored.

On a gloomy day in March he was shot in the chest.

Hjerrild, who was a physician in the hospital, had him put into a small room where there were only four beds. One of the men in there had been shot in the spine and lay quite still. Another was wounded in the breast and lay talking deliriously for hours at a time in quick, abrupt phrases. The third, who lay nearest Niels, was a great, strong peasant lad with fat, round cheeks; he had been struck in the brain by a fragment of a shell, and incessantly, hour after hour, about every half minute, he would lift his right arm and his right leg simultaneously and then let them fall again, accompanying his movements with a loud but dull and hollow “Hah-ho!” always in the same measure, always exactly the same, “Hah” when he lifted his limbs, “ho” when he let them fall.

There Niels Lyhne lay. The bullet had entered his right lung and had not come out again. In war not much circumlocution can be used, and he was told he had but little chance of life.

He was surprised; for he did not feel as though he were dying, and his wound did not pain him much. But soon a faintness came over him and warned him that the doctor was right.

So this was the end. He thought of Gerda, he thought of her constantly the first day, but he was always disturbed by the strange, cool look in her eyes the last time he had taken her in his arms. How beautiful it would have been, how poignantly beautiful, if she had clung to him to the very last and had sought his eye till her own was glazed in death; if she had been content to breathe out her life upon the heart that loved her so well instead of turning away from him at the last moment to save herself over into more life and yet more life!

On the second day in the hospital, Niels felt more and more oppressed by the heavy atmosphere in the room, and his longing for fresh air was strangely intertwined in his mind with the desire to live. After all, there had been so much in life that was beautiful, he thought, as he remembered the fresh breeze along the shore at home, the cool soughing of the wind in the beech forests of Zealand, the pure mountain air of Clarens, and the evening zephyrs of Lake Garda. But when he began to think of human beings, his soul sickened again. He summoned them in review before him, one by one, and they all passed and left him alone, and not one stayed with him. But how far had he held fast to them? Had he been true? He had only been slower in letting go, that was all. No, it was not that. It was the dreary truth that a soul is always alone. Every belief in the fusing of soul with soul was a lie. Not your mother who took you on her lap, nor your friend, nor yet the wife who slept on your heart.⁠ ⁠…

Toward evening, inflammation set in, and the pain of his wound increased.

Hjerrild came and sat by him for a few minutes in the evening, and at midnight he returned and stayed a long time. Niels was suffering intensely and moaned with pain.

“A word in all seriousness, Lyhne,” said Hjerrild. “Do you want to see a clergyman?”

“I have no more to do with clergymen than you have,” Niels whispered angrily.

“Never mind me! I am alive and well. Don’t lie there and torture yourself with your opinions. People who are about to die have no opinions, and those they have don’t matter. Opinions are only to live by⁠—in life they can do some good, but what does it matter whether you die with one opinion or another? See here, we all have bright, tender memories from our childhood; I have seen scores of people die, and it always comforts them to bring back those memories. Let us be honest! No matter what we call ourselves, we can never quite get that God out of heaven; our brain has fancied Him up there too often, the picture has been rung into it and sung into it from the time we were little children.”

Niels nodded.

Hjerrild bent down to catch his words if he wished to say anything.

“You are very good,” Niels whispered, “but”⁠—and he shook his head decisively.

The room was still a long time except for the peasant lad’s everlasting “Hah-ho!” hammering the hours to pieces.

Hjerrild rose. “Goodbye, Lyhne,” he said. “After all, it is a noble death to die for our poor country.”

“Yes,” said Niels, “and yet this is not the way we dreamed of doing our part that time long, long ago.”

Hjerrild left him. When he came into his own room, he stood a long while by the window looking up at the stars.

“If I were God,” he said under his breath, and in his thoughts he continued, “I would much rather save the man who was not converted at the last moment.”

The pain in Niels’s wound grew more and more intense; it tore and clutched at his breast, it persisted without mercy. What a relief it would have been if he had had a god to whom he could have moaned and prayed!

Toward morning he grew delirious, the inflammation was progressing rapidly.

So it went on for two more days and two more nights.

The last time Hjerrild saw Niels Lyhne he was babbling of his armor and of how he must die standing.

And at last he died the death⁠—the difficult death.