Niels Lyhne was tired. These repeated runnings to a leap that was never leaped had wearied him. Everything seemed to him hollow and worthless, distorted and confused, and, oh, so petty! He preferred to stop his ears and stop his mouth and to immerse himself in studies that had nothing to do with the busy everyday world, but were like an ocean apart, where he could wander peacefully in silent forests of seaweed among curious animals.
He was tired, and the root of his weariness sprang from his baffled hope of love; thence it had spread, quickly and surely, through his whole being, to all his faculties and all his thoughts. Now he was cold and passionless enough, but in the beginning, after the blow had fallen, his love had grown, day by day, with the irresistible power of a malignant fever. There had been moments when his soul was almost bursting with insane passion; it swelled like a wave in its infinite longing and frothing desire; it rose and went on rising and rising, till every fibre in his brain and every cord in his heart was strung tense to the breaking-point. Then weariness had come, soothing and healing, making his nerves dull against pain, his blood too cold for enthusiasm, and his pulse too weak for action. And more than that, it had protected him against a relapse by giving him all the prudence and egoism of the convalescent. When his thoughts went back to those days in Fjordby, he had a sense of immunity akin to the feeling of a man who has just passed through a severe illness and knows that now, when he has endured his allotted agony, and the fever has burned itself to ashes within him, he will be free for a long, long time.
Then it happened, one summer day, after Erik and Fennimore had been married for two years, that he received a half-whining, half-boasting letter from Erik, in which he blamed himself for having wasted his time of late. He did not know what the matter was, but he had no ideas. The people he met in the neighborhood were fine, jolly fellows, no conventionality or nonsense about them, but they were perfect dromedaries with regard to art. There was not a human being he could talk with, and he had gotten himself into a slough of laziness and stagnation which he could not pull out of. He never had a glimmering of an idea or a mood, and never felt inspired. Sometimes he was afraid that his power had run out, and that he never would do anything any more. But this could not possibly go on forever! It must come back; he had been too rich to end like this, and when it came he would show them what art was, those fellows who painted away all the time as if they had learned it by rote. For the present, however, he was as if bewitched, and it would be an act of friendship if Niels would visit Mariagerfjord. They would make him as comfortable as circumstances allowed, and he could just as well spend his vacation there as any other place. Fennimore sent her love and would be glad to see him.
This letter was so unlike Erik that Niels saw at once there must be something serious amiss or he would not complain in this fashion. He was aware, too, of how little volume there was in the wellspring of Erik’s production—a slender stream only, which unfavorable circumstances could easily dry out. He would go at once! For all that had happened, Erik should find him a faithful friend; whatever the years had loosened of old ties and uprooted of old illusions, he would at least know how to guard this old friendship of their childhood. He had helped Erik before, and he would help him now. A fanaticism of friendship possessed him. He would renounce his future, fame, ambitious dreams, everything, for Erik’s sake. All that he owned of smoldering enthusiasm and creative ferment should be Erik’s; he would merge himself in Erik with his whole self and all his ideas, holding nothing back, keeping nothing for himself. He dreamed of greatness for the friend who had torn his life asunder so roughly, and saw himself blotted out, forgotten, impoverished, deprived of his intellectual heritage; and he went on dreaming that his gift to Erik should become no longer a loan, but Erik’s very own, as he coined it into works and deeds and gave it his stamp. Erik in honor and glory, and he himself one of the many, many commonplace folk and nothing else; poor, at last, by necessity, not by choice; a real beggar, not a prince in disguise. … And it was sweet to dream himself so bitterly humble.
But dreams are dreams, and he laughed at himself, as he thought that people who neglect their own work always have no end of time to interest themselves in that of others. It also occurred to him that, when he came face to face with Erik, the latter would, of course, disclaim his letter and pass it off as a joke. He certainly would think it extremely absurd if Niels were actually to present himself with the announcement that he was ready to help him recover his creative power. Nevertheless he went. In his inmost heart he believed that he could do some good, and no matter how much he tried to explain it away or cast doubts upon it, he could not rid himself of the feeling that it really was the friendship of their boyhood which had reasserted itself in all its old simplicity and warmth, in spite of the years and what the years had brought.
The villa at Mariagerfjord belonged to an elderly couple who had been forced by ill-health
