VII

It was an evening in spring; the sun threw a red light into the room, as it sank toward the horizon. The wings of the windmill on the embankment drew shadows over the windowpanes and the walls, coming, going, in a monotonous swinging from darkness to light: a moment of darkness, two moments of light.

At the window, Niels Lyhne sat gazing through the darkly burnished elms on the embankment to the fiery clouds beyond. He had been in the country, walking under blossoming beeches, past green rye-fields, over flower-decked meadows. Everything had been so fair and light, the sky so blue, the Sound so bright, the women he met so wondrously beautiful. Singing, he had followed the forest path, but soon the words had died out of his song, then the rhythm was lost, at last the tones were muted, and silence came over him like a fit of giddiness. He closed his eyes, and still he felt how his body drank the light, and his nerves vibrated with it. Every breath he drew of the cool, intoxicating air sent his blood rushing more wildly through the quivering, helpless veins. He felt as though all the teeming, budding, growing, germinating forces of spring were mysteriously striving to vent themselves through him in a mighty cry, and he thirsted for this cry, listened for it, till his listening grew into a vague, turgid longing.

Now, as he sat there by the window, the longing awoke in him again.

He yearned for a thousand tremulous dreams, for cool and delicate images, transparent tints, fleeting scents, and exquisite music from streams of highly strung, tensely drawn silvery strings⁠—and then silence, the innermost heart of silence, where the waves of air never bore a single stray tone, but where all was rest unto death, steeped in the calm glow of red colors and the languid warmth of fiery fragrance.⁠—This was not what he longed for, but the images glided forth from his mood and submerged all else until he turned from them to follow his own train of thought again.

He was weary of himself, of cold ideas and brain-dreams. Life a poem? Not when you went about forever poetizing about your own life instead of living it. How innocuous it all was, and empty, empty, empty! This chasing after yourself, craftily observing your own tracks⁠—in a circle, of course. This sham diving into the stream of life while all the time you sat angling after yourself, fishing yourself up in one curious disguise or another! If he could only be overwhelmed by something⁠—life, love, passion⁠—so that he could no longer shape it into poems, but had to let it shape him!

Involuntarily he made a gesture as if to ward it off with his hand. After all, he was afraid in his inmost heart of this mighty thing called passion. This storm-wind sweeping away everything settled and authorized and acquired in humanity as if it were dead leaves. He did not like it! This roaring flame squandering itself in its own smoke⁠—no, he wanted to burn slowly.

And yet this living on at half speed in quiet waters, always in sight of land, seemed so paltry. Would that the storm and waves would come! If he only knew how, his sails should fly to the yards for a merry run over the Spanish Main of life! Farewell to the slowly dripping days, farewell to the pleasant little hours! Peace be with you, you dull moods that have to be furbished with poetry before you can shine, you lukewarm emotions that have to be clothed in warm dreams and yet freeze to death! May you go to your own place! I am headed for a coast where sentiments twine themselves like luxuriant vines around every fibre of the heart⁠—a rank forest; for every vine that withers, twenty are in blossom; for each one that blossoms, a hundred are in bud.

Oh, that I were there!

He grew tired of his longing and sick of himself. He needed people. But of course Erik was not in now. Frithjof had been with him all morning, and it was too late for the theatre. Nevertheless he went out and strolled dejectedly through the streets.

Perhaps Mrs. Boye would be in. This was not one of her evenings and it was rather late. Suppose he try, anyway.

Mrs. Boye was in. She was home alone. Too tired from the spring air to go to a dinner party with her niece, she had preferred to lie on the sofa, drinking strong tea and reading Heine; but now she was tired of verses and wanted to play lotto.

So they played lotto. Fifteen, twenty, thirty-seven, a long series of figures, the rattling of dice in a bag, and an irritating sound of balls rolling on the floor in the apartment above them.⁠ ⁠…

“This is not amusing,” said Mrs. Boye, when they had played for a long time without covering any numbers. “Is it?⁠—No!” she answered herself and shook her head disconsolately. “But what else can we play?”

She folded her hands before her on the disks and looked at Niels with a hopeless, inquiring gaze.

Niels really did not know.

“Anything but music!” She bent her face down over her hands and touched her lips to the knuckles, one after the other, the whole row, then back again. “This is the most wretched existence in the world,” she said, looking up. “It isn’t possible to have anything like an adventure, and the small happenings that life has to offer are surely not enough to keep one’s spirits up. Don’t you feel that, too?”

“Well, I can’t suggest anything better than that we act like the Caliph in Arabian Nights. With that silk kimono you are wearing, if you would only wind a white cloth around your head, and let me have your large Indian shawl, we could easily pass for two merchants from Mossul.”

“And what should we two unfortunate merchants do?”

“Go down to Storm Bridge, hire a boat for twenty pieces of gold, and sail up the dark river.”

“Past the sand-chests?”

“Yes, with colored lamps on the masthead.”

“Like Ganem, the Slave of Love.⁠—Oh, I know that line of thought so well! It’s exactly like a man⁠—to get so terribly busy building up scenery and background, forgetting the action itself for the setting. Have you never noticed that women live much less in their imagination than men? We don’t know how to taste pleasure in our fancy or escape from pain with a fanciful consolation. What is, is. Imagination⁠—it is so innocuous. When we get as old as I am now, then sometimes we content ourselves with the poverty-stricken comedy of imagination. But we ought never to do it⁠—never!”

She settled herself languidly on the sofa, half reclining, her hand under her chin, her elbow supported by the cushions. She gazed dreamily out before her, and seemed quite lost in melancholy thoughts.

Niels was silent too, and the room was so quiet that the restless hopping of the canary bird was plainly heard; the great clock ticked and ticked its way through the silence, louder and louder, and a string in the open piano, suddenly vibrating, emitted a long, low, dying note that blended with the softly singing stillness.

She looked very young as she lay there, flooded from head to foot in the soft yellow light of the lamp above her. There was something alluring in the incongruity of her beautiful, strongly moulded throat and matronly Charlotte Corday cap with the frank child-eyes and the little mouth opening over milk-white teeth.

Niels looked at her admiringly.

“How strange it is to long for one’s self!” she said; “and yet I often, so often, long for myself as a young girl. I love her as one whom I had been very close to and shared life and happiness and everything with, and then had lost while I stood helpless. What a wonderful time that was! You cannot conceive the purity and delicacy of such a young girl’s soul when she is just beginning to love for the first time. It can only be told in music, but you can think of it as a festival in a fairy palace, where the air shines like blushing silver. It is filled with cool flowers, and they change color, their tints are slowly shifting. Everything is song, jubilant and yet soft. Dim presentiments gleam and glow like mystic wine in exquisite dream-goblets. It is all song and fragrance; a thousand scents are wafted through the palace. Oh, I could weep when I think of it, and when I think that if it could all come back to me, by a miracle, just as it was, it would no longer bear me up; I should fall through like a cow trying to dance on cobwebs.”

“No, quite the contrary,” said Niels eagerly, and his voice trembled, as he went on: “no, the love you could feel now would be much finer, much more spiritual than that young girl’s.”

“Spiritual! I hate this spiritual love. The flowers growing from that soil are made of cotton cloth; they don’t even grow, they are taken from the head and stuck in the heart, because the heart has no flowers of its own. That is exactly what I envy in the young girl: everything about her is genuine, she does not fill the goblet of her love with the makeshift of imagination. Do not suppose, because her love is shot through and shadowed over by imagined pictures and again pictures in a great, teeming vagueness, that she cares more for those images than for the earth she walks upon. It is only that all her senses and instincts and powers are reaching out for love everywhere⁠—everywhere, without ever feeling weary. But she does not revel in her fancies, nor even so much as rest in them; no, she is very much more genuine, so genuine that in her own unwitting manner she very often becomes innocently cynical. You have no idea, for instance, of what intoxicating pleasure a young girl finds in breathing secretly the odor of cigars that clings to the clothes of the man she loves⁠—that is a thousand times more to her than a whole conflagration of fancies. I despise imagination. What good is it, when our whole being yearns toward the heart of another, to be admitted only to the chilly anteroom of his imagination! And that is what happens so often. How often we have to submit to letting the man we love deck us out with his imagination, put a halo around our head, tie wings on our shoulders, and wrap us in a star-spangled robe! Then at last he finds us worthy of his love, when we masquerade in this costume; but then we can’t be ourselves, because we are too dressed up, and because men confuse us by kneeling in the dust and worshipping us instead of just taking us as we are and simply loving us.”

Niels was quite bewildered. He had picked up the handkerchief she dropped and sat there intoxicating himself with its perfume. He was not at all prepared to have her look at him in that impatient, questioning way, just as he was absorbed in studying her hand, but he managed to answer that he thought a man could not give a finer proof of his love than this⁠—that he had to justify himself to himself for loving a human being so unutterably, and therefore set her so high and surrounded her with a nimbus of divinity.

“But that is just what I find so insulting,” said Mrs. Boye, “as if we were not divine enough in ourselves.”

Niels smiled complacently.

“No, you mustn’t smile, I’m not joking. It is really very serious, for this adoration is at bottom tyrannical in its fanaticism; it cramps us in a mould of man’s ideal. Slash a heel and clip a toe! Anything in us that doesn’t square with man’s conception has to be eliminated, perhaps not by force, but by ignoring it, systematically relegating it to oblivion, and never giving it a chance to develop, while the qualities we don’t possess or that aren’t in the least characteristic of us are forced to the rankest growth by lauding them to the skies, taking for granted that we have them in the fullest measure, and making them the cornerstone on which man builds his love. I say that we are subjected to a drill; man’s love puts us through a drill. And we submit to it, even those who love no one submit to it, contemptible minions that we are!”

She had risen from her reclining posture and looked threateningly at Niels.

“If I were beautiful!⁠—oh, I mean ravishingly beautiful, more alluring than any woman who ever lived, so that all who saw me were struck with unquenchable, agonizing love as by witchcraft⁠—then I would use the power of my beauty to make them adore me, not their traditional bloodless ideal, but myself, as I am, every inch, every line of my being, every gleam of my nature!”

She had risen now to her full height, and Niels thought he ought to go, but he stood turning over in his mind a great many audacious words, which, after all, he did not dare to utter. At last, summoning all his courage, he seized her hand and kissed it, but she gave him her other hand to kiss too, and then he could say nothing more than: “Good night.”

Niels Lyhne had fallen in love with Mrs. Boye, and he was happy because of it.

When he went home through the same streets where he had strolled so dejectedly that same evening, it seemed to him that ages had passed since he walked there. His bearing had acquired a new poise, a grave decorum, and when he carefully buttoned his gloves, he did so with a subconscious sense that he had undergone a great change which somehow demanded that he should button his gloves⁠—carefully.

Too much absorbed to think of sleep, he went up on the embankment.

It seemed to him that his thoughts flowed very quietly. He was surprised at his own calm, but he did not have perfect faith in it. He felt as though something in the very depths of his being were bubbling, very softly, but persistently: welling up, seething, pressing on, but far, far away. He was in a mood as one who waits for something that must come from afar, a distant music that must draw near, little by little, singing, murmuring, frothing, rushing, roaring, and whirling down over him, catching him up he knew not how, carrying him he knew not whither, coming on as a flood, breaking as a surf, and then⁠—

But now he was calm. There was only the tremulous singing in the distance; otherwise all was peace and tranquillity.

He loved⁠—he said it aloud to himself again and again. The words had such a strange ring of dignity, and held such deep meanings. They meant that he was no longer a captive in the imagined world of his childhood, nor was he the sport of aimless longings and misty dreams. He had escaped from the elf-land that had grown up with him and around him, encircling him with a hundred arms, blindfolding him with a hundred hands. He had broken away from its grasp and had become master of himself, and though it reached after him, implored him with dumb appealing eyes, and beckoned him with white fluttering garments, its power was dead as a dream killed by day, a mist dispelled by the sun. Was not his young love day and sun and all the world? He had been strutting about in royal purple not yet spun, and had taken his seat on a throne not yet built; but now he stood on a high mountain, looking out over the world that stretched before him like a plain. In this world thirsting for song he had as yet no existence and was not even awaited. What a rapturous thought it was that, in all this silent, wakeful infinity, not a breath of his spirit had stirred a leaf or raised a ripple. It was all his to win, and he knew that he could win it. He felt strong and all-conquering as only those can feel whose songs are still unsung, throbbing in their own breast.

The soft spring air was full of perfumes, not saturated with them as the summer nights may be, but rather as it were streaked⁠—now with the pungent aroma from resinous young poplars, now with the cool breath of late violets, and again with the sweet almond odor of cherry-trees. The scents came and mingled, were wafted away and dissolved; sometimes one would quicken and free itself from the others, only to die as suddenly or to vanish slowly on a breath of wind. Light moods flitted across his mind like the shadows from this fitful dance of scents, and as the perfumes mocked his senses by coming and going as they listed, so his mind was baffled by his vain longing to be borne aloft, calmly resting in tranquil flight on the slowly gliding wings of a mood. For his moods were not yet birds with wings strong enough to carry him; they were down and feathers only, drifting on the wind, falling like snow, and melting.

He tried to recall the picture of her as she lay on the sofa and talked to him, but it would not come. He saw her vanishing in a lane of trees; or sitting and reading with her hat on, holding one of the large white leaves in her gloved fingers, just on the point of turning it, then turning leaf after leaf. He saw her entering her carriage in the evening after the theatre and nodding to him behind the pane; then the carriage drove away, and he stood looking after it; it kept on driving, and he still followed it with his eyes. Indifferent faces came and spoke to him, figures he had not seen for years passed down the street, turned and looked after him, and still the carriage kept on driving, and he could not get rid of it, could not think of other pictures because of that carriage. Then, just as he was getting nervous with impatience, it came: the yellow light from the lamp, the eyes, the mouth, the hand under the chin, as plainly as if it were all before him there in the darkness.

How lovely she was, how mild, how fair! He loved her with a desire that knelt at her feet, begging for all this seductive beauty. Cast yourself from your throne down to me! Make yourself my slave! Put the chain around your neck with your own hands, but not in sport⁠—I want to pull the chain, I demand submission in your every limb, bondage in your eyes! Oh, that I could draw you to me with a love-philtre, but, no, a love-philtre would compel you, you would yield to its power without volition, and I want none to be your master but myself. Your will must be broken in your hands, and you must hold it out humbly to me. You shall be my queen, and I your slave, but my slave’s foot must be on your queenly neck. There is no lunacy in this desire, for is it not in the nature of a woman’s love to be proud and strong and to bend? It is love, I know, to be weak and to reign.

He felt that he could never draw to himself the part of her soul that was one with the luxuriant, glowing, sensuous-soft aspect of her beauty; it would never clasp him in those gleaming Juno arms, never in passionate weakness give that voluptuous neck to his kisses⁠—never in all eternity. He saw it all clearly. He could win, perhaps he already had won, the young girl in her, and he was sure that she, the full-blooded beauty, felt this fair young creature who had died within her mysteriously stirring in her living grave to clasp him with slender maiden arms and meet him with timid maiden lips. But his love was not that. He loved the very thing in her that he could not win, loved this neck with its warm, flower-like whiteness gleaming with a dew of gold under the dusky hair. He sobbed with yearning passion and wrung his hands with impotent desire, threw his arms around a tree, leaned his cheek against the bark, and wept.