V
Six months had passed since Edele’s death, when one of Lyhne’s cousins, Mrs. Refstrup, became a widow. Her husband had been a potter, but the business had never been flourishing, and during his long illness it had quite run to seed, so there was scarcely anything between the widow and actual want. Seven children were more than she could provide for. The two youngest and also the oldest, who could help her in the factory, remained with her, but the others were distributed among the family. The Lyhnes took the second boy, Erik, who was fourteen, and had been studying at the Latin school in the nearest town, where he had free tuition. Now he was to share Mr. Bigum’s instruction with Niels and Frithjof Petersen, the pastor’s boy.
It was very much against his will that he was kept at his books, for he wanted to be a sculptor. His father had called this nonsense, but Lyhne had nothing against it; he said the boy had talent. Still he thought he ought to take his bachelor’s degree first, in order to have something to fall back upon; and besides a classical education was necessary to a sculptor, or was, at least, very desirable. That settled the matter for the time being. Erik had to console himself with the fairly large collection of good engravings and neat bronzes that Lønborggård had to offer. This meant a great deal to one who had seen nothing but the rubbish bequeathed the local library by a bone-carver more freakish than artistic in taste, and Erik was soon busy with pencil and modelling-stick. No one attracted him as did Guido Reni, who in those days was more famous than Raphael and the greatest; nor is there anything that can open young eyes to the beauty of a work of art better than the certainty that their admiration is authorized up to the highest pinnacle. Andrea del Sarto, Parmigianino, and Luini, who were to mean so much to him later when he and his talent had found each other, left him quite indifferent, while the boldness of Tintoretto and the bitterness of Salvator Rosa and Caravaggio filled him with delight. For sweetness in art has no appeal for the very young; the daintiest of miniature painters begins his career in the footsteps of Buonarotti, and the pleasantest of lyrists sets out on his first voyage under the black sail of bloody tragedy.
Still Erik’s art was to him only a game, only a little better than other games, and he was no more proud of a well-modelled head or a cleverly carved horse than of hitting the weather vane on the church steeple with a stone, or of swimming out to Sønderhagen and back again without resting. These were the games in which he excelled, games requiring physical prowess, strength, endurance, a sure hand, and a practised eye. He cared nothing for the kind of sport Niels and Frithjof liked, where fancy plays the leading role, and all the events and triumphs are imagined. The result was that the other two soon left their old pastime to follow Erik’s lead. Their romance books were laid aside, and the interminable story came to a rather violent end one day at a secret session in the hayloft. Silence brooded over its newly filled grave. In fact, they shrank from mentioning it to Erik, for he had not been with them many days before they suspected that he would make fun of them and their story, that he would shame them and lower them in their own eyes. He had the power to do this because he himself was so free from all daydreams and fancies and enthusiasms. His clear, boyish common sense was as merciless in its perfect healthfulness and as contemptuous of mental idiosyncrasies as children generally are of physical blemishes. 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.
Among all the emotional relations of life is there any that is finer, more sensitive, and more fervent than the exquisitely modest love of one boy for another boy? It is a love that never speaks and never dares to vent itself in a caress or a look, a seeing love that grieves bitterly over every fault in the loved one, a love made up of longing and admiration and self-forgetfulness, of pride and humility and calmly breathing happiness.
Erik stayed at Lønborggård only a little over a year. It happened that Lyhne, on a visit to Copenhagen, took occasion to speak about the boy to one of the leading sculptors there, and showed him some of Erik’s sketches, whereupon Mikkelsen, the sculptor, declared that this was talent, and further studying was a waste of time. It did not require much classical education to find a Greek name for a nude figure. So it was settled that Erik was to be sent at once to the city to attend
