He tried to recall the picture of her as she lay on the sofa and talked to him, but it would not come. He saw her vanishing in a lane of trees; or sitting and reading with her hat on, holding one of the large white leaves in her gloved fingers, just on the point of turning it, then turning leaf after leaf. He saw her entering her carriage in the evening after the theatre and nodding to him behind the pane; then the carriage drove away, and he stood looking after it; it kept on driving, and he still followed it with his eyes. Indifferent faces came and spoke to him, figures he had not seen for years passed down the street, turned and looked after him, and still the carriage kept on driving, and he could not get rid of it, could not think of other pictures because of that carriage. Then, just as he was getting nervous with impatience, it came: the yellow light from the lamp, the eyes, the mouth, the hand under the chin, as plainly as if it were all before him there in the darkness.
How lovely she was, how mild, how fair! He loved her with a desire that knelt at her feet, begging for all this seductive beauty. Cast yourself from your throne down to me! Make yourself my slave! Put the chain around your neck with your own hands, but not in sport—I want to pull the chain, I demand submission in your every limb, bondage in your eyes! Oh, that I could draw you to me with a love-philtre, but, no, a love-philtre would compel you, you would yield to its power without volition, and I want none to be your master but myself. Your will must be broken in your hands, and you must hold it out humbly to me. You shall be my queen, and I your slave, but my slave’s foot must be on your queenly neck. There is no lunacy in this desire, for is it not in the nature of a woman’s love to be proud and strong and to bend? It is love, I know, to be weak and to reign.
He felt that he could never draw to himself the part of her soul that was one with the luxuriant, glowing, sensuous-soft aspect of her beauty; it would never clasp him in those gleaming Juno arms, never in passionate weakness give that voluptuous neck to his kisses—never in all eternity. He saw it all clearly. He could win, perhaps he already had won, the young girl in her, and he was sure that she, the full-blooded beauty, felt this fair young creature who had died within her mysteriously stirring in her living grave to clasp him with slender maiden arms and meet him with timid maiden lips. But his love was not that. He loved the very thing in her that he could not win, loved this neck with its warm, flower-like whiteness gleaming with a dew of gold under the dusky hair. He sobbed with yearning passion and wrung his hands with impotent desire, threw his arms around a tree, leaned his cheek against the bark, and wept.
VIII
There was in Niels Lyhne’s nature a lame reflectiveness, child of an instinctive shrinking from decisive action, grandchild of a subconscious sense that he lacked personality. He was always struggling against this reflectiveness, sometimes goading himself by calling it vile names, then again decking it out as a virtue that was a part of his inmost self and was bound up with all his possibilities and powers. But whatever he made of it, and however he looked upon it, he hated it as a secret infirmity, which he might perhaps hide from the world, but never from himself; it was always there to humiliate him whenever he was alone with himself. How he envied the audacity that rushes confidently into words, never heeding that words bring actions, and actions bring consequences—until those consequences are at its heels. People who possessed it always seemed to him like centaurs—man and horse cast in a single mould. With them impulse and leap were one, whereas he was divided into rider and horse—impulse one thing, leap something very different.
Whenever he pictured himself declaring his love for Mrs. Boye—and he always had to picture everything—he could plainly see himself in the scene, his attitude, his every motion, his whole figure from the front, from the side, and from the back. He could see himself falter with the feverish irresolution that robbed him of his presence of mind and paralyzed him, while he stood there awaiting her answer as if it were a blow forcing him to his knees, instead of a shuttlecock to be thrown back in ever so many ways and returned in as many more.
He thought of speaking, and he thought of writing, but he never managed simply to blurt it out. It was said only in veiled declarations and in a half-feigned lyric passion that made a pose of being carried away into hot words and fantastic hopes. Nevertheless, a certain intimacy of a strange kind grew up between them, born of a youth’s humble love, a
