Niels Lyhne

he had to say always found expression in pictures such as these. He would sometimes dream in other images and long to break through that narrow circle within which he created, but when he had strayed beyond his bounds and tried his powers in other fields, he always returned with a chill sense of discouragement, feeling that he had been borrowing from others and producing something not his own. After these unfortunate excursions⁠—which, however, always taught him more than he was aware of⁠—he became more intensely Erik Refstrup than ever before. Then he would abandon himself with more reckless courage and with almost poignant fervor to the cult of his own individuality, while his whole manner of associating with himself, to his slightest act, would be suffused with a religious enthusiasm. He seemed surrounded by shadowy throngs of beautiful forms, younger sisters of the slender-limbed women of Parmigianino with their long necks and large, narrow princess hands; they sat at his table, poured his wine with movements full of noble grace, and held him in the spell of their fair dreams with Luini’s mystic, contemplative smile, so inscrutably subtle in its enigmatic sweetness.

But when he had served the god faithfully for eleven days, it sometimes happened that other powers gained the ascendancy over him, and he would be seized with a violent craving for the coarse enjoyment of gross pleasures. Then he would plunge into dissipations, feverish with that human thirst for self-destruction which yearns, when the blood burns as hotly as blood can burn, for degradation, perverseness, filth, and smut, with precisely the measure of strength possessed by another equally human longing, the longing to keep one’s self greater than one’s self and purer.

In these moments there was but little that was rough and coarse enough for him, and when they had passed, it was long before he could regain his balance; for in truth these excesses were not natural to him; he was too healthy for them, too little poisoned by brooding. In a sense, they came as a rebound from his devotion to the higher spirits of his art, almost like a revenge, as though his nature had been violated by the pursuit of those idealistic aims which choice, aided by circumstances, had made his own.

This twofold struggle, however, was not carried on along such definite lines that it appeared on the surface of Erik Refstrup’s life; nor did he feel the need of making his friends understand him in this phase. No, he was the same simple, happy-go-lucky fellow as of old, slightly awkward in his shrinking from emotions put into words, a little of a freebooter in his capacity for seizing and holding. Yet the other thing was in him and could be sensed sometimes in quiet moments, like the bells that ring in a sunken city on the bottom of the sea. He and Niels had never understood each other so well as now; both felt it, and silently each renewed the old friendship. And when vacation time came, and Niels felt that he really must make his long-deferred visit to his Aunt Rosalie, who was married to Consul Claudi in Fjordby, Erik went with him.

The main highway from the richest district above Fjordby enters the town between two great thorn-hedges, which bound Consul Claudi’s vegetable garden and his large pleasure garden by the shore. What then becomes of the road⁠—whether it ends in the Consul’s courtyard, which is as large as a marketplace, or whether it is continued in a bend running between his hayloft and his lumber yard to form, later, the main street of the town⁠—is a matter of opinion. Many travellers follow the bend and drive on, but there are also many who stop and think the goal reached when they have come within the Consul’s wide tarred gateway, where the doors are always thrown back and covered with skins spread for drying.

The buildings on the premises were all old with the exception of the tall warehouse with its dead-looking slate roof, the newest architectural feature in Fjordby. The long, low main building appeared to be forced to its knees by three large gables, and was joined, in a dim corner, to the wing containing the kitchen and stables; in another lighter corner, to the warehouse. In the dark corner was the back door of the store, which formed, with the peasants’ waiting-room, the office, and the servants’ hall, a rather dingy world of its own, where the mingled odor of cheap tobacco and moldy floors, of spices and dried codfish and wet wool, made the air so thick you could almost taste it. But when you had passed through the office with its pungent smoke of sealing-wax and had reached the hall which formed the dividing line between the business and the family, a prevailing perfume of new millinery prepared you for the delicate scent in the living-rooms. It was not the fragrance of any nosegay or of any real flower; it was the intangible, memory-laden atmosphere which pervades a home, though no one can say whence it comes. Every home has its own, and it may suggest a thousand things⁠—the smell of old gloves or new playing-cards or open pianos⁠—but it is always different. It may be stifled by incense, perfumes, or cigar smoke, but it cannot be killed; it always comes back unchanged and is there just as before. Here it was of flowers, not stock or roses or any other flower that can be named, but rather as one might fancy the scent of those fantastic, pale sapphire lilies that twine their blossoms around vases of old porcelain. And how well it went with those wide, low rooms with their heirloom furniture and their stiff, old-fashioned grace! The floors were white as only grandmothers’ floors can be; the walls were in plain colors with a light tracery of garlands in delicate tints running under the ceiling, which had a stucco rose in the centre. The doors