Chapter 10 — Erik, Fennimore, Fjordby

Some years have passed since Mrs. Boye's marriage and Hjerrild's Christmas Eve. Niels has continued in Copenhagen at the loose, unfocused life the novel has refused to sentimentalize: reading, writing nothing in particular, attending lectures, drifting from rooms to rooms. Erik, by contrast, has married. The young woman is Fennimore — daughter of a respectable family, younger than the two friends, gentle, intelligent, attached to Erik in a way that has not yet been tested by ordinary life. They have left the city. Erik's sculpture career, which had begun with promise, has not extended into the steady production older sculptors expect of younger ones; the couple has taken a small manor in the village of Fjordby on Mariagerfjord in north Jutland, where the rents are low and the scenery is good and the studio can be set up cheaply.

Niels travels north to visit them. The journey takes days. He arrives in late summer; the heath is in flower; the wide brown water of the fjord stretches away from the manor windows. Erik meets him at the door with the old sociability, but Niels notices, almost at once, that the studio is not what it should be — pieces half-finished, dust on the tools, the smell of damp clay where there ought to be the smell of work. Erik's drinking, which had always been within the limits of his constitution in Copenhagen, has expanded into the long country days. He laughs about it. He is half-aware. He is not yet alarmed.

Fennimore is younger than Niels had expected and quieter. She has been at Fjordby almost a year; the social life of a north Jutland village is what it is; her husband is half elsewhere. She is glad Niels has come. She walks with him to the fjord; she shows him the little garden behind the manor. She tells him about her childhood. The chapter does not stage anything. It records, with patience, the conditions under which the catastrophe of the next chapter will become possible: a friend's wife who is lonely, a friend who has stopped working, a guest who has lived inside his own head for too many years and who is for the first time in a house with someone who listens. The novel knows what it is doing. It lets us know too.