Recollections of My Childhood and Youth Part 17

Between the young French lady and myself an active correspondence had sprung up, while the young Spaniard's radiant figure continued to retain the same place in my thoughts.

Then my surroundings claimed their rights, and it was not without emotion that I realised how charming the girls at home were. For I was only then entering upon the Cherubino stage of my existence, when the sight of feminine grace or beauty immediately transports a youth into a mild state of love intoxication.

It was incredible how rich the world was in bewitching creatures, and the world of Copenhagen especially. If you walked down Crown Princess Street, at a window on the ground floor you saw a dark girl with a Grecian-shaped head and two brown eyes, exquisitely set, beneath a high and n.o.ble forehead. She united the chaste purity of Pallas Athene with a stern, attractive grace.

If you went out towards the north side of the town, there was a house there on the first floor of which you were very welcome, where a handsome and well-bred couple once a week received young men for the sake of the lady's young niece. The master of the house was a lean and silent man, who always looked handsome, and was always dignified; he had honourably filled an exalted official post. His wife had been very attractive in her youth, had grown white while still quite young, and was now a handsome woman with snow-white curls cl.u.s.tering round her fresh-coloured face. To me she bore, as it were, an invisible mark upon her forehead, for when quite a young girl she had been loved by a great man. She was sincerely kind and genuinely pleasant, but the advantage of knowing her was not great; for that she was too restless a hostess. When it was her At Home she never remained long enough with one group of talkers properly to understand what was being discussed. After about a minute she hurried off to the opposite corner of the drawing-room, said a few words there, and then pa.s.sed on to look after the tea.

It was neither to see her nor her husband that many of the young people congregated at the house. It was for the sake of the eighteen-year-old fairy maiden, her niece, whose face was one to haunt a man's dreams. It was not from her features that the witchery emanated, although in shape her face was a faultless oval, her narrow forehead high and well-shaped, her chin powerful. Neither was it from the personality one obtained a glimpse of through her features. The girl's character and mental quality seemed much the same as that of other girls; she was generally silent, or communicative about trifles, and displayed no other coquetry than the very innocent delight in pleasing which Nature itself would demand.

But all the same there was a fascination about her, as about a fairy maiden. There was a yellow shimmer about her light hair; azure flames flashed from her blue eyes. These flames drew a magic circle about her, and the dozen young men who had strayed inside the circle flocked round her aunt the evening in the week that the family were "at home" and sat there, vying with each other for a glance from those wondrous eyes, hating each other with all their hearts, and suffering from the ridiculousness of yet meeting like brothers, week after week, as guests in the same house. The young girl's male relatives, who had outgrown their enthusiasm for her, declared that her character was not good and reliable--poor child! had she to be all that, too? Others who did not ask so much were content to enjoy the sound of her voice.

She was not a Copenhagen girl, only spent a few Winters in the town, then disappeared again.

Some years after, it was rumoured, to everybody's astonishment, that she had married a widower in a provincial town--she who belonged to the realms of Poesy!

Then there was another young girl, nineteen. Whereas the fairy maiden did not put herself out to pretend she troubled her head about the young men whom she fascinated with the rhythm of her movements or the radiation of her loveliness, was rather inclined to be short in her manner, a little staccato in her observations, too accustomed to admiration to attract worshippers to herself by courting them, too undeveloped and impersonal to consciously a.s.sert herself--this other girl was of quite another sort. She had no innate irresistibility, but was a shrewd and adaptable human girl. Her face did not attract by its beauty, though she was very much more beautiful than ugly, with a delicately hooked nose, a mouth full of promise, an expression of thoughtfulness and determination. When she appeared at a ball, men's eyes lingered on her neck, and even more on her white back, with its firm, smooth skin, and fine play of the muscles; for if she did not allow very much of her young bust to be seen, her dress at the back was cut down nearly to her belt. Her voice was a deep contralto, and she knew how to a.s.sume an expression of profound gravity and reflection. But she captivated most by her attentiveness. When a young man whom she wished to attract commenced a conversation with her, she never took her eyes from his, or rather she gazed into his, and showed such a rapt attention to his words, such an interest in his thoughts and his occupations, that after meeting her once he never forgot her again. Her coquetry did not consist of languishing glances, but of a pretended sympathy, that flattered and delighted its object.

IV.

These Danish girls were likely to appeal to a young man just returned from travels abroad, during which his emotions had been doubly stirred, for the first time, by feminine affection and by enthusiasm for a woman.

They influenced me the more strongly because they were Danish, and because I, who loved everything Danish, from the language to the monuments, had, since the war, felt something lacking in everyone, man or woman, who was foreign to Denmark.

But in the midst of all these visitations of calf-love, and their vibrations among undefined sensations, I was pulled back with a jerk, as it were, to my earlier and deepest impression, that of the loveliness and exalted person of the young Spaniard. Letters from Paris furrowed my mind like steamers the waters of a lake, made it foam, and the waves run high, left long streaks across its wake. Not that Mlle. Mathilde sent letters to me herself, but her Italian lady and gentlemen friends wrote for her, apparently in her name, loudly lamenting my unreasonable departure, wishing and demanding my return, telling me how she missed me, sometimes how angry she was.

I was too poor to be able to return at once. I did what I could to procure money, wrote to those of my friends whom I thought could best afford it and on whom I relied most, but met with refusals, which made me think of the messages Timon of Athens received in response to similar requests. Then I staked in the lottery and did not win.

Urged from France to return, and under the high pressure of my own romantic imagination, it seemed clear to me all at once that I ought to unite my lot for good to that of this rare and beautiful woman, whom, it is true, I had never spoken to one minute alone, who, moreover, had scarcely anything in common with me, but who, just by the dissimilarity of her having been born of Spanish parents in Rio, and I of a Danish father and mother in Copenhagen, seemed destined by Fate for me, as I for her. The Palm and the Fir-tree had dreamed of one another, and could never meet; but men and women could, however far apart they might have been born. In the middle of the Summer of 1867 I was as though possessed by the thought that she and I ought to be united.

The simplest objection of all, namely, that I, who was scarcely able to support myself, could not possibly support a wife, seemed to me altogether subordinate. My motives were purely chivalric; I could not leave her in the lurch, as the miserable hero of Andersen's _Only a Player_ did Noomi. And a vision of her compelling loveliness hovered before my eyes.

The whole of the month of July and part of the month of August I was on the rack, now pa.s.sionately desiring a successful issue of my plans, now hoping just as ardently that they would be stranded through the opposition of the foreign family; for I was compelled to admit to myself that the beautiful Spaniard would be very unsuited to Copenhagen, would freeze there, mentally as well as literally. And I said to myself every day that supposing the war expected in Denmark were to break out again, and the young men were summoned to arms, the most insignificant little Danish girl would make me a better Valkyrie; all my feelings would be foreign to her, and possibly she would not even be able to learn Danish.

Any other woman would understand more of my mind than she. And yet! Yet she was the only one for me.

Thus I was swayed by opposing wishes the whole of the long time during which the matter was pending and uncertain. I was so exhausted by suspense that I only kept up by taking cold baths twice a day and by brisk rides. The mere sight of a postman made my heart beat fast. The scorn heaped upon me in the Danish newspapers had a curious effect upon me under these circ.u.mstances; it seemed to me to be strangely far away, like blows at a person who is somewhere else.

I pondered all day on the painful dilemma in which I was placed; I dreamt of my Dulcinea every night, and began to look as exhausted as I felt. One day that I went to Fredensborg, in response to an invitation from Frederik Paludan-Muller, the poet said to me: "Have you been ill lately? You look so pale and shaken." I pretended not to care; whatever I said or did in company was incessant acting.

I experienced revulsions of feeling similar to those that troubled Don Quixote. Now I saw in my distant Spanish maiden the epitome of perfection, now the picture melted away altogether; even my affection for her then seemed small, artificial, whimsical, half-forgotten. And then again she represented supreme happiness.

When the decision came, when,--as everyone with the least experience of the world could have foretold,--all the beautiful dreams and audacious plans collapsed suddenly, I felt as though this long crisis had thrown me back indescribably; my intellectual development had been at a standstill for months. It was such a feeling as when the death of some loved person puts an end to the long, tormenting anxiety of the foregoing illness. I, who had centred everything round one thought, must now start joylessly along new paths. My outburst,--which astonished myself,--was:

"How I wanted a heart!"

V.

I could not at once feel it a relief that my fancies had all been dissipated into thin air. Physically I was much broken down, but, with my natural elasticity, quickly recovered. Yet in my relations towards the other s.e.x I was torn as I had never been before. My soul, or more exactly, that part of my psychical life bordering on the other s.e.x, was like a deep, unploughed field, waiting for seed.

It was not much more than a month before the field was sown. Amongst my Danish acquaintances there was only one, a young and very beautiful widow, upon whom, placed as I was with regard to Mile. Mathilde, I had definitely counted. I should have taken the young Spaniard to her; she alone would have understood her--they would have been friends.

There had for a long time been warm feelings of sympathy between her and me. It so chanced that she drew much closer to me immediately after the decisive word had been spoken. She became, consequently, the only one to whom I touched upon the wild fancies to which I had given myself up, and confided the dreams with which I had wasted my time. She listened to me sympathetically, no little amazed at my being so devoid of practical common sense. She stood with both feet on the earth; but she had one capacity that I had not met with before in any young woman--the capacity for enthusiasm. She had dark eyes, with something melancholy in their depths; but when she spoke of anything that roused her enthusiasm, her eyes shone like stars.

She pointed out how preposterous it was in me to wish to seek so far away a happiness that perhaps was very close to me, and how even more preposterous to neglect, as I had done, my studies and intellectual aims for a fantastic love. And for the first time in my life, a young woman spoke to me of my abilities and of the impression she had received of them, partly through the reading of the trifles that I had had printed, partly, and more particularly, through her long talks with me. Neither the little French girl nor the young Spanish lady had ever spoken to me of myself, my talents, or my future; this Danish woman declared that she knew me through and through. And the new thing about it all, the thing hitherto unparalleled in my experience, was that she believed in me.

More than that: she had the highest possible conception of my abilities, a.s.serted in contradiction to my own opinion, that I was already a man of unusual mark, and was ardently ambitious for me.

Just at this moment, when so profoundly disheartened, and when in idle hopes and plans I had lost sight of my higher goal, by her firm belief in me she imparted to me augmented self-respect. Her confidence in me gave me increasing confidence in myself, and a vehement grat.i.tude awoke in me for the good she thus did me.

Then it happened that one day, without preamble, she admitted that the interest she felt in me was not merely an intellectual one; things had now gone so far that she could think of nothing but me.

My whole nature was shaken to its foundations. Up to this time I had only regarded her as my friend and comforter, had neither felt nor fought against any personal attraction. But she had scarcely spoken, before she was transformed in my eyes. The affection I had thirsted for was offered to me here. The heart I had felt the need of was this heart.

And it was not only a heart that was offered me, but a pa.s.sion that scorned scruples.

In my austere youth hitherto, I had not really had erotic experiences whatever. I had led the chaste life of the intellectual worker. My thoughts had been the thoughts of a man; they had ascended high and had delved deep, but my love affairs had been the enthusiasms and fancies of a half-grown boy, chimeras and dreams. This young woman was my first living erotic reality.

And suddenly, floodgates seemed to open within me. Streams of lava, streams of molten fire, rushed out over my soul. I loved for the first time like a man.

The next few days I went about as if lifted above the earth; in the theatre, in the evening, I could not follow the performance, but sat in the pit with my face in my hands, full of my new destiny, as though my heart would burst.

And yet it was more a physical state, an almost mechanical outcome of what to me was overwhelmingly new, a.s.sociation with a woman. It was not because it was just this particular woman. For my emotional nature was so composite that even in the first moment of my bliss I did not regard this bliss as unmixed. From the very first hour, I felt a gnawing regret that it was not I who had desired her, but she who had chosen me, so that my love in my heart of hearts was only a reflection of hers.

VI.

About this time it so happened that another woman began to engage my thoughts, but in an altogether different manner. Circ.u.mstances resulted in my being taken into the secret of unhappy and disturbing domestic relations in a well-to-do house to which I was frequently invited, and where to all outward seeming all the necessary conditions of domestic happiness were present.

The master of the house had in his younger days been a very handsome man, lazy, not clever, and of an exceedingly pa.s.sionate temper. He was the son of a man rich, worthy and able, but of a very weak character, and of a kept woman who had been the mistress of a royal personage.

Through no fault of his own, he had inherited his mother's professional vices, persistent untruthfulness, a comedian's manner, prodigality, a love of finery and display. He was quite without intellectual interests, but had a distinguished bearing, a winning manner, and no gross vices.

His wife, who, for family reasons, had been married to him much too young, had never loved him, and never been suited to him. As an innocent, ignorant girl, she had been placed in the arms of a man who was much the worse for a reckless life, and suffering from an illness that necessitated nursing, and made him repulsive to her. Every day that pa.s.sed she suffered more from being bound to a man whose slightest movement was objectionable to her and whose every remark a torture. In the second decade of her marriage the keenest marital repulsion had developed in her; this was so strong that she sometimes had to pull herself together in order, despite her maternal feelings, not to transfer her dislike to the children, who were likewise his, and in whom she dreaded to encounter his characteristics.

Towards her, the man was despotic and cunning, but not unkind, and in so far excusable that, let him have done what he might, she could not have got rid of the hatred that plagued him and consumed her. So dissimilar were their two natures.

Her whole aim and aspiration was to get the bond that united them dissolved. But this he would not hear of, for many reasons, and more especially from dislike of scandal. He regarded himself, and according to the usual conception of the words, justly so, as a good husband and father. He asked for no impossible sacrifice from his wife, and he was affectionate to his children. He could not help her detesting him, and indeed, did not fully realise that she did. And yet, it was difficult for him to misunderstand. For his wife scarcely restrained her aversion even when there were guests in the house. If he told an untruth, she kept silence with her lips, but scarcely with her expression. And she would sometimes talk of the faults and vices that she most abhorred, and then name his.

The incessant agitation in which she lived had made her nervous and restless to excess. As the feminine craving to be able, in marriage, to look up to the man, had never been satisfied, she only enacted the more vehemently veracity, firmness and intellect in men. But undeveloped as she was, and in despair over the dissatisfaction, the drowsiness, and the darkness in which her days glided away, whatever invaded the stagnation and lighted up the darkness: sparkle, liveliness, brilliance and wit, were estimated by her more highly than they deserved to be.

At first when, in the desolation of her life, she made advances to me, this repelled me somewhat. The equestrian performer in Heiberg's Madame Voltisubito cannot sing unless she hears the crack of a whip. Thus it seemed to me that her nature could not sing, save to the accompaniment of all the cart, carriage and riding whips of the mind. But I saw how unhappy she was, and that the intense strain of her manner was only an expression of it.

She could not know the beauty of inward peace, and in spite of her Protestant upbringing she had retained all the unaffectedness and sincerity of the natural human being, all the obstinate love of freedom, unmoved in the least by what men call discipline, ethics, Christianity, convention. She did not believe in it all, she had seen what it resulted in, and what it covered up, and she pa.s.sed her life in unmitigated despair, which was ordinarily calm to all appearance, but in reality rebellious: what she was enduring was the attempted murder of her soul.

To all that she suffered purely mentally from her life with her husband in the home that was no home at all, there had of late been added circ.u.mstances which likewise from a practical point of view made interference and alteration necessary. Her lord and master had always been a bad manager, in fact worse than that; in important matters, thoroughly incapable and fatuous. That had not mattered much hitherto, since others had looked after his affairs; but now the control of them had fallen entirely into his own hands, and he managed them in such a way that expenses increased at a terrific rate, while his income diminished with equal rapidity, and the question of total ruin only seemed a matter of time.

His wife had no outside support. She was an orphan and friendless. Her husband's relations did not like her and did not understand her. And yet just at this time she required as a friend a man who understood her and could help her to save her own and the children's fortunes from the shipwreck, before it was too late. She felt great confidence in me, whom she had met, at intervals, from my boyhood, and she now opened her heart to me in conversation more and more. She confided in me fully, gave me a complete insight into the torture of her life, and implored me to help her to acquire her freedom.

Thus it was that while still quite a young man a powerful, never-to-be- effaced impression of the miseries of modern coercive marriage was produced upon me. The impression was not merely powerful, but it waked, like a cry of distress, both my thinking powers and my energy. As through a c.h.i.n.k in the smooth surface of society, I looked down into the depths of horror. Behind the unhappiness of one, I suspected that of a hundred thousand, knew that of a hundred thousand. And I felt myself vehemently called upon, not only to name the horror by its name, but to step in, as far as I was able, and prevent the thing spreading unheeded.

Scales had fallen from my eyes. Under the semblance of affection and peace, couples were lacerating one another by the thousand, swallowed up by hatred and mutual aversion. The glitter of happiness among those higher placed dazzled the thoughtless and the credulous. He who had eyes to see, observed how the wretchedness due to the arrangement of society, wound itself right up to its pinnacles.