Niels was quite bewildered. He had picked up the handkerchief she dropped and sat there intoxicating himself with its perfume. He was not at all prepared to have her look at him in that impatient, questioning way, just as he was absorbed in studying her hand, but he managed to answer that he thought a man could not give a finer proof of his love than this—that he had to justify himself to himself for loving a human being so unutterably, and therefore set her so high and surrounded her with a nimbus of divinity.
“But that is just what I find so insulting,” said Mrs. Boye, “as if we were not divine enough in ourselves.”
Niels smiled complacently.
“No, you mustn’t smile, I’m not joking. It is really very serious, for this adoration is at bottom tyrannical in its fanaticism; it cramps us in a mould of man’s ideal. Slash a heel and clip a toe! Anything in us that doesn’t square with man’s conception has to be eliminated, perhaps not by force, but by ignoring it, systematically relegating it to oblivion, and never giving it a chance to develop, while the qualities we don’t possess or that aren’t in the least characteristic of us are forced to the rankest growth by lauding them to the skies, taking for granted that we have them in the fullest measure, and making them the cornerstone on which man builds his love. I say that we are subjected to a drill; man’s love puts us through a drill. And we submit to it, even those who love no one submit to it, contemptible minions that we are!”
She had risen from her reclining posture and looked threateningly at Niels.
“If I were beautiful!—oh, I mean ravishingly beautiful, more alluring than any woman who ever lived, so that all who saw me were struck with unquenchable, agonizing love as by witchcraft—then I would use the power of my beauty to make them adore me, not their traditional bloodless ideal, but myself, as I am, every inch, every line of my being, every gleam of my nature!”
She had risen now to her full height, and Niels thought he ought to go, but he stood turning over in his mind a great many audacious words, which, after all, he did not dare to utter. At last, summoning all his courage, he seized her hand and kissed it, but she gave him her other hand to kiss too, and then he could say nothing more than: “Good night.”
Niels Lyhne had fallen in love with Mrs. Boye, and he was happy because of it.
When he went home through the same streets where he had strolled so dejectedly that same evening, it seemed to him that ages had passed since he walked there. His bearing had acquired a new poise, a grave decorum, and when he carefully buttoned his gloves, he did so with a subconscious sense that he had undergone a great change which somehow demanded that he should button his gloves—carefully.
Too much absorbed to think of sleep, he went up on the embankment.
It seemed to him that his thoughts flowed very quietly. He was surprised at his own calm, but he did not have perfect faith in it. He felt as though something in the very depths of his being were bubbling, very softly, but persistently: welling up, seething, pressing on, but far, far away. He was in a mood as one who waits for something that must come from afar, a distant music that must draw near, little by little, singing, murmuring, frothing, rushing, roaring, and whirling down over him, catching him up he knew not how, carrying him he knew not whither, coming on as a flood, breaking as a surf, and then—
But now he was calm. There was only the tremulous singing in the distance; otherwise all was peace and tranquillity.
He loved—he said it aloud to himself again and again. The words had such a strange ring of dignity, and held such deep meanings. They meant that he was no longer a captive in the imagined world of his childhood, nor was he the sport of aimless longings and misty dreams. He had escaped from the elf-land that had grown up with him and around him, encircling him with a hundred arms, blindfolding him with a hundred hands. He had broken away from its grasp and had become master of himself, and though it reached after him, implored him with dumb appealing eyes, and beckoned him with white fluttering garments, its power was dead as a dream killed by day, a mist dispelled by the sun. Was not his young love day and sun and all the world? He had been strutting about in royal purple not yet spun, and had taken his seat on a throne not yet built; but now he stood on a high mountain, looking out over the world that stretched before him like a plain. In this world thirsting for song he had as yet no existence and was not even awaited. What a rapturous thought it was that, in all this silent, wakeful infinity, not a breath of his spirit had stirred a leaf or raised a ripple. It was all his to win, and he knew that he could win it. He felt strong and all-conquering as only those can feel whose songs are still unsung, throbbing in their own breast.
The soft spring air was full of perfumes, not saturated with them as the summer nights may be, but rather as it were streaked—now with the pungent aroma from resinous young poplars, now with the cool breath of late violets, and
