IX

Niels Lyhne hurried home. He could not bear his loneliness among so many strangers, but the nearer he came to Copenhagen, the oftener he asked himself what he wanted there, and the more he regretted that he had not stayed abroad. For whom did he have in Copenhagen? Not Frithjof, and Erik was travelling in Italy on a scholarship, so he was not there. Mrs. Boye? It was a queer affair, this relation with Mrs. Boye. Now that he came straight from his mother’s grave, it seemed to him, not exactly a desecration or anything like that, and yet out of tune with the key in which his present moods were pitched. It was a discord. If he had been going to meet his fiancée, his young blushing bride, now that his soul had so long been bent on filial duties, it would not have conflicted with his feeling. It was of no use that he tried to take a superior tone with himself and call the change in his conception of his intimacy with Mrs. Boye Philistine and provincial. The word “Bohemian” formed itself subconsciously as an expression of a distaste that he could not reason away, and it was in line with this mood that his first visit, after he had engaged his old rooms at the embankment, was to the Neergaards and not to Mrs. Boye.

The following day he called on her, but did not find her in. The janitor said she had taken a villa at Emiliekilde, which surprised Niels, for he knew that her father’s country house was in that neighborhood.

Well, he would have to go out there in a day or two.

But the very next day he received a note from Mrs. Boye asking him to meet her in her apartment in town. The pale niece had seen him in the street. A quarter before one he was to come⁠—he must come. She would tell him why, if he did not know it. Did he know it? He must not misjudge her, and not be unreasonable. He knew her too well, and why should he take it as a plebeian nature would? He must not⁠—please! After all, they were not like other people. Oh, if he only would understand her! Niels, Niels!

This letter made him strangely excited, and he suddenly remembered with a sense of uneasiness that Mrs. Neergaard had looked at him with a sarcastic pitying expression and had smiled and said nothing in a curious meaning way. What could it be? What in the world could have happened?

The mood that had kept him away from Mrs. Boye had vanished so completely that he could not understand how he had ever felt it. He was alarmed. If they had only written to each other like sensible people! Why had they not written? He certainly had not been so busy. It was queer how he would allow himself to be so absorbed in the place where he happened to be that he forgot what was far away, or if he did not forget it, at least pushed it into the distant background, where it was buried by the present⁠—as under mountains. No one would think he had imagination.

At last! Mrs. Boye herself opened the door to the anteroom before he had time to ring. She said nothing, but gave him her hand in a long, sympathetic clasp; the newspapers had announced his bereavement. Niels said nothing either, and so they walked silently through the parlor, between the two rows of chairs in red-striped covers. The chandelier was wrapped in paper, and the windowpanes were whitened. In the sitting-room everything was as usual, except that the Venetian blinds were rolled down before the opened windows, and as they moved to and fro in the slight breeze, they struck the casement with a faint, monotonous tapping. Rays of light reflected from the sunlit canal outside filtered in between the yellow slats and made squares of tremulous wavy lines in the ceiling, which quivered with the rippling of the waves outside. Otherwise all was hushed and still, silently waiting with bated breath.⁠ ⁠…

Mrs. Boye could not make up her mind where she wanted to sit: finally she decided on the rocking-chair, and dusted it assiduously with her handkerchief, but instead of sitting down she stood behind the chair, resting her hands on its back. She still wore her gloves and had only drawn one arm out of her half-fitting black mantilla. Her dress was of silk tartan in a very tiny check matching the broad ribbons on the wide, round Pamela hat of light straw which half hid her face as she stood looking down and rocking the chair nervously.

Niels seated himself on the piano-stool at a distance from her, as if he expected something unpleasant.

“Then you know it, Niels?”

“No, but what is it I don’t know?”

The chair stopped. “I am engaged.”

“Are you engaged? But how⁠—why⁠—Mrs. Boye?”

“Oh, don’t call me Mrs. Boye, and don’t begin to be unreasonable right away!” She leaned against the back of the rocking-chair with a little air of defiance. “Surely you can understand that it isn’t the pleasantest thing in the world for me to stand here and explain to you. I will do it, but you might at least help me.”

“What do you mean? Are you engaged, or are you not?”

“I have just told you that I am,” she replied with gentle impatience, looking up.

“Then may I be allowed to wish you joy, Mrs. Boye, and to thank you very much for the time we have known each other.” He had risen to his feet and bowed sarcastically several times.

“And you can part from me like this, quite calmly? I am engaged, and then we are done, and everything that has been between us two is just a stupid old story which mustn’t be brought to mind any more. Past is past, and that is all⁠—Niels, all the precious days⁠—will the memory of them be silent from now on? Will you never, never think of me, never miss me? Won’t you call the dream forth again, on many a quiet evening, and give it the colors it might have glowed with? Can you keep from loving it all back to life again in your thoughts and ripening it to the fullness it might have had? Can you? Can you put your foot on it and crush it all out of existence, every bit of it? Niels!”

“I hope so; you have shown me that it can be done.⁠—But this is nonsense, pure, unmitigated nonsense from beginning to end. Why did you arrange this comedy? I have no shadow of a right to reproach you. You have never loved me, never said that you loved me. You have given me leave to love you, that is all, and now you withdraw your permission. Or perhaps you will allow me to go on, though you have given yourself to another? I don’t understand you, if you can imagine that to be possible. We are not children. Or are you afraid I shall forget you too soon? Never fear. You are not one to be blotted easily out of a man’s life. But take care! A love like mine does not come to a woman twice in her life; take care that you do not bring misfortune upon yourself by casting me off! I don’t wish you any harm, no, no! May you never know want and sickness, and may you have all the happiness that comes with wealth, admiration, and social success, in measure full and overflowing, that is my wish for you. May all the world stand open to you, all but one little door, one single little door, however much you knock and try to open it⁠—but otherwise everything as fully and widely as it is possible to wish it.”

He spoke slowly, almost sadly, not bitterly, but with a strangely tremulous note in his voice, a note that was new to her and moved her. She had grown a little pale and stood leaning stiffly against the chair. “Niels,” she said, “don’t predict misfortune! Remember you were not here, Niels, and my love⁠—I did not know how real it was; it seemed more like something that just interested me. It breathed through my life like a delicate spiritual poem, it never caught me in strong arms; it had wings⁠—only wings. At least I thought so. I did not know better until now, or until the moment I had done it⁠—said Yes and all that. Everything was so difficult, there were so many things all at once and so many people to consider.⁠ ⁠… It began with my brother, Hardenskjold, the one who was in the West Indies, you know. He had been rather wild when he was here, but over there he settled down and became so sensible and went into partnership with someone and made a lot of money, and married a rich widow, a sweet little thing, I assure you, and he and father made up, for Hardie was so changed, oh, he is so respectable there is no end to it, and so susceptible to what people say⁠—terribly bourgeoise, oh! Of course, he thought I ought to be taken up in the bosom of the family again, and every time he came here he lectured me and pleaded and palavered, and you see father is an old man now, and so at last I did it, and everything was just as in the old days.”

She paused for a moment and began to take off first her mantilla and then her hat and gloves, and, busy with all this, she turned a little away from Niels, while she went on talking.

“And then Hardie had a friend who is very highly respected⁠—oh, extremely so, and they all thought I ought to do it and wished it so much, and then you see I could take my position in society just as before, or really better than before, because he is so very highly respected in every way, and after all that is what I have been wishing for a long time. I suppose you can’t understand that? You would never have thought it of me? Quite the contrary. Because I was always making fun of conventional society with its banalities and its stereotyped morality, its thermometer of virtue and its compass of womanliness⁠—you remember how witty we were! It is to weep, Niels, for it wasn’t true, at least not all the time. I will tell you something: we women can break away for a while, when something in our lives has opened our eyes to the love of freedom that after all is in us, but we can’t keep it up. It is in our blood, this passion for the quintessence of propriety and the pinnacle of gentility up to its most punctilious point. We can’t bear to be at war with the established order that is accepted by all commonplace people. In our inmost selves we really think these people are right, because they are the ones that sit in judgment, and in our hearts we bow to their judgments and suffer from them, no matter how brave a face we wear. It is not natural for us women to be exceptional, not really, Niels, it makes us so queer, more interesting, perhaps, but still⁠—Can you understand it? It is silly, don’t you think so? But at least you can comprehend that it made a strange impression on me to return to the old surroundings. So many things came back to me, memories of my mother and of her standards. It seemed as though I had come into a safe haven again; everything was so peaceful and well ordered, and I had only to bind myself to it to be properly happy ever after. And so I let them bind me, Niels.”

Niels could not help smiling; he felt so superior, and was so sorry for her, as she stood there, girlishly unhappy in the midst of all this confession. He was softened and could not find any hard words.

He went over to her.

Meanwhile she had turned the chair toward her and had sunk down on it, and now she was sitting there quite forlorn and pathetic, leaning back with arms hanging and face lifted, gazing out under lowered eyelids through the darkened parlor with its two rows of chairs into the dim anteroom.

Niels laid his arm along the back of the chair and rested his hand on its arm, as he bent over her. “And you had quite forgotten⁠—me?” he whispered.

She seemed not to hear him and did not even lift her eyes, but at last she shook her head, very faintly, and, after another long pause, shook it again, very faintly.

Round about them everything was very still at first. Then a maid came clattering along the halls and singing, as she polished the door-locks; the noise of the knobs turning cut brutally into the silence and made it seem deeper than before when it suddenly came back. After a while, nothing was heard except the drowsy, monotonous tapping of the blinds.

The silence seemed to rob them of the power of speech, almost of thought. She sat as before with her eyes fixed on the dim anteroom, while he remained standing, bending over her, gazing at the pattern of her silk dress, and, unconsciously, lured by the enveloping stillness, he began to rock her in the chair⁠—very⁠—softly⁠—very⁠—softly.⁠ ⁠…

She lifted her eyelids for a look at his shadowed profile, and lowered them again in quiet content. It was like a long embrace; it was as though she gave herself into his arms when the chair went back, and when it swung forward again, and her feet touched the floor, there was something of him in the pressure of the boards against her foot. He felt it too; the process began to interest him, and he rocked more and more vigorously. It was as though he came nearer and nearer to taking her as he drew the chair farther back; there was anticipation in the instant when it was about to plunge forward again, and when it came down there was a strange satisfaction in the soft tap of her passive feet against the floor; then when he pushed it down yet a little farther there was complete possession in the action which pressed her sole gently against the floor and forced her to raise her knee ever so slightly.

“Let us not dream!” said Niels at last with a sigh and relinquished the chair.

“Yes, let us!” she said almost pleadingly, and looked innocently at him with great wistful eyes.

She had risen slowly.

“No dreams!” said Niels nervously, putting his arm around her waist. “Too many dreams have passed between you and me. Have you never felt them? Have they never touched you like a light breath caressing your cheek or stirring your hair? Is it possible that the night has never been tremulous with sigh upon sigh that dropped and died on your lips?”

He kissed her, and it seemed to him that she grew less young under his kisses, less young, but lovelier, more glowing in her beauty, more alluring.

“I want you to know it,” he said. “You don’t know how I love you, how I have suffered and longed. Oh, if those rooms at the embankment could speak, Tema!”

He kissed her again and again, and she threw her arms around his neck with such abandon that her wide silk sleeves fell back above the billowing lace of the white undersleeves, above the gray elastic that held them together over the elbow.

“What could those rooms say, Niels?”

“Tema, they could say, ten thousand times and more; they could pray in that name, rage in that name, sigh and sob in it; they could threaten Tema, too.”

“Could they?”

From the street below came a conversation floating in through the open window complete and unabridged, the most commonplace worldly wisdom drawled in shopworn phrases, welded together by two untemperamental, gossipy voices. All this prose made it more wonderful yet to stand there, heart to heart, sheltered in the soft, dim light.

“How I love you, sweetheart, sweetheart⁠—in my arms you are so dear; are you so dear, so dear? And your hair⁠—I can hardly speak, and all my memories⁠—so dear⁠—all my memories of how I cried and was wretched and longed so miserably, they press on and force their way in as if they too would be happy with me in my happiness⁠—do you understand?⁠—Do you remember, Tema, the moonlight last year? Are you fond of it?⁠—Oh, you don’t know how cruel it can be. Such a clear, moonlight night, when the air seems to have stiffened in cold light, and the clouds lie there in long layers⁠—Tema, flowers and leaves hold their fragrance so close around them it is like a frost of scents covering them, and all sounds seem so far away and die so suddenly and do not linger at all⁠—Such a night is so merciless, for it makes longing grow so strangely intense; the silence draws it out from every corner of your soul, sucks it out with hard lips, and there is no glimmering hope, no slumbering promise in all that clearness. Oh, how I cried, Tema! Tema, have you never cried through a moonlight night? Sweetheart, it would be a shame if you should cry; you shall never cry, there shall always be sunshine for you and nights of roses⁠—a night of roses⁠—”

She had given herself entirely to his embrace, and with her gaze lost in his, her lips murmured strangely sweet words of love, half muted by her breath, words repeated after him, as if she were whispering them to her own heart.

The cessation of the voices in the street made her stir restlessly. Then they came back to the firm, rhythmic accompaniment of a cane striking against the cobblestones, crossed over to the other side, lingered long in the distance, sank to a murmur⁠—died away.

And the silence again welled up around them, flamed up around them, throbbing with heartbeats, heavy with breath, yielding. Speech had been seared away between them, and lingering kisses fell from their lips fraught with unspoken questions, but giving no solace nor any present bliss. They held each other’s gaze and dared not take their eyes away, but neither did they dare to put meaning into their look; they veiled it rather; withdrew behind it, silently hiding, brooding over secret dreams.

A quiver passed through his clasping arms and woke her. She thrust him from her with both hands and set herself free.

“Go, Niels, go! You must not be here, you must not. Do you hear?”

He tried to draw her to him again, but she broke away, wild and pale. She was trembling from head to foot and stood holding her arms out from her body as if she were afraid to touch herself.

Niels would have knelt and caught her hand.

“Don’t touch me!” There was desperation in her look. “Why don’t you go when I am begging you to? Good heavens, why can’t you go? No, no, don’t speak to me, go away, you⁠—Can’t you see I am shaking before you? Look, look! Oh, it’s wicked the way you are treating me! And when I’m begging you to go!”

It was impossible to say a word; she would not listen. She was quite beside herself. Tears streamed from her eyes; her face was almost distorted and seemed to give out light in its pallor.

“Oh, do go! Can’t you see that you are humiliating me by staying? You are brutal to me, that’s what you are! What have I done to you that you ill-treat me this way? Do go! Have you no pity?”

Pity? He was cold with rage. This was madness! Still he could do nothing but go, and he went. He did not like the two rows of chairs, but he walked slowly between them, looking at them with a fixed gaze of defiance.

“Exit Niels Lyhne,” he said, when he heard the latch of the hall-door click behind him.

He walked down the steps thoughtfully, his hat in his hand. On the landing he stopped and gesticulated to himself: If he could understand the least bit! Why this and why, again, that? Then he walked on. There were the open windows. He felt like tearing to pieces that sickly sweet silence up there with a shrill cry. He felt like talking to someone for hours⁠—mercilessly⁠—talking nonsense into that silence, washing it cold in nonsense. He could not get it out of his blood; he could see it, taste it; he walked in it. Suddenly he stopped and blushed fiery red with angry shame. Had she used him to tempt herself with?

In the room above, Mrs. Boye still was weeping. She had gone over to the pier-glass and stood resting both hands on the console, weeping till the tears dripped from her cheeks down into the pink chamber of a huge seashell lying there. She looked at her distorted face as it appeared above the misty spot her breath had formed on the mirror, and traced the course of her tears as they welled out over the rim of the eyes and rolled down. Where did they all come from? She had never cried like this before⁠—yes, once, in Frascati, after a runaway.

Presently the tears began to come more sparingly, but a nervous trembling still shook her spasmodically from neck to heel.

The sun now beat directly on the windows. The tremulous reflections from the waves were drawn aslant under the ceiling, and on the sides of the Venetian blinds the parallel rays fell in rows, forming perfect shelves of yellowish light. The heat increased, and mingling with the ripe smell of hot wood and sun-warmed dust, other scents floated out from the bright flowers of the sofa-cushions, from the silken curves of the chair-backs, from books and folded rugs, where the heat released a hundred forgotten perfumes and wafted them through the air, light as wraiths.

Very slowly her trembling subsided, leaving a curious dizziness, in which fantastic emotions that were more than half sensations whirled around on the tracks of her wondering thoughts. She closed her eyes, but remained standing with her face turned to the mirror.

Strange how it had come over her, this piercing terror! Had she cried out? There was the echo of a scream in her ears and a tired feeling in her throat as if she had emitted a long, anguished cry. If he had taken her! She allowed herself to be taken and pressed her arms against her heart as if to ward him off. She struggled, but yet⁠—now: she felt as if she were sinking naked through the air, blushing, burning with shame, impudently caressed by all the winds of heaven⁠—He would not go, and it would soon be too late; all her strength was leaving her like bubbles that burst; bubble after bubble forced its way between her lips and burst unceasingly; in another second it would be too late! Had she begged him on her knees? Too late! She was lifted irresistibly to his embrace, as a bubble that rises through the water⁠—tremulous, so her soul rose up naked before him, with every wish bared to his gaze, every secret dream, every hidden surrender unveiled before his mastering eye. Again in his arms, lingering, sweetly trembling. There was a statue of alabaster surrounded by flames; it glowed transparent in the heat of the fire; little by little its dark centre melted, until all was luminous light.

Slowly she opened her eyes and looked at her image in the mirror with a discreet smile as at a fellow conspirator before whom she did not wish to commit herself too fully. Then she went around the room gathering together her gloves, hat, and mantilla.

Her dizziness seemed blown away, leaving only a rather pleasant sense of weakness in her knees. She walked about to feel it better. Secretly, as if by accident, she gave the rocking-chair a confidential little push with her elbow.

She rather liked scenes.

With one look she said farewell to some invisible thing. Then she rolled up the blinds, and it seemed like another room.

Three weeks later Mrs. Boye was married, and Niels Lyhne was quite alone with himself. He could not quite keep up his indignation over the unworthy manner in which she had thrown herself into the arms of that conventional society at which she had so often scoffed. True, it had only opened the door and beckoned, and she had come. But it was hardly for him to throw stones, for had he not himself felt the magnetic attraction of honest bourgeoisie? If it had not been for that last meeting! If that really was what he accused her of, if it had been intended for a madcap farewell to the old life, one last wanton prank before she withdrew behind “the quintessence of propriety”⁠—could it be possible? Such boundless self-scorn, such a cynical mockery of herself and him and all that they had shared of memories and hopes, of enthusiasm and sacred ideals! It made him blush and rage by turns.⁠—But was he fair to her? After all, what had she done but tell him frankly and honestly: Such and such things draw me to the other side and draw me powerfully, but I recognize your right even more fully than you ask, and here I am. If you can take me, I am yours; if not, I go where the power is greatest.⁠—And if it were so, had she not been entirely within her rights? He had not been able to take her. The final decision might depend on such a little thing, on the shadow of a thought, the vibration of a mood.

If he only knew what she must have known for an instant and probably did not know any longer! He hated to believe that of which he could not help accusing her. Not only for her sake, but even more for his own, because it seemed to put a blot on his ’scutcheon, not logically, of course, and yet⁠—

But, whatever the manner of her leaving him, one thing was certain: he was now alone, and though he felt the emptiness at first, he was soon conscious of a sense of relief. So many things were waiting for him. The year at Lønborggård and abroad, though absorbing his thoughts, had been in a sense an involuntary rest, and the very fact that this period had given him a clearer conception of his own powers and limitations spurred him on to use his faculties in undisturbed work. He was not anxious to create yet, but rather to collect; there was such an infinite mass of material he wanted to make his own that he began to think dejectedly of the brief span of mortal life. Though he had never wasted his time, it is not easy to emancipate one’s self from the paternal bookcase, and it seems simplest to seek the goal along the paths where others have attained it, and therefore he had not set out to seek his own Vineland in the wide world of books, but had followed where the fathers led. Loyally he had closed his eyes to much that lured him, in order to see more clearly in the vast night of the Eddas and sagas; and he had been deaf to many voices that called him, in order to listen more closely to the mystic sounds of nature in the folksongs.

But now he understood, at last, that it was not a law of nature to be either Old Norse or Romantic, that it was simpler to express his own doubts than to put them in the mouth of Gorm, Loki-worshipper, that it was more rational to find words for the mystic stirrings of his own being than to call to the cloister walls of the Middle Ages and hear his own voice come back to him as a faint echo.

He had always had an open mind for the new ideas of his time, but he had been occupied in finding how the New had been foreshadowed in the Old, rather than in listening to what the New said clearly and explicitly for itself. In this he was in no wise remarkable; for never yet has any new gospel been preached but the whole world has become busy with the old prophets.

Yet this did not suffice, and Niels threw himself enthusiastically into his new labors. He was seized with that lust of conquest and thirst for the power of knowledge which every worker in the realm of thought, no matter how humble a drudge he may later become, has surely felt once in his life, though for only one brief hour. Which one of us all, whom a kind fate has given the opportunity to care for the development of our own minds, has not gazed rapturously out over the boundless sea of knowledge, and which of us has not gone down to its clear, cool waters and begun, in the lighthearted arrogance of youth, to dip it out in our hollow hand as the child in the legend? Do you remember how the sun could laugh over the fair summer land, yet you saw neither flower nor sky nor rippling brook? The feasts of life swept past and woke not even a dream in your young blood; even your home seemed far away⁠—do you remember? And do you also remember how a structure rose in your thoughts from the yellowing leaves of books, complete and whole, reposing in itself as a work of art, and it was yours in every detail, and your spirit dwelt in it? When the pillars rose slender and with conscious strength in their bold curves, it was of you that brave aspiring and of you the bold sustaining. And when the vaulted roof seemed to be suspended in air, because it had gathered all its weight, stone upon stone, in mighty drops, and let it down on the neck of the pillars, it was of you that dream of weightless floating, that confident bearing down of the arches; it was you planting your foot on your own.

In this wise your personality grows with your knowledge and is clarified and unified through it. To learn is as beautiful as to live. Do not be afraid to lose yourself in minds greater than your own! Do not sit brooding anxiously over your own individuality or shut yourself out from influences that draw you powerfully for fear that they may sweep you along and submerge your innermost pet peculiarities in their mighty surge! Never fear! The individuality that can be lost in the sifting and reshaping of a healthy development is only a flaw; it is a branch grown in the dark, which is distinctive only so long as it retains its sickly pallor. And it is by the sound growth in yourself that you must live. Only the sound can grow great.

Christmas Eve came upon Niels Lyhne unawares. For the past six months, he had not visited anyone except now and then the Neergaards. They had invited him to spend the evening with them, but last Christmas Eve had been the memorable one at Clarens, and therefore he preferred to be alone.

There was a high wind. A thin covering of snow not yet trodden into slush spread over the streets and made them seem wider. The layer of white on roofs and windowsills gave a touch of beauty to the houses at the same time as it made them appear more isolated. The street-lamps, flickering in the wind, would now and then, as if absentmindedly, send a patch of light up a wall and startle from its dreams a merchants sign, making it stare out in large-lettered blankness. The store-windows, too, half lighted as they were and still disarranged from the Christmas shopping, wore an unusual aspect, a curiously abstracted look.

He turned into the side streets, where the celebration seemed to be in full swing. Music sounded from basements and low rooms; sometimes it was a violin, but more often a hand organ, that droned out dance tunes, and something in the hearty goodwill of the performers suggested rather the pleasant toil of the dance than its festive glamor. It brought an illusion of shuffling feet and steaming air⁠—at least so it seemed to him who stood outside and, in his solitude, became polemical against all this sociability. He had much more sympathy for the workingman who stood with his child outside a tiny shop, discussing one of the cheap marvels in the dimly lighted window, evidently determined to have their choice absolutely decided before they ventured into that den of temptation. And he felt sympathy for the poorly clad old gentlewomen who passed him, one by one, almost at every hundred steps⁠—all with the strangest coats and mantillas in the fashion of bygone days, and all with diffident, timorous movements of their old throats, like suspicious birds, walking in the uncertain, hesitating manner of those long unused to the world, as if they had been sitting, day after day, forgotten in the hidden corners of rear flats and attic rooms and only that one evening in the year were included and remembered. It saddened him. His heart shrank with a sick sensation, as he tried to picture to himself the slowly trickling existence of such a lonely old spinster; he seemed to hear sounding in his ears a mantel clock, painfully rhythmic, ticking out its “once-again, once-again,” dropping the empty seconds, one by one, in the chalice of day and filling it full.

Well, he would have to get this Christmas dinner over with. He retraced his steps in a half conscious dread that if he chose other streets they might reveal other kinds of lonely creatures and other forms of forlornness than those he had encountered, which had already left a bitter taste in his mouth.

Out there in the wider streets he breathed more freely. He quickened his pace with a slight sense of defiance, holding himself apart as it were from what he had just seen by telling himself that his loneliness was self-chosen.

He entered one of the larger restaurants. While waiting for his dinner, he observed, from the shelter of an old newspaper supplement, the people who came in. Most of them were young men. Some had a challenging air, as if they would forbid all present to appropriate them as fellow sufferers, while others could not conceal their embarrassment at having no place to go on such an evening, but all showed a marked preference for distant corners and secluded tables. Many came in couples, and most of these were plainly brothers; Niels had never seen so many brothers all at once. Often they were very much unlike each other in dress and manner, and their hands testified even more clearly to their different positions in life. It was almost a rarity to see any particular intimacy between them, either when they came or after they had sat and talked for a while. Here, one was superior and the other full of admiration; there, one was cordial, while the other repelled advances. Others again betrayed a mutual watchfulness, or, worse yet, an unexpressed condemnation of each other’s aims and ambitions and methods. Most of them evidently needed the holiday and a certain amount of loneliness to make them remember their common origin and bring them together.

Niels sat thinking of this and marvelling at the patience all these people exhibited, neither ringing nor calling for the waiters, as if they had tacitly agreed to banish as much as possible of the restaurant atmosphere from the place. While he was engrossed in this, he saw just coming in a man whom he knew, and the sudden sight of a familiar face among all these strangers startled him so that he rose and met him with a pleased, though somewhat surprised, “Good evening.”

“Are you waiting for anyone?” asked the other, looking for a place to hang his overcoat.

“No, I am alone.”

“That’s lucky for me!”

The newcomer was a Dr. Hjerrild, a young man whom Niels had met at the Neergaards, and whom he knew⁠—not from anything he had said, but from certain innuendos of Mrs. Neergaard’s⁠—to be very liberal in his religious views, though the political opinions he professed were quite the reverse. People of that type did not often frequent the home of the Neergaards, who were at once religious and liberal. The doctor, however, belonged by inclination as well as through the influence of his dead mother to one of the circles⁠—rather numerous at that time⁠—where the new liberal ideas were looked on with sceptical or even hostile eyes, while in religion their members were rather more than rationalists and rather less than atheists, when they were not mystics or indifferentists. These various circles had many shades of opinion, but, in general, they were agreed in feeling that Holstein was at least as near to their hearts as Slesvig, while the kinship with Sweden was ignored, and Danism in its newest forms was not altogether approved. Moreover, they knew their Molière better than their Holberg, Baggesen better than Oehlenschläger, and in their artistic taste they tended, perhaps, to the sentimental.

In such, or at least kindred influences, Hjerrild had developed. He sat looking a little dubiously at Niels, as the latter recounted his observations of the other diners and especially dwelt on their apparent shame at not having part in any home or semblance of home on such an evening.

“I understand that perfectly,” he said coldly, in a tone almost of rebuff. “People don’t come here on Christmas Eve because they like it, and necessarily they must have a sense of humiliation at being left out, no matter whether it’s other people’s doing or their own. Do you mind telling me why you are here? Don’t answer if you would rather not.”

Niels replied that it was only because he had spent last Christmas Eve with his mother, who had since died.

“I beg your pardon,” said Hjerrild; “it was very good of you to answer me, and you must forgive me for being so suspicious. Do you know, I could very well imagine that you might come here in order to administer a youthful kick to Christmas as an institution, but as for myself, I am really here out of respect for other people’s Christmas. It is the first Christmas Eve since I came here that I have not spent with a very kind family from my native town. It occurred to me, somehow, that I was in the way when they sang their Christmas carols, not that they were ashamed⁠—they have too much character for that⁠—but it made them uneasy to have anyone there to whom these hymns were as sung into the empty air. At least that is what I imagined.”

Almost silently they finished their dinner, lighted their cigars, and agreed to go somewhere else for their toddy. Neither of them felt inclined, that evening, to gaze upon the same gilded mirror frames and red sofas that met their eyes on most of the other evenings of the year, and so they sought refuge in a little café which they did not usually frequent.

They soon realized that this was no place to stay in.

The host and the waiters, with a few friends, sat in the rear of the room, playing loo with two trumps. The host’s wife and daughters looked on and brought the refreshments, but not to the strangers; a waiter filled their order. They drank hurriedly, for they noticed that their entrance made an interruption; the conversation was hushed, and the host, who had been sitting in his shirtsleeves, seemed embarrassed and put on his coat.

“We seem to be rather homeless tonight,” said Niels, as they walked down the street.

“Well, that is as it should be,” was Hjerrild’s rather pathetic answer.

They began to talk about the Christian religion, for the topic was in the air.

Niels argued vehemently, but in rather general terms, against Christianity.

Hjerrild was tired of treading again the beaten track of discussions that were old to him, and suddenly said, without any particular connection with what had gone before: “Take care, Lyhne; Christianity is in power. It is foolish to quarrel with the reigning truth by agitating for a crown prince truth.”

“Foolish or not foolish⁠—what does it matter?”

“Don’t say that so lightly. I did not mean to tell you such a commonplace as that it is foolish in a material way; morally, too, it is foolish and worse. Take care; don’t associate yourself too closely with this particular movement in our time, unless it happens to be absolutely necessary to your own personality. As a poet you must have many other interests.”

“I don’t understand you. I can’t treat myself like a hurdy-gurdy from which I can take out an unpopular piece and put in a tune that everybody is whistling.”

“Can’t you? Many people can. But you can at least say: ‘We are not playing that piece just now.’ We can often do more in that line than we think. A human being is not so closely knit. When you use your right arm constantly in violent exertion, the blood rushes to it, and it grows at the expense of the rest of your body, while your legs, which you are using as little as possible, naturally get a little thin. You can apply the image for yourself. Have you noticed that most of the idealistic forces in our country, and probably the best of them, are entirely absorbed in the cause of political freedom? You can take a lesson from that. Believe me, there is saving grace in fighting for an idea that is gaining ground, but it is very demoralizing to a man to belong to a losing minority, which life, in its inevitable course, puts in the wrong, point by point, step by step. It cannot be otherwise, for it is bitterly disheartening to see that which your inmost soul believes to be right and true, to see this Truth reviled and struck in the face by the meanest camp-follower in the victorious army, to hear her called vile names, while you can do nothing at all except to love her even more faithfully, kneel to her in your heart with even deeper adoration, and see her beautiful face as radiantly beautiful as ever and as full of majesty, shining with the same immortal light, no matter how much dust is whirled up around her white forehead, no matter how thickly the poisonous fog closes in around her halo. It is bitterly disheartening, and your soul suffers injury inevitably, for it is so easy to hate until your heart is weary, or to draw around you the cold shadows of contempt, or to be dulled by pain and let the world go its own way.⁠—Of course, if there is that within you which makes you not choose the easiest way nor evade the whole matter, but walk upright with all your faculties tense and all your sympathies wide awake, taking the blows and stings of defeat as the scourge falls on your back again and again, and still keep your bleeding hope from drooping, while you listen for the distant rumblings that presage revolution, and look for the faint, distant dawn that some day⁠—some time, perhaps.⁠ ⁠… If you have that within you!⁠—but don’t try it, Lyhne. Imagine what the life of such a man must be, if he is to be true to himself. Never to open his mouth without knowing that whatever he says will be met with scorn and jeers! To have his words distorted, besmirched, wrenched all out of joint, turned into cunning snares for his own feet, and then, before he can pick them up from the mud and straighten them out again, to find all the world suddenly deaf. Then to begin over again at another point and have the same thing happen over and over again. And⁠—what hurts most, perhaps⁠—to be misunderstood and despised by noble men and women, whom he looks up to with admiration and respect in spite of their different principles. Yet it must be so, it cannot be otherwise. Those who are in opposition must not expect to be attacked for what they really are or really want, but for what the party in power is pleased to think they are and want; and besides, power used upon the weaker must be misused⁠—how can it be otherwise? Surely no one can expect the party in power to divest itself of its advantages in order to meet the opposition on equal terms; but that does not make the struggle of the opposition less painful and heartrending. When you think of all this, Lyhne, do you really suppose a man can fight this battle, with all these vulture-beaks buried in his flesh, unless he has the blind, stubborn enthusiasm which we call fanaticism? And how in the world can he get fanatic about a negation? Fanatic for the idea that there is no God!⁠—But without fanaticism there is no victory. Hush, listen!”

They stopped before a house where a curtain had been rolled up, allowing them to look into a large room, and through the slightly opened window a song floated out to them, borne on the clear voices of women and children:

“A child is born in Bethlehem,
In Bethlehem.
Therefore rejoice, Jerusalem!
Hallelujah, Hallelujah!”

They walked on silently. The song and especially the notes of the piano followed them down the quiet street.

“Did you hear?” said Hjerrild. “Did you hear the enthusiasm in that old Hebraic shout of triumph? And those two Jewish names of towns! Jerusalem was not only symbolic: the entire city, Copenhagen, Denmark, it was Us, the Christian people within the people.”

“There is no God, and man is his prophet,” replied Niels bitterly and rather sadly.

“Exactly,” scoffed Hjerrild. “After all, atheism is unspeakably tame. Its end and aim is nothing but a disillusioned humanity. The belief in a God who rules everything and judges everything is humanity’s last great illusion, and when that is gone, what then? Then you are wiser; but richer, happier? I can’t see it.”

“But don’t you see,” exclaimed Niels Lyhne, “that on the day when men are free to exult and say: ‘There is no God!’ on that day a new heaven and a new earth will be created as if by magic. Then and not till then will heaven be a free infinite space instead of a spying, threatening eye. Then the earth will be ours and we the earth’s, when the dim world of bliss or damnation beyond has burst like a bubble. The earth will be our true mother country, the home of our hearts, where we dwell, not as strangers and wayfarers a short time, but all our time. Think what intensity it will give to life, when everything must be concentrated within it and nothing left for a hereafter. The immense stream of love that is now rising up to the God of men’s faith will bend to earth again and flow lovingly among all those beautiful human virtues with which we have endowed and embellished the godhead in order to make it worthy of our love. Goodness, justice, wisdom⁠—who can name them all? Don’t you see what nobility it will give men when they are free to live their life and die their death, without fear of hell or hope of heaven, but fearing themselves, hoping for themselves? How their consciences will grow, and what a strength it will give them when inactive repentance and humility cannot atone any more, when no forgiveness is possible except to redeem with good what they sinned with evil.”

“You must have a wonderful faith in humanity. Why, then atheism will make greater demands on men than Christianity has done.”

“Of course!”

“Of course; but where will you get all the strong individuals you will need to make up your atheistical community?”

“Little by little; atheism itself must develop them. Neither this generation nor the next and not the next after that will be ripe for atheism, of that I am quite aware, but in every generation there will be a few who will honestly struggle to live and die in it and will win. These people will, in course of time, form a group of spiritual ancestors to whom their descendants will look back in pride, and from whom they will gain courage. It will be hardest in the beginning; many will fail, and those who win will have torn banners, because they will still be steeped in traditions to the marrow of their bones; it is not only the brain that has to be convinced, but the blood and nerves, hopes and longings, even dreams! But it does not matter; some time it will come, and the few will be the many.”

“You think so?⁠—I am trying to think of a name; could we call it pietistical atheism?”

“All true atheism⁠—” Niels began, but Hjerrild cut him short.

“Of course,” he said, “of course! By all means, let us have only a single gate, one needle’s eye for all the camels on the face of the earth.”