The garden was a little lighter now; there was a slight breeze and a bit of moon which laid a tremulous strip of silver from the jetty out to the Berendt Claudi.
He went through the garden out on the stone sloping which protected it from the water, running in abrupt angles round a large embankment and all the way out to the end of the harbor mole. Balancing uncomfortably on the flat, slanting stones, he finally reached the molehead and, rather out of breath, sat down on the bench.
Above his head the red lantern of the harbor light swung slowly back and forth with a sound like the sighing of iron, while the flag line flapped gently against its staff.
The moon had come out a little more and cast a cautious grayish-white light over the quiet ships in the harbor and over the maze of rectangular roofs and white dark-eyed gables in the town. Above and beyond it all the church steeple rose, calm and light.
He leaned back dreaming, while a wave of unutterable joy and exultation surged through his heart; he felt rich and full of strength and the warmth of life. It seemed as though Fennimore must hear every love-thought that grew from his rapture, vine in vine, and blossom on blossom; and he rose, and quickly striking the strings of the mandolin sang triumphantly to the town asleep in there:
“Wakeful aloft lies my lassie
She listens to my song!”
Again and again, when his heart grew too full, he repeated the words of the old ballad.
Gradually he became calmer. Memories of the hours in the past when he had felt weakest, poorest, and most forlorn pressed in on him with a slight, tense pain like that of the first tears welling up in the eyes. He sat down on the bench again, and with his hand lying mute on the mandolin strings, he gazed out over the blue-gray expanse of the fjord, where the moon bridge formed a glittering way past the dark ship to the lines of the Morsø hills, drawn in faint, melancholy cloud-blue land through a haze of white.
And the memories thronged, but they grew gentler, were lifted to fairer lands, and seemed lighted by a roseate dawn.
… My lassie!
He sang it to himself:
“Wakeful aloft lies my lassie
She listens to my song.”
XI
Three years had passed; Erik and Fennimore had been married for two years, and made their home in a little villa at Mariagerfjord. Niels had not seen Fennimore since that summer at Fjordby. He lived in Copenhagen and went out a great deal, but had no intimate friends except Dr. Hjerrild, who called himself old because touches of gray had begun to appear in his dark hair.
That unexpected engagement had been a hard blow to Niels. It had a benumbing effect on him. He grew more bitter and less confiding, and had no longer so much enthusiasm to pit against Hjerrild’s pessimism. Though he still pursued his studies, their plan was less and less definite, while his purpose of some time completing them and beginning his real lifework flickered uncertainly. He lived much among people, but very little with them. They interested him, but he did not in the least care to have them be interested in him; for he felt the force that should have driven him to do his part with the others or against them slowly ebbing out of him. He could wait, he told himself, even if he had to wait till it was too late. Whoever has faith is in no hurry—that was his excuse to himself. For he believed that, when he came down to the bedrock of his own nature, he did have faith strong enough to move mountains—the trouble was that he never managed to set his shoulder to them. Once in a while, the impulse to create welled up in him, and he longed to see a part of himself freed in work that should be his very own. For days he would be excited with the happy, titanic effort of carting the clay for his Adam, but he never formed it in his own image. The willpower necessary to persistent self-concentration was not in him. Weeks would pass before he could make up his mind to abandon the work, but he did abandon it, asking himself, in a fit of irritation, why he should continue. What more had he to gain? He had tasted the rapture of conception; there remained the toil of rearing, cherishing, nourishing, carrying to perfection—Why? For whom? He was no pelican, he told himself. But argue as he might, he was dissatisfied with himself and felt that he had not fulfilled his own expectations; nor did it avail him to carp at these expectations and ask whether they were well founded. He had reached the point where he had to choose, for when first youth is past—early or late in accordance with each person’s individuality—then, early or late, dawns the day when Resignation comes to us as a temptress, luring us to forego the impossible and be content. And Resignation has much in her favor; for how often have not the idealistic aspirations of youth been beaten back, its enthusiasms been shamed, its hopes laid waste!—The ideals, the fair and beautiful, have lost nothing of their radiance, but they no longer walk here among us as in the early days of our youth. The broad, firmly planted stairway of worldly wisdom has conveyed them back, step by step, to that heaven whence our simpler faith once brought them down; and there
