Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

“ Olyphant sat staring at her with heavy, vacuous eyes. He kept his feelings desperately at bay, because he feared their vehemence. How vast the sky was! And the mountains, how blue and airy and divinely indifferent! What is life, that we should deplore its loss; or death, that we should dread its coming? ”

“ A man who is sick unto death does not mind throwing his reason overboard in his efforts to keep hold of the life that is slipping away from him. No cure is too absurd to try, if somebody asserts that it has benefited him. It was a ridiculous thing, of course, incapable of being discussed among rational people; but that did not prevent Harold Olyphant from clutching at a shivering hope that he held in this mysterious parchment the key to restored health and activity. ”

“ But it pleased Olyphant's fancy to imagine a fiendish mockery in this shielding and clinging intimacy between the dread heathen incantation, breathing evil curses, and the sacred words of consolation and love, uttered by Him who hurled the old bloody gods from their thrones into the outer darkness. Perhaps the old monk intended by this ingenious arrangement to effect a compromise between the old gods and the new; perhaps he meant to counteract the magic of the incantation by that of the prayer as that of the prayer by the incantation. ”

“ But this one life, which was so dear to him, why should it be chosen for extinction out of all the worthless millions? Remorse hovered like a shadow in the background of his mind; but he could not bring himself to believe in it. A strange chill numbness settled all over him, and he felt nothing, except a dull heartache.
The harsh scream of a bird of prey aroused him. He arose slowly, lifted the dead body in his arms, and bore it back toward the villa. And again he seemed to himself to be under a spell which would compel him to march on with this burden forever. ”

“ How beautiful to feel the rare and potent juices of life mount within you, instinct with the sweetness and strength of the earth, building with elfin craft your delicate fibres, and unfolding your growth in a little green world, feeding and sheltering a teeming variety of animated things. Your vital processes are grand and slow, the rhythm of your being is Nature's rhythm ”

“ Griffin put down his heavy foot, and swore that he had had enough of the wilderness. What with mosquitoes and bats, and wolves prowling about the tents, howling like demons, and the loons making night hideous with their unearthly mirth, he could scarcely be blamed for refusing to make a martyr of himself any longer. He compelled his cousin by main force to break up the camp, not for the reason he alleged, but because he honestly believed that Olyphant, if permitted to nurse his fancies in solitude, would sooner or later lose his mind. ”

“ There was a twilight region of the soul, separate and distinct from the daylight region, in which science and reason dwelt; and in these dusky recesses the strangest things could strike root and send forth long pallid shoots that sought and yet shrank from the daylight.
The next day the two friends were out rowing on the fjord. When they had talked for awhile, Olyphant pulled the ancient parchment from his pocket, and became absorbed in the contemplation of the runes. The locusts—oh, what an exquisite, swelling crescendo they executed ”

“ The fancy flitted through his brain that it was the incantation, working in her blood, which was opening her senses to the subtler life and the hidden music of nature, as it had opened his. He became conscious of a closer kinship with her when he saw how beautifully her eyes lit up at the mention of this murmurous summer chorus. They were both under the same spell now, for good or for ill.
"Don't you think man made a great mistake in becoming civilized?" ”

“ He succeeded occasionally in persuading himself that it was all a hallucination; that he had done no harm to Winifred Ramsey, and that the course of wisdom would be to return home and devote his recovered health to the perfecting of his great discovery. But his heart rose in passionate protest against this reasoning. Out of the depth of his nature something cried out with wild voices which he could not hush or appease. He must see Winifred and do penance to her, humble himself in the dust before her, and receive her forgiveness. ”

“ Through Olyphant's oppressed mind flared suddenly a wild hostility to these people. He did not know why—but he detested them all—he hated them. Here were lives enough that cumbered the earth, and could well be spared. There could be no harm in trying the ancient curse on one of these—for in all probability it would have no more effect than the breeze which wafted over their heads—but it must be someone, unknown and unseen, whose fate, past and to come, he would never know ”

“ For the magic potency of the Lord's Prayer was an unacknowledged article of faith with the mediæval Christian Church. There seemed to be little sense, at first, in the quaint and abrupt alliterations, but no sooner had he begun to puzzle over them again than the strange chorus of minute sounds again became audible, and the same exquisite joy of oneness with nature, coupled with a sympathetic rhythm of being and ecstatic insight, burst upon him. ”

“ She lay like a weary child in his arms; resting her head upon his shoulder, smiling vaguely toward the moss-grown Faun that was playing his broken reed under the ilexes. There was something quivering through the light—a kind of dumb anguish, a rigid, shining despair. Then there came a chorus of strange wild voices, flute-like, incorporeal, and remote. There was laughter in them—mirthless and mocking—like that of the loon in the Norseland wilderness. ”

“ Olyphant had intended never to see or know the one against whom he hurled the ancient curse, for his morbid conscience would torture him to death, in case this person should show symptoms of ill-health. But an anonymous and impersonal victim could never be very troublesome. He would have slipped away now, and never questioned Griffin about his companion, if the conviction had not burst upon him that he had made a terrible mistake. He had attached the unmusical laugh to the wrong person, and perhaps brought calamity upon one whom he had not intended to harm. ”

“ Miss Ramsey's shyness had not the faintest touch of awkwardness about it, it was a native virginal reserve which repelled rather than invited confidence. But this very reserve, when coupled with the sweetness of nature which he found behind it, became doubly attractive to him; it furnished the key-note to her character, and the more he explored this character, the lovelier it appeared to him.
Mrs. Coleman, who had been on a rowing excursion with Griffin and Marit, returned about noon, and seemed in no wise displeased at Olyphant's attention to her niece. ”

“ With his placid self-conceit (which had a touch of drollery in it, and was not offensive) and his solid satisfaction with existence as it is, he was a most grateful companion to his high-strung and self-torturing cousin, who was always bothering about life's meaning, social problems, and other fantastic affairs. It was chiefly to escape his sense of responsibility for the world's misery that Olyphant had accepted the advice of his physician and gone to Norway; for whatever misery there is in Norway is of a quiet and unobtrusive kind, and is scarcely visible in summer ”

“ But such a mere intellectual conviction was impotent to affect the diseased nerve-centres, and, preach as much as he would, his feelings remained the same. Even the kindly but unmusical laugh of his cousin jarred on him, and it was useless to talk to Griffin about his longing for primeval silence and the like; for that blunt young gentleman took no hints, but treated his kinsman as a harmless and amiable lunatic, whose opinions he brushed away like so many cobwebs. He let his harsh mirth ring with a certain gusto through the lonely wilderness ”

“ Every word the lady uttered stabbed the young man like a sharp blade. Mrs. Coleman was a large woman of forty-five or fifty, with a majestic carriage and a perceptible mustache. On her cheeks, too, the down would need but little encouragement to develop into whiskers. But, for all that, her face was agreeable and not unkindly, and there was a look of race about her which distinctly stamped her as a gentlewoman. While they were talking, Miss Ramsey came out of the dining-room, her face framed in a mist of lace and a mass of auburn hair. There was a startled anxiety in her eyes, when she saw him ”

“ You would be appalled, if you knew how many lives have been impoverished that yours and mine might be enriched; how many have been destroyed that ours might be preserved. Impoverishment is but a lesser destruction. I am bound to think that my life is the most important in the world and to act upon that supposition. ”

“ The pure, sweet pagan vigor that rioted with joyous tumult in his veins was deeply repugnant to these dusky narcotic fumes. He felt that it would be impossible for him to put a cigar between his lips again.
"This climate, I should say, is just the thing for you," Griffin remarked, seating himself in a big, carved chair; "you look like a different man."
"Oh, yes," answered Olyphant, ruefully; "I woke up with a ravenous appetite this morning; I feel as if I had a bottomless pit within me."
"Oh, no," laughed his cousin, blowing a series of smoke-rings against the ceiling ”

“ They grew constantly more definite and unattractive. They became Cook tourists "doing" Norway in nine days; most likely Massachusetts school-mistresses with hard, intelligent faces, eye-glasses, mannish attire; and devoid of every grace that makes womanhood adorable. Griffin, with his cumbrous sportiveness and his matter-of-fact manner, flirting with these unlovely damsels must be a sight for gods. The vision pursued Olyphant like a nightmare.
Through the small lead-framed windows there came a burst of clear sky. Presently Marit brought supper, but Olyphant was unable to touch it. ”

“ Olyphant, for some reason, felt a vague animosity toward those Yankee tourists. He pictured to himself some shrill, angular New England girls, with short hair and a thirst for culture. As the afternoon wore on, the weather grew worse; and the New England girls tortured his fancy with suggestions of all the things which he abhorred in women. ”

“ But as physicists don't in any way interfere with me, and may benefit me, I have no interest in despatching them into eternity."
"Your philosophy is a brutal one, Oliver."
"Not at all. Nature is lavish of life. She is appallingly prolific. She has ordained that only the strong should survive, that the fit should develop their fitness by eliminating the unfit. ”

“ To grow like a tree, slowly and placidly, with long sensitive roots penetrating the soil, a thousand branches wrestling with the storm, and leaves without number drinking the sun and the dew through myriad pores, must have its deep delights. ”

“ Such gravely observant blue eyes, such thin, wavy, blond hair, such gently accentuated features, we see every day among professional men with a taste for scholarship; and, if we take the trouble to interpret them at all, we conclude that they indicate inherited culture, and a disposition to take life seriously. ”

“ He had so much to do in the world which only his weakness prevented him from accomplishing. Since he abandoned his linguistic studies, which he had prosecuted for three years in Germany, and devoted himself to science, life had seemed to him rich and precious. For three years he had labored with unremitting zeal at a grand discovery in physics which would revolutionize human society. It would double the earth's capacity for supporting her children ”

“ Every scientist knows that water can be burned by means of an electric current; but this method is too expensive. Olyphant was on the track of a much cheaper and simpler method, which had already yielded him astonishing results but was not yet sufficiently perfected for publication. I am bound to respect his wishes in giving no hint as to the nature of the discovery, which I do the more readily as he has never confided to me the details of his process. ”

“ He prided himself on his superiority to romantic considerations, declared that he meant to marry a homely girl, because the beautiful ones were always spoiled by flattery before they were out of their pinafores; and he was not discouraged by Olyphant's prophecy that, if he made his intention known, he was doomed to celibacy. A man so well "fixed" in life as himself, Griffin contended, need give himself no trouble on that score. ”