Part 11

In the condition of boyish self-inquisition in which I then found myself, this acquaintance was a fresh element of fermentation, and the strongest to which my self-examination had hitherto been subjected. I instinctively desired to engage her fancy; but my attitude was from myself through her to myself. I wanted less to please than to dominate her, and as it was only my head that was filled with her image, I wholly lacked the voluntary and cheerful self-humiliation which is an element of real love. I certainly wished with all my heart to fascinate her; but what I more particularly wanted was to hold my own, to avoid submission, and retain my independence. My boyish pride demanded it.

The young foreigner, whose knowledge of the world was hardly greater than my own, had certainly never, during her short life, come in contact with so extraordinary a phenomenon; it afforded matter for reflection. She certainly felt attracted, but, woman-like, was on her guard. She was of a quiet, amiable disposition, innocently coquettish, naturally adapted for the advances of sound common sense and affectionate good-will, not for the volts of passion; she was, moreover, femininely practical.

She saw at a glance that this grown-up schoolboy, who almost staggered her with his eloquence, his knowledge, his wild plans for the future, was no wooer, and that his advances were not to be taken too seriously. Next, with a woman's unfailing intuition, she discovered his empty love of power. And first involuntarily, and then consciously, she placed herself in an attitude of defence. She did not lack intelligence. She showed a keen interest in me, but met me with the self-control of a little woman of the world, now and then with coolness, on one occasion with well-aimed shafts of mockery.

Our mutual attitude might have developed into a regular war between the sexes, had we not both been half-children. Just as I, in the midst of a carefully planned assault on her emotions, occasionally forgot myself altogether and betrayed the craving to be near her which drove me almost every day to her door, she also would at times lose the equilibrium she had struggled for, and feverishly reveal her agitated state of mind. But immediately afterwards I was again at the assault, she once more on the alert, and after the lapse of four months our ways separated, without a kiss, or one simple, affectionate word, ever having passed between us.

In my morbid self-duplication, I had been busy all this time fixing in my memory and writing down in a book all that I had said to her or she to me, weighing and probing the scope and effect of the words that had been uttered, laying plans for future methods of advance, noting actual victories and defeats, pondering over this inanity, bending over all this abnormality, like a strategist who, bending over the map, marks with his nail the movements of troops, the carrying or surrender of a fortified position.

This early, unsatisfactory and not strictly speaking erotic experience had the remarkable effect of rendering me for the next seven years impervious to the tender passion, so that, undisturbed by women or erotic emotions, I was able to absorb myself in the world of varied research that was now opening up to me.

II.

A school-friend who was keenly interested in astronomy and had directed my nightly contemplations of the heavens, drew me, just about this time, a very good map of the stars, by the help of which I found those stars I knew and extended my knowledge further.

The same school-friend sometimes took me to the Observatory, to see old Professor d'Arrest--a refined and sapient man--and there, for the first time, I saw the stellar heavens through a telescope. I had learnt astronomy at school, but had lacked talent to attain any real insight into the subject. Now the constellations and certain of the stars began to creep into my affections; they became the nightly witnesses of my joys and sorrows, all through my life; the sight of them sometimes comforted me when I felt lonely and forsaken in a foreign land. The Lyre, the Swan, the Eagle, the Crown and Boötes, Auriga, the Hyades and the Pleiades, and among the Winter constellations, Orion; all these twinkling groups, that human eyes have sought for thousands of years, became distant friends of mine, too. And the thoughts which the sight of the countless globes involuntarily and inevitably evokes, were born in me, too,--thoughts of the littleness of the earth in our Solar System, and of our Solar System in the Universe, of immeasurable distances--so great that the stars whose rays, with the rapidity of light's travelling, are striking against our eyes now, may have gone out in our childhood; of immeasurable periods of time, in which a human life, or even the lifetime of a whole people, disappears like a drop in the ocean. And whereas at school I had only studied astronomy as a subject, from its mathematical aspect, I now learnt the results of spectroscopic analysis, which showed me how the human genius of Bunsen and Kirchhoff had annihilated the distance between the Earth and the Sun; and at the same time I perceived the inherent improbability of the culture of our Earth ever being transmitted to other worlds, even as the Earth had never yet received communications from the civilisation of any of the stars.

This circumstance, combined with the certainty of the gradual cooling and eventual death of the Earth, gave me a conclusive impression of the finality of all earthly existence and of the merely temporary character of all progress.

Feeling that all religions built up on a belief in a God were collapsing, Europe had long inclined towards the religion of Progress as the last tenable. Now I perceived as I raised my eyes to the starry expanse and rejoiced in my favourite stars, Sirius in the Great Dog, and Vega in the Lyre or Altair in the Eagle, that it, too, was tottering, this last religion of all.

III.

At school, I had known a score of boys of my own age, and naturally found few amongst them who could be anything to me. Among the advantages that the freedom of student life afforded was that of coming in contact all at once with hundreds of similarly educated young men of one's own age. Young men made each other's acquaintance at lectures and banquets, were drawn to one another, or felt themselves repulsed, and elective affinity or accident associated them in pairs or groups for a longer or shorter period.

A young fellow whose main passion was a desire for intellectual enrichment was necessarily obliged to associate with many of the other young men of his own age, in order to learn to know them, in order, externally and internally, to gain as much experience as possible and thereby develop himself.

In the case of many of them, a few conversations were enough to prove that any fruitful intimacy was out of the question. I came into fleeting contact with a number of suave, or cold, or too ordinary young students, without their natures affecting mine or mine theirs. But there were others who, for some months, engaged my attention to a considerable extent.

The first of these was a type of the student of the time. Vilsing was from Jutland, tall, dark, neither handsome nor plain, remarkable for his unparalleled facility in speaking. He owed his universal popularity to the fact that at students' Parties he could at any time stand up and rattle off at a furious rate an apparently unprepared speech, a sort of stump speech in which humorous perversions, distortions, lyric remarks, clever back-handed blows to right and left, astonishing incursions and rapid sorties, were woven into a whole so good that it was an entertaining challenge to common sense.

The starting point, for instance, might be some travesty of Sibbern's whimsical definition of life, which at that time we all had to learn by heart for the examination. It ran:

"Life altogether is an activity and active process, preceding from an inner source and working itself out according to an inner impulse, producing and by an eternal change of matter, reproducing, organising and individualising, and, since it by a certain material or substratum constitutes itself a certain exterior, within which it reveals itself, it simultaneously constitutes itself as the subsisting activity and endeavour in this, its exterior, of which it may further be inquired how far a soul can be said to live and subsist in it, as a living entity--appearing in such a life."

It is not difficult to conceive what delightful nonsense this barbaric elucidation might suggest, if a carouse, or love, woman or drunkenness were defined in this vein; and he would weave in amusing attacks on earlier, less intrepid speakers, who, as Vilsing put it, reminded one of the bashful forget-me-not, inasmuch as you could read in the play of their features: "Forget me not! I, too, was an orator."

Vilsing, who had been studying for some years already, paid a freshman a compliment by desiring his acquaintance and seeking his society. He frequented the Students' Union, was on terms of friendship with those who led the fashion, and was a favourite speaker. It was a species of condescension on his part to seek out a young fellow just escaped from school, a fellow who would have sunk into the earth if he had had to make a speech, and who had no connection with the circle of older students.

Vilsing was a young man of moods, who, like many at that time, like Albrecht, the chief character in Schandorph's [Footnote: Sophus Schandorph, b. 1820, d. 1901; a prominent Danish novelist, who commenced his literary activity in the sixties.--[Translator's note.]] Without a Centre, would exhibit all the colours of the rainbow in one morning. He would give himself, and take himself back, show himself affectionate, cordial, intimate, confidential, full of affectionate anxiety for me his young friend, and at the next meeting be as cursory and cool as if he scarcely remembered having seen me before; for he would in the meantime have been attacked by vexation at his too great friendliness, and wish to assert himself, as knowing his own value.

He impressed me, his junior, by revealing himself, not precisely as a man of the world, but as a much sought after society man. He told me how much he was asked out, and how he went from one party and one ball to another, which, to me, with my hankering after experiences, seemed to be an enviable thing. But I was more struck by what Vilsing told me of the favour he enjoyed with the other sex. One girl--a charming girl!--he was engaged to, another loved him and he her; but those were the least of his erotic triumphs; wherever he showed himself, he conquered. And proofs were to hand. For one day, when he had dragged me up to his room with him, he bewildered me by shaking out before my eyes a profusion of embroidered sofa-cushions, fancy pillows, cigar-cases, match-holders, crocheted purses, worked waistcoats, etc.; presents from every description of person of the feminine gender. In every drawer he pulled out there were presents of the sort; they hung over chairs and on pegs.

I was young enough to feel a certain respect for a man so sought after by the fair sex, although I thought his frankness too great. What first began to undermine this feeling was not doubt of the truth of his tales, or the genuineness of the gifts, but the fact that one after another of my comrades, when the first cool stages of acquaintance were passed, invariably found a favourable opportunity of confidentially informing me--he could not explain why it was himself, but it was a fact--that wherever he showed himself women were singularly fascinated by the sight of him; there must be something about him which vanquished them in spite of him. When at last one evening the most round-backed of all of them, a swain whose blond mustache, of irregular growth, resembled an old, worn-out toothbrush more than anything else, also confided in me that he did not know how it was, or what could really be the cause of it, but there must be something about him, etc.,--then my belief in Vilsing's singularity and my admiration for him broke down. It must not be supposed that Vilsing regarded himself as a sensual fiend. He did not pose as cold and impudent, but as heartfelt and instinct with feeling. He was studying theology, and cherished no dearer wish than eventually to become a priest. He constantly alternated between contrition and self-satisfaction, arrogance and repentance, enjoyed the consciousness of being exceptionally clever, an irresistible charmer, and a true Christian. It seemed to him that, in the freshman whom he had singled out from the crowd and given a place at his side, he had found an intellectual equal, or even superior, and this attracted him; he met with in me an inexperience and unworldliness so great that the inferiority in ability which he declared he perceived was more than counterbalanced by the superiority he himself had the advantage of, both in social accomplishments and in dealing with women.

It thus seemed as though many of the essential conditions of a tolerably permanent union between us were present. But during the first conversation in which he deigned to be interested in my views, there occurred in our friendship a little rift which widened to a chasm. Vilsing sprang back horrified when he heard how I, greenhorn though I was, regarded life and men and what I considered right. "You are in the clutches of Evil, and your desire is towards the Evil. I have not time or inclination to unfold an entire Christology now, but what you reject is the Ideal, and what you appraise is the Devil himself. God! God! How distressed I am for you! I would give my life to save you. But enough about it for the present; I have not time just now; I have to go out to dinner."

This was our last serious conversation. I was not saved. He did not give his life. He went for a vacation tour the following Summer holidays, avoided me on his return, and soon we saw no more of each other.

IV.

The theory, the intimation of which roused Vilsing to such a degree, bore in its form witness to such immaturity that it could only have made an impression on a youth whose immaturity, in spite of his age, was greater still. To present it with any degree of clearness is scarcely possible; it was not sufficiently clear in itself for that. But this was about what it amounted to:

The introspection and energetic self-absorption to which I had given myself up during my last few years at school became even more persistent on my release from the restraint of school and my free admission to the society of grown-up people.