One game after another grew old and silly, stupid and tiresome like the pictures in the A.B.C., and yet they had once been new, inexhaustibly new. Here they used to roll a barrel-hoop—Niels and the pastor’s Frithjof—and the hoop was a ship, which was wrecked when it toppled over, but if you caught it before it fell, then it was casting anchor. The narrow passage between the outhouses, where you could hardly squeeze through, was Babel-Mandeb or the Portal of Death. On the stable door “England” was written in chalk, and on the barn door “France.” The garden gate was Rio Janeiro, but the smithy was Brazil. Another game was to play Holger the Dane: you could play it among the tall burs behind the barn; but if you went up in the miller’s pasture, there were two sinkholes known as the gorges, and there were the haunts of the veritable Prince Burmand and his wild Saracens, with reddish gray turbans and yellow plumes in their helmets—burdocks and Aaron’s rod of the tallest. That was the only real Mauretania. That rank, succulent growth, that teeming mass of exuberant plant-life, excited their lust of destruction and intoxicated them with the voluptuous joy of demolishing. The wooden swords gleamed with the brightness of steel; the green sap stained the blade with red gore, and the cut stalks squashing under their feet were Turks’ bodies trampled under horses’ hoofs with a sound as of bones crunched in flesh.
Sometimes they played down by the fjord: mussel-shells were launched as ships, and when the vessel got stuck in a clump of seaweed, or went aground on a sandbank, it was Columbus in the Sargasso Sea or the discovery of America. Harbors and mighty embankments were built; the Nile was dug out in the firm beach sand, and once they made Gurre Castle out of pebbles—a tiny dead fish in an oyster-shell was the corpse of Tove, and they were King Valdemar who sat sorrowing by her side.
But this was all past.
Niels was quite a lad now, twelve years old, nearing thirteen, and he no longer needed to hack thistles and burdocks in order to feed his knightly fancies, any more than he had to launch his explorer’s dreams in a mussel-shell. A book and a corner of the sofa were enough for him now, and if the book refused to bear him to the coast of his desires, he would hunt up Frithjof and tell him the tale which the book would not yield. Arm in arm, they would saunter down the road, one telling, both listening; but when they wanted to revel to the full and really give their imagination free play, they would hide in the fragrant dimness of the hayloft. After a while, these stories, which always ended just when you had really entered into them, grew into a single long story that never ended, but lived and died with one generation after the other; for when the hero had grown old, or you had been careless enough to let him die, you could always give him a son, who would inherit everything from the father, and whom, in addition, you could dower with any other virtues that you happened to value particularly just at the moment.
Whatever stamped itself on Niels’s mind, what he saw, what he understood and what he misunderstood, what he admired and what he knew he ought to admire—all was woven into the story. As running water is colored by every passing picture, sometimes holding the image with perfect clearness, sometimes distorting it or throwing it back in wavering, uncertain lines, then again drowning it completely in the color and play of its own ripples, so the lad’s story reflected feelings and thoughts, his own and those of other people, mirrored human beings and events, life and books, as well as it could. It was a play life, running side by side with real life. It was a snug retreat, where you could abandon yourself to dreams of the wildest adventures. It was a fairy garden that opened at your slightest nod, and received you in all its glory, shutting out everybody else. Whispering palms closed overhead; flowers of sunshine and leaves like stars on vines of coral spread at your feet, and among them a thousand paths led to all the ages and the climes. If you followed one, it would lead you to one place, and if you followed another, it would lead you to another place, to Aladdin and Robinson Crusoe, to Vaulunder and Henrik Magnard, to Niels Klim and Mungo Park, to Peter Simple and Odysseus—and the moment you wished it, you were home again.
About a month after Niels’s twelfth birthday, two new faces appeared at Lønborggård.
One was that of the new tutor; the other was that of Edele Lyhne.
The tutor, Mr. Bigum, was a candidate for orders and was at the threshold of the forties. He was rather small, but with a stocky strength like that of a workhorse, broad-chested, high-shouldered, and slightly stooping. He walked with a heavy, slow, deliberate tread, and moved his arms in a vague, expressionless way that seemed to require a great deal of room. His high, wide forehead was flat as a wall, with two perpendicular lines between the eyebrows; the nose was short and blunt, the mouth large with thick, fresh lips. His eyes were his best feature, light in color, mild, and clear. The movements of his eyeballs showed that he was slightly deaf. Nevertheless, he loved music and played his violin with passionate devotion; for the notes, he said, were not heard only with the ears, but with
