“Oh, I don’t know; I take it for what it is worth. We don’t generally live very much. Most of the time we only exist. If you could get life handed to you in one whole large, appetizing cake that you could set your teeth in … but doled out in bits!—no, it’s not amusing.”
“Tell me, Niels—it’s only to you I can talk of such absurd things; I don’t know how it is, but you’re so queer. Tell me—is there anything in your glass? All right!—Have you ever thought of death?”
“Have I? Why, yes. Have you?”
“I don’t mean at funerals or when a man is sick, but sometimes when I’m just sitting here comfortably it comes over me like—like a despair simply. When I sit here and mope and don’t do anything and can’t do anything, then I actually feel the time slipping away from me. Hours and weeks and months rush past with nothing in them, and I can’t nail them to the spot with a piece of work. I don’t know if you understand what I mean, but I want to get hold of it with something achieved. When I paint a picture, the time I use for it remains mine forever; it isn’t lost, even though it’s past. I am sick when I think of the days as they go—incessantly. And I have nothing, or I can’t get at it. It’s torture! I sometimes get into such a rage that I have to get up and walk the floor and sing some idiotic thing to keep myself from crying, and then when I stop I am almost mad to think that the time has gone meanwhile, and is going while I think, and going and going. There is nothing more wretched than to be an artist. Here I am, strong and healthy; I have eyes to see; my blood is warm and red; my heart beats, and there is nothing the matter with my head, and I want to work, but I can’t. I am struggling and groping for something that eludes me, something that I can’t grasp even if I toil and moil till I sweat blood. What can a man do for inspiration or to get an idea? It is all one whether I concentrate or whether I go out and pretend I am not looking for anything, never, never anything except the sense that now Time is standing up to the waist in eternity and hauling in the hours, and they rush past, twelve white and twelve black, never stopping, never stopping. What shall I do? What do people do when they feel like that? Surely, I can’t be the first. Have you nothing to suggest?”
“Travel.”
“No, anything but that. What made you think of that? You don’t believe I’m done for, do you?”
“Done for! No, but I thought the new impressions—”
“The new impressions! Exactly. Have you never heard about people who had plenty of talent in their first youth while they were fresh and full of hope and plans, but when youth had passed their talent was gone too—and never came back?”
They were silent for a long time.
“They travelled, Niels, to get new impressions, that was their fixed idea. The south, the Orient—it was all in vain; it slid off from them as from a looking-glass. I have seen their graves in Rome—two of them, but there are many, many others. One of them went mad.”
“I have never heard that about painters before.”
“It’s true. What can it be, do you think? A hidden nerve that’s given way? Or something we have failed in or sinned against in ourselves, perhaps—who knows? A soul is such a fragile thing, and no one knows how far the soul extends in a human being. We ought to be good to ourselves—Niels!” His voice had grown low and soft. “I have often longed to travel, because I felt so empty. You have no idea how I have longed for it, but I simply don’t dare to, for suppose it didn’t help, and that I was one of those people I was telling you of. What then! Think of standing face to face with the certainty that I was done for, didn’t possess anything, couldn’t do anything—think of it—couldn’t do anything! A paltry wretch, a cursed dog of a cripple, a miserable eunuch! What do you think would become of me? And after all it is not impossible. My first youth is past, and as for illusions and that sort of thing, I can assure you I haven’t many left. It’s terrible how we go through them, and yet I was never one of those who’re anxious to get rid of them. I was not like you and the rest of the people who used to foregather at Mrs. Boye’s—you were always so busy plucking the fine feathers from one another, and the balder you got, the more you crowed. Still what’s the difference—sooner or later we all start molting.”
They were silent again. The air was bitter with cigar smoke and heavy with cognac, and they sighed drearily, oppressed by the stuffiness of the room and by their own very sad hearts.
Niels had travelled two hundred miles to bring aid, and here he sat feeling his impulse put to shame, while the colder side of his nature looked on. For what could he do, when it came to the point? What if he tried to talk picturesquely to Erik, in many words of purple and ultramarine, dripping with light and wading in shadow! There had been a dream of something like that in his brain when he started out. How utterly absurd! To bring aid! You might perhaps drive away the goddess with the closed hands from an artist’s door, but that
