J. P. Jacobsen

“ White and still, Edele lay there with the old man’s hand between both of hers. Slowly she breathed out her life, breath by breath; fainter and fainter was the rising of her breast; heavier and heavier fell the eyelids.
“My love to Copenhagen!” was her last low whisper.
But her last message was heard by no one. It did not come from her lips even as a breath—her message to him, the great artist whom she had loved secretly with her whole soul, but to whom she had been nothing, only a name that his ear knew, only one unrecognized figure in the great admiring public. ”

“ Bigum knew very well what an unfavorable impression he made and how hopeless his love was, but he knew it as we know a thing when we hope with all the strength of our soul that our knowledge is false. There is always the miracle left; and though miracles do not happen, they might happen. Who knows? Perhaps our intelligence, our instinct, our senses, in spite of their daylight clearness, are leading us astray. Perhaps the one thing needful is just that unreasoning courage which follows hope’s will-o’-the-wisp as it burns over seething passions pregnant with desire! ”

“ It was a fairy garden that opened at your slightest nod, and received you in all its glory, shutting out everybody else. Whispering palms closed overhead; flowers of sunshine and leaves like stars on vines of coral spread at your feet, and among them a thousand paths led to all the ages and the climes. If you followed one, it would lead you to one place, and if you followed another, it would lead you to another place, to Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe, to Vaulunder and Henrik Magnard, to Niels Klim and Mungo Park, to Peter Simple and Odysseus—and the moment you wished it, you were home again. ”

“ She felt herself growing pale with rapture. Softly she laid both hands on her son’s head, but he drew them gently to his lips and kissed them.
“You have made me so happy, Niels! Then my life has not been one long, useless sigh, if I have helped to lead you on as I hoped and dreamed so ardently—good heavens! how often I have dreamed it!—And yet there is so much sadness mixed in my joy, Niels! To think that my fondest wish should be fulfilled, the thing I have longed for so many years.... Such things happen only when life is almost done.” ”

“ You knew it all the time, and yet you have been lashing all your thoughts and desires on toward the goal which you knew you could not reach. I am not offended by your love, Mr. Bigum, but I condemn it. You have done what so many people do: they close their eyes to the realities and stop their ears when life cries ‘No’ to their wishes. They want to forget the deep chasm fate has placed between them and the object of their ardent longing. They want their dream to be fulfilled. But life takes no account of dreams. ”

“ They much preferred to be by themselves; for they had scarcely passed the middle of the first week before they were both in love with Fennimore. It was not the mature passion which must and will know its fate and longs to have and to hold and to be assured. As yet it was only the first dawn of love like a hint of spring in the air, instinct with a longing akin to sadness and with an unrest that is gently pulsing joy. The heart is so tender and yielding and easily moved. A light on the water, a rustling in the leaves, a flower unfolding its petals—all seem to have a strange new power. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Niels understood much. Fennimore would have been miserable had she known how much. Was it not partly the old story of love’s holiday fare which refuses to turn into daily bread, but goes on being holiday fare, only more tasteless, more insipid, and less nourishing, day by day? One can’t perform a miracle, and the other can’t perform it, and there they sit in their banqueting clothes, careful to smile and to use festive words, but underneath they feel the agony of hunger and thirst, while their eyes shrink from each other, and hatred begins to grow in their hearts. ”

“ Whatever stamped itself on Niels’s mind, what he saw, what he understood and what he misunderstood, what he admired and what he knew he ought to admire—all was woven into the story. As running water is colored by every passing picture, sometimes holding the image with perfect clearness, sometimes distorting it or throwing it back in wavering, uncertain lines, then again drowning it completely in the color and play of its own ripples, so the lad’s story reflected feelings and thoughts, his own and those of other people, mirrored human beings and events, life and books, as well as it could. ”

“ So she died, and Niels buried her in the friendly churchyard at Clarens, where the brown vineyard mould covers the children of so many lands, and where broken columns and veiled urns repeat the same words of mourning in so many languages.
They gleam white under dark cypresses and among the winter bloom of the viburnum; early roses strew their petals over many of them, and often the ground at their base is blue with violets, but over every mound and every stone creep the glossy-leaved vines of the gentle periwinkle, Rousseau’s favorite flower, sky blue as never a sky was blue. ”

“ First the despair, the bootless despair, and then the merciful stupor—that must be the explanation. It seemed to Niels that he understood everything: the hardness in her, the dreary humility, and her coarseness, which was the bitterest drop in the whole goblet. By degrees he came to see also that his delicacy and deferential homage must oppress and irritate her, because a woman who has been hurled from the purple couch of her dreams to the pavement below will quickly resent any attempt to spread carpets over the stones which she longs to feel in all their hardness. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yes, Miss Lyhne, I am only a poor servant in your brother’s house, and yet there is a world where I am ruler, powerful, proud, rich, with the crown of victory, noble by virtue of the passion that drove Prometheus to steal the fire from the heaven of the gods. There I am brother to all the great in spirit, whom the earth has borne, and who bear the earth. I understand them as none but equals understand one another; no flight that they have flown is too high for the strength of my wings. ”

“ There is a solemnity in the air; the sunset glow threatens, hot and fierce out there in the distance, but softly melancholy where it steals in over the heather. “If you only knew—rapture of love beyond words, bitter sorrow solaced by the cross, or the trusting hope of a common fate?”
There was another in which she stands erect on the brown heath, tense with longing, her cheek pressed down on her folded hands. She is so sweet in her naïve longing and a wee bit sad and angered with life for passing her by. Why does not Eros come with kissing roses? Does he think she is too young? ”

“ Moreover, she had learned that they were only dreams—distant, illusive dreams, which no longing in the world could ever draw down to her earth. When she abandoned herself to them now, it was with a sense of weariness, while an accusing inner voice told her that she was like the drunkard who knows that his passion is destroying him, that every debauch means strength taken from his weakness and added to the power of his desire. But the voice sounded in vain, for a life soberly lived, without the fair vice of dreams, was no life at all—life had exactly the value that dreams gave it and no more. ”

“ From that day Niels felt a timid happiness in Edele’s presence. She was no more a human being like any one else, but an exalted creature, divine by virtue of her strange, mystic beauty. His heart throbbed with rapture in merely looking at her, kneeling to her in his heart, crawling to her feet in abject self-effacement. Yet there were moments when his adoration had to have vent in outward signs of subjection. ”

“ For that reason Niels and Frithjof were afraid of him. They formed themselves after him, denied much and concealed more. Niels was especially quick to suppress in himself anything that was not of Erik’s world, and with the burning zeal of the renegade, he scoffed at Frithjof, whose slower, more faithful nature could not instantly throw over the old for the new. His unkind mockery really sprang from jealousy, for he had fallen in love with Erik on the very first day, while the latter, in shy aloofness, half reluctant, half supercilious, just barely and grudgingly allowed himself to be loved. ”

“ He laid stress on the strength and self-reliance mankind would gain when men had learned faith in themselves, and when the individual strove to bring his life into harmony with what seemed to him, in his best moments, the highest that dwelt in him, instead of seeking it outside of himself in a controlling deity. He made his faith as beautiful and blessed as he could, but he did not conceal from her how crushingly sad and comfortless the truth of atheism would seem in the hour of sorrow compared to the old fair, happy dream of a Heavenly Father who guides and rules. ”

“ He was Aladdin, and there was not a thing he had been storming the clouds for but it had fallen right down into his turban.
Now came a happy time for Niels, the glorious time when the mighty impulse of growth sweeps us jubilantly past the dead points in our own nature; when we are filled to bursting with a strength that makes us eager to put our shoulders to mountains if need be, while we build away bravely on the Tower of Babel, which is meant to pierce the sky, but ends in being just a squatty structure that we go on all our lives adding to—now a timid spire, now a freakish bay window. ”

“ This was Fennimore’s new home, and for a while it was as bright as happiness could make it, for they were both young and in love, strong and healthy, and without a care for their means of subsistence, either spiritual or material.
But every palace of joy that rises heavenward has sand mixed in the earth on which it is founded, and the sand will collect and run away, slowly perhaps, imperceptibly perhaps, but it runs and runs, grain by grain.... And love? Even love is not a rock, however much we may wish to believe it. ”

“ He accustomed himself not to think of it, as he did with many other things that he might have wished different, and threw himself with his whole soul into the situation as it was, without any conscious attempts to make it over by dreams or cover its defects with imaginary festoons and garlands. But, oh, how sweet it was to love for once with the love of real life; for now he knew that nothing of what he had imagined to be love was real love, neither the turgid longing of the lonely youth, nor the passionate yearning of the dreamer, nor yet the nervous foreboding of the child. ”

“ 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 light-hearted arrogance of youth, to dip it out in our hollow hand as the child in the legend? ”

“ There was such quiet over the fjord that the sound of the oars seemed only to measure the stillness in pauses of equal length. Hushed and soft, the gray twilight brooded over the soundless deep; the boat and its occupants melted together in one dark mass, from which the phosphorescence freed the plying oars and sometimes a trailing rope’s end, or perhaps the brown impassive face of the oarsman. No one spoke. Fennimore was cooling her hand in the water; she and Erik sat turning back to look at the network of light that trailed silently after the boat and held their thoughts in its fair meshes. ”

“ It is just like a candle, Niels, that is being carried away from you into the darkness, into the darkness, and it seems to you fainter and fainter and fainter, and you can’t see it, but still it is shining over there where it is—far away. I always thought I should live to be such an old, old woman, and that I should stay here with you all, and now they won’t let me, they are taking me away from house and home and making me go all alone. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is there like a bud, tightly folded around its own sweetness and beauty, existing only for itself, oppressed by itself. For it knows there is something in life that it does not know. It is that which has warmed the sheltering petals and given light to the innermost heart of reddest dusk, where the scent lies yet scentless, a foreboding only, pressed into one tremulous tear!
Will it never be freed and breathe out all its slumbering fragrance, never be rich in its own wealth? Will it never, never unfold and blush itself awake with gleaming rays of sunlight darting in under its petals? ”

“ Enthusiasm bore them on the wings of the eagle, and their hearts expanded with the courage of thousands.
No doubt life would in time wear it all out, lull most of it to sleep; worldly wisdom would break down much, and cowardice would sweep away the rest—but what of it? The time that has gone with happiness does not come back with grief, and nothing the future may bring can wither a day or wipe out an hour in the life that has been lived.
To Niels the world, in those days, began to wear a different aspect. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Toward morning Erik came home, and when Fennimore saw him by the cold, truthful light of dawn, preparing to go to bed, heavy and unsteady with drink, his eyes glazed from gambling and his face dirty-pale after the sleepless night, then all the fair words Niels had spoken seemed to her [221] quite visionary. The bright promises she had made to her own heart fainted and paled before the oncoming day—vapory dreams and fumes of fancy: a fairy flock of lies! ”