Niels sat thinking of this and marvelling at the patience all these people exhibited, neither ringing nor calling for the waiters, as if they had tacitly agreed to banish as much as possible of the restaurant atmosphere from the place. While he was engrossed in this, he saw just coming in a man whom he knew, and the sudden sight of a familiar face among all these strangers startled him so that he rose and met him with a pleased, though somewhat surprised, “Good evening.”
“Are you waiting for anyone?” asked the other, looking for a place to hang his overcoat.
“No, I am alone.”
“That’s lucky for me!”
The newcomer was a Dr. Hjerrild, a young man whom Niels had met at the Neergaards, and whom he knew—not from anything he had said, but from certain innuendos of Mrs. Neergaard’s—to be very liberal in his religious views, though the political opinions he professed were quite the reverse. People of that type did not often frequent the home of the Neergaards, who were at once religious and liberal. The doctor, however, belonged by inclination as well as through the influence of his dead mother to one of the circles—rather numerous at that time—where the new liberal ideas were looked on with sceptical or even hostile eyes, while in religion their members were rather more than rationalists and rather less than atheists, when they were not mystics or indifferentists. These various circles had many shades of opinion, but, in general, they were agreed in feeling that Holstein was at least as near to their hearts as Slesvig, while the kinship with Sweden was ignored, and Danism in its newest forms was not altogether approved. Moreover, they knew their Molière better than their Holberg, Baggesen better than Oehlenschläger, and in their artistic taste they tended, perhaps, to the sentimental.
In such, or at least kindred influences, Hjerrild had developed. He sat looking a little dubiously at Niels, as the latter recounted his observations of the other diners and especially dwelt on their apparent shame at not having part in any home or semblance of home on such an evening.
“I understand that perfectly,” he said coldly, in a tone almost of rebuff. “People don’t come here on Christmas Eve because they like it, and necessarily they must have a sense of humiliation at being left out, no matter whether it’s other people’s doing or their own. Do you mind telling me why you are here? Don’t answer if you would rather not.”
Niels replied that it was only because he had spent last Christmas Eve with his mother, who had since died.
“I beg your pardon,” said Hjerrild; “it was very good of you to answer me, and you must forgive me for being so suspicious. Do you know, I could very well imagine that you might come here in order to administer a youthful kick to Christmas as an institution, but as for myself, I am really here out of respect for other people’s Christmas. It is the first Christmas Eve since I came here that I have not spent with a very kind family from my native town. It occurred to me, somehow, that I was in the way when they sang their Christmas carols, not that they were ashamed—they have too much character for that—but it made them uneasy to have anyone there to whom these hymns were as sung into the empty air. At least that is what I imagined.”
Almost silently they finished their dinner, lighted their cigars, and agreed to go somewhere else for their toddy. Neither of them felt inclined, that evening, to gaze upon the same gilded mirror frames and red sofas that met their eyes on most of the other evenings of the year, and so they sought refuge in a little café which they did not usually frequent.
They soon realized that this was no place to stay in.
The host and the waiters, with a few friends, sat in the rear of the room, playing loo with two trumps. The host’s wife and daughters looked on and brought the refreshments, but not to the strangers; a waiter filled their order. They drank hurriedly, for they noticed that their entrance made an interruption; the conversation was hushed, and the host, who had been sitting in his shirtsleeves, seemed embarrassed and put on his coat.
“We seem to be rather homeless tonight,” said Niels, as they walked down the street.
“Well, that is as it should be,” was Hjerrild’s rather pathetic answer.
They began to talk about the Christian religion, for the topic was in the air.
Niels argued vehemently, but in rather general terms, against Christianity.
Hjerrild was tired of treading again the beaten track of discussions that were old to him, and suddenly said, without any particular connection with what had gone before: “Take care, Lyhne; Christianity is in power. It is foolish to quarrel with the reigning truth by agitating for a crown prince truth.”
“Foolish or not foolish—what does it matter?”
“Don’t say that so lightly. I did not mean to tell you such a commonplace as that it is foolish in a material way; morally, too, it is foolish and worse. Take care; don’t associate yourself too closely with this particular movement in our time, unless it happens to be absolutely necessary to your own personality. As a poet you must have many other interests.”
“I don’t understand you. I can’t treat myself like a hurdy-gurdy from which I can take out an unpopular piece and put in a tune that everybody is whistling.”
“Can’t you? Many people can. But you can at least say: ‘We are not playing that piece just now.’ We can often do more in that line than we think. A human being is not so closely knit. When you use your right arm constantly in violent exertion, the blood rushes to it, and it grows at the expense of the rest of your body, while your legs,
