Chapter 13 — Lönborggaard, Gerda, the son's death, the prayer

Niels has been at Lönborggaard for some months when he meets Gerda. She is the daughter of a neighboring family — younger than he is by more than a few years, gentle, devout in the unforced way of country women, untouched by any of the salons Niels has lived in. The novel is candid about how unequal the match is intellectually and how that does not, in the event, matter. She is decent. She is kind. She loves him without strain. He marries her — not as a recovery, not as a thesis, but because the marriage is the thing offered and he is finished refusing things. They live at Lönborggaard. A son is born. The novel allows them, for the first time in many chapters, a stretch of plain happiness.

Gerda's health gives way. The illness is one of the slow ones the nineteenth century did not understand and could not cure. Niels watches her decline through a winter and a spring. In the last weeks, faith — which had been the steadying weather of her life — leaves her. She does not lose it argumentatively; she loses it in fear. The novel's scenes at her bedside are among its hardest. Niels has nothing to offer her. He has held his position for thirty years; he holds it now; he is not going to lie. He sits with her. He tells her the things one tells a wife. She dies frightened. He buries her at Lönborggaard.

A year later the boy falls ill. He is small. He is the only child. The illness is the kind that takes children quickly. Niels, having watched two women die in his life, knows the shape of it. He sits at the bedside with the doctor coming and going. And then — because he is a father, and because there is nothing else to do with the hands — he prays. He prays not because he has changed his mind about God but because the impulse is older than his mind. He prays in the dark beside the bed. The chapter is exact about this, and unsparing. The boy dies. Niels gets up from beside the bed and never prays again. The novel does not tell us this in the form of a sentence; it tells us by what he does and does not do over the next pages. The atheism that does not console has been tested in the room a man can be tested in, and it has held — at the cost of everything in the room.