Excerpts from
Niels Lyhne
By J. P. Jacobsen
But then one Sunday, in the beginning of August, Lyhne and his wife had driven off on a visit, and Niels and Miss Edele were home alone. In the morning Edele had asked Niels to pick a bouquet of cornflowers for her, but he had forgotten; it wasn"t until afternoon that he remembered, as he was sauntering about with Frithiof. So he picked the flowers and ran up to the house with them.
The silence in the house made him think that his aunt was asleep, and he tiptoed carefully through the rooms. On the threshold of the parlor, he stopped in order to prepare himself to walk especially quietly over to Edele"s doorway. The parlor was full of sunshine and a large flowering oleander made the air inside heavy with its sweet almond fragance. The only sound to be heard was a muted splash now and then as th goldfish moved about in their galss bowl on the table with the plant.
Niels walked quitely across the flor, balancing with his arms, his tongue between his teeth.
He cautiously took hold of the door handle (warmed by the sun, it burned in his hand) and turned it, slowly and gingerly, his brow furrowed and his eyes squinting.
He pushed the door ajar, leaned in through the opening, and placed the bouquet on a chair just inside the door. It was dark in there, as if the shades were pulled down, and the air seemed moist with scent, the scent of rose oil.
She was stretched out on the sea-green satin of the chaise longue, dressed in a fantastic gypsy costume. She lay there on her back, her chin in the air, her throat extended, her forehead tilted back, and her long, loose hair flowing over the end of the chaise longue and onto the carpet. An artificial pomegrate flower had washed ashore on the island formed by a bronze-colored leather shoe in the middle of the dull-gold stream.
The colors of the costume were many, though all muted. A waistband of a matte, striped material, designed with multi-colored flames of dark blue, pale rose, gray, and orange, was fitted around a white silk shift with very wide sleeves that reached down past the elbow. The silk had a slightly reddish sheen to it, and it was sparsely shot through with threads of read gold. Her skirt of primrose-colored velvet, without any trimming, was not pulled tightly around her but lay loosely spread out with the folds falling abliquely over the chaise longue. From the knee down, her legs were bare, and she had bound her crossed ankles together with a heavy necklace of pale coral. Out on the floor lay an open fan with pictures of a series of playing cards arranged in an arc, and farther away lay a pair of leaf-brown stockings, one of them rolled up, the other spread out flat, revealing its shape and the reddish seam along the leg.
At the same moment that Niels had caught the sight of her, she has also seen him. She made a little involuntary movement, as if to stand up, but stopped herself and remained lying there as before, simply turning her head slightly and looking at the boy with an inquisitive smile.
"Here they are," he said, going over to her with the flowers.
She stretched out her hand for them, hastily compared their color to the colors of her costume, and then, with a wearily murmured "Impossible," she let them fall.
With a dismissive motion of her hand she stopped Niels from picking them up.
"Give me that over there," she said, pointing to a red bottle lying on a crumpled hankerchief by her feet.
Niels went over to it; he was beet-red, and as he bent over those matte-white, gently curving legs and those long, narrow feet that had something of a hand"s intelligence in their finely cradled contours, he felt quite faint; when, at the same moment, the tip of one foot curled downward with a sudden movement, he was just about to collapse.
"Where did you pick those cornflowers?" asked Edele.
Niels pulled himself together and turned toward her. "I picked them in the pastor"s rye field," he said with a voice that surprised him, there was such a resonance to it. Without looking up he handed her the bottle.
Edele noticed his emotion and looked at him with astonishment. Suddenly she blushed, raised herself up on one arm, and pulled her legs up under her skirt. "Go, go, go, go," she said, partly annoyed, partly embarrassed, and with every word she sprinkled some of the essence of rose at Niels.
Niels left.
When he was out the door she slowly let her legs glide down from the chaise longue and gazed down at them with curiosity.
From J.P Jacobsen: Niels Lyhne. Fjord Press, 1990
Translated by Tiina Nunnally
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