J. P. Jacobsen

“ The stalks of oats bowed downward, and the young clover trembled on the stubble-fields, and the wheat rose and fell in heavy billows; the roofs groaned, the mill creaked, its wings swung about, the smoke was driven back into the chimneys, and the window-panes became covered with moisture.
There was a swishing of wind in the gable-windows, in the poplars of the manor-house; the wind whistled through tattered bushes on the green hill of Bredbjerg. Mogens lay up there, and gazed out over the dark earth. The moon was beginning to acquire radiance, and mists were drifting down on the meadow. ”

“ Now he clearly heard the sound from the leaves of the silver poplar. He bowed his head in his arms and wept.
The next day was one of those in which late summer is rich. A day with a brisk, cool wind, with many large swiftly flying clouds, with everlasting alternations of darkness and light, according as the clouds drift past the sun. Mogens had gone up to the cemetery, the garden of the manor abutted on it. Up there it looked rather barren, the grass had recently been cut; behind an old quadrangular iron-fence stood a wide-spreading, low elder with waving foliage. ”

“ Finally Thora went to her room, but Mogens remained sitting in the conservatory, miserable that she had gone. He drew black imaginings for himself, that she was dead and gone, and that he was sitting here all alone in the world and weeping over her, and then he really wept. At length he became angry at himself and stalked up and down the floor, and wanted to be sensible. There was a love, pure and noble, without any coarse, earthly passion; yes, there was, and if there was not, there was going to be one. Passion spoiled everything, and it was very ugly and unhuman. ”

“ Mogens angrily broke a pane with his elbow, and slowly walked away. The girls inside screamed. Then he ran again for a long time with a low moaning. Scattered flashes of memory of happy days came to him, and when they had passed the darkness was twice as black. He could not bear to think of what had happened. It was impossible for it to have happened. He threw himself down on his knees and raised his hands toward heaven, the while he pleaded that that which had happened might be as though it had not occurred. ”

“ It was very still round about him, a great peace was within him, the pictures had disappeared, but happiness was here. A deep silence! There was not a sound, but sounds were in the air. And there came laughter and song and low words came and light and footsteps and dull sobbing of the beats of the pumps. Moaning he ran away, ran long and far, came to the lake, followed the shore, until he stumbled over the root of a tree, and then he was so tired that he remained lying. ”

“ She felt herself so strong at this hour, and life lay before her like a great, radiant day; no longer like a day declining toward the calm, melancholy hours of dusk. It seemed to her like an open, wide-awake space of time, with hot pulses throbbing every second, with joyous light, with energy and swiftness and an infinity without and within. And she was thrilled with the fullness of life, and longed for it with the feverish eagerness with which a traveler sets out on a journey. ”

“ The people of Old Bergamo had to stay where they were, and day by day it grew hotter; and day by day the gruesome disease became more voracious and more grasping. Terror grew to madness. What there had been of order and good government was as if the earth had swallowed it, and what was worst in human nature came in its stead.
At the very beginning when the plague broke out people worked together in harmony and concord. ”

“ A cross it proves to be, as they draw nearer. For all the time they are drawing nearer. They press upward along the steep road, flanked by walls, which leads up to the old town. It is a throng of white faces; they carry scourges in their hands. On their red banners a rain of fire is pictured. And the black crosses sway from one side to the other in the crowd.
From the dense mass there rises a smell of sweat, of ashes, of the dust of the roadway, and of stale incense.
They no longer sing, neither do they speak, nothing is audible but the tramping, herd-like sound of their naked feet. ”

“ A clayey river with flakes of muddy sand, and endless shores of stone-gray gravel; pale-brown fields without a blade of grass, pale-brown slopes, pale-brown hills and dust-colored roads, and here and there near the white houses, groups of black trees, absolutely black bushes and trees. Over all this hung a whitish sky, quivering with light, which made everything still paler, still dryer and more wearily light; never a glimmer of luxuriant, satiated hues, nothing but hungry, sun-parched colors; not a sound in the air, not a scythe passing through the grass, not a wagon rattling over the roads ”

“ He got his hands full of small stones, it was gravel, it was a black heap of gravel. Why was he out here in the field burrowing in a black gravel-heap?—He smelled the smoke, the flames flashed round him, he saw Camilla sink down into them, he cried out aloud and rushed wildly across the field. He could not rid himself of the sight of the flames, he held his eyes shut: Flames, flames! He threw himself on the ground and pressed his face down into the snow: Flames! He leaped up, ran backward, ran forward, turned aside: Flames everywhere! ”

“ He is enraptured by this tiny, living creature, he would so much like to have it come closer and closer, but he does not care to move, scarcely to take breath, lest it may be frightened and fly away.
As Mogens saw Thora more and more frequently, memories came more and more rarely, and he began to see her as she was. It was a time of peace and happiness when he was with her, full of silent longing and quiet sadness when he did not see her. ”

“ It lay directly opposite the councilor’s. Mogens ran on as if possessed. There was only a single slanting cross-street left. It was quite filled with people: well-dressed men, ragged old women who stood talking in a slow, whining tone, yelling apprentices, over-dressed girls who whispered to each other, corner-loafers who stood as if rooted to the spot and cracked jokes, surprised drunkards and drunkards who quarreled, helpless policemen, and carriages that would go neither forwards nor backwards. Mogens forced his way through the multitude. ”

“ Too much logic, too much contention for its own sake, one might say, and too little art.
This was the period when Jens Peter Jacobsen began to write, but he stood aside from the conflict, content to be merely artist, a creator of beauty and a seeker after truth, eager to bring into the realm of literature “the eternal laws of nature, its glories, its riddles, its miracles,” as he once put it. That is why his work has retained its living colors until to-day, without the least trace of fading. ”

“ So it is much better that one should take one’s ease here in a corner between high garden-walls, where the air lies tepid and soft and still—to sit on the sunny side, where a bench curves into a niche of the wall, to sit there end gaze upon the shimmering green acanthus in the roadside ditches, upon the silver-spotted thistles, and the pale-yellow autumn flowers.
The roses should have been on the long gray wall opposite, a wall full of lizard holes and chinks with withered grass ”

“ And day by day the plague increased, the summer’s sun blazed down upon the town, not a drop of rain fell, not the faintest breeze stirred. From corpses that lay rotting in the houses and from corpses that were only half-buried in the earth, there was engendered a suffocating stench which mingled with the stagnant air of the streets and attracted swarms and clouds of ravens and crows until the walls and roofs were black with them. ”

“ Fonss viewed this lifeless monotony with a resigned smile, but it made Elinor visibly nervous; not actively nervous as in the case of annoyance, but mournful and weary, as one often becomes after many days of rain, when all one’s gloomy thoughts seem to pour down upon one with the rain; or as at the idiotically consoling tick-tack of a clock, when one sits and grows incurably tired of one’s self ”

“ But what joy can you take in a tree or a bush, if you don’t imagine that a living being dwells within it, that opens and closes the flowers and smooths the leaves? When you see a lake, a deep, clear lake, don’t you love it for this reason, that you imagine creatures living deep, deep down below, that have their own joys and sorrows, that have their own strange life with strange yearnings? ”

“ He rushed further across the snow, past houses, past trees, past a terror-struck face, that stared out through a window-pane, round stacks of grain and through farm-yards, where dogs howled and tore at their chains. He ran round the front wing of a building and stood suddenly before a brightly, restlessly lighted window. The light did him good, the flames yielded to it; he went to the window and looked in. It was a brew-room, a girl stood at the hearth and stirred the kettle. The light which she held in her hand had a slightly reddish sheen on account of the dense fumes. ”

“ Mogens and William got along famously and Mogens had to promise that he would come to the manor-house in the evening. This he did, and later he came almost every day, but in spite of all the cordial invitations he continued living at the inn.
Now came a restless period for Mogens. At first Thora’s proximity brought back to life all his sad and gloomy memories. Often he had suddenly to begin a conversation with one of the others or leave, so that his emotion might not completely master him. She was not at all like Camilla, and yet he heard and saw only Camilla. ”

“ Mogens smiled.
“You don’t believe in elves, but you should. It is beautiful to believe in all that, in gnomes and elves. I believe in mermaids too, and elder-women, but goblins! What can one do with goblins and three-legged horses? Old Mary gets angry when I tell her this; for to believe what I believe, she says is not God-fearing. Such things have nothing to do with people, but warnings and spirits are in the gospel, too. What do you say?”
“I, oh, I don’t know—what do you really mean?”
“You surely don’t love nature?” ”

“ Mogens crept over the ruins and fragments of the fallen wall towards the edge of the abyss, from which cold and hot blasts of air alternately struck his face; on the other side so much of the wall had fallen, that he could look into Camilla’s room, while the part that hid the councilor’s office still stood. It grew hotter and hotter; the skin of his face became taut, and he noticed, that his hair was crinkling. Something heavy glided past his shoulder and remained lying on his back and pressed him down to the floor ”

“ You are only a little bit alarmed because of the change, you are frightened because of the slight disarrangement of your daily habits. I am thoroughly familiar with that, you are not the first one I have gotten tired of.”
“Oh, stay with me only to-day, I won’t torment you to stay a single hour longer.
“You really are dogs, you women! You haven’t a trace of fine feelings in your body. If one gives you a kick, you come crawling back again.”
“Yes, yes, that’s what we do, but stay only for to-day—won’t you—stay!”
“Stay, stay! No!”
“You have never loved me, Mogens!” ”

“ Of hell he spoke, that it is infinite as heaven is infinite, of the lonely world of torments which each one of the condemned must endure and fill with his wails. Seas of sulphur were there, fields of scorpions, flames that wrap themselves round a person like a cloak, and silent flames that have hardened and plunged into the body like a spear twisted round in a wound. ”

“ We owe everything to you, and we worship you, mother, if you only knew.... Oh, you cannot imagine, how much we want your love, want you beyond all bounds and limits, but there again you have taught us to restrain our love, and we never dare to come as close to your heart as we should like. ”

“ Most of them would come and ask him how a human being possibly could be so wonderfully beautiful, and they marveled that it really could be an entertaining occupation for several days to recall the features of a face, its changes of expression and coloring, the small movements of a head and a pair of hands, and the varying inflections in a voice. But then the peasant pointed with his whip towards the slate-roof about a mile away and said that the councilor lived over there, and the good Mogens rose from the straw and stared anxiously towards the roof. ”