Chapter 2 — Niels's birth, the parents' tug-of-war

In a way, the child has brought the parents back together. Over the cradle they meet in a common hope, a common joy, a common fear. But they are still far apart. Lyhne is absorbed in his farming and the affairs of the parish; he gives scrupulous attention to the existing order of things and acts only on the deliberate recommendations of his old head servant or the elders of the parish. Bartholine continues to live in the books she reads. She voices her grief, by turns, in the broad generalities of her favorite poets — sometimes in lofty indignation against the dungeons of tyrants, sometimes in calm pitying sorrow for a generation cowed by the soulless bustle of the day, sometimes only as a gentle sigh for the freedom of the bird in flight.

As the child grows, the struggle for him grows more intense and is waged with a wider variety of weapons. Bartholine reaches Niels through the imagination. She tells him stories. She describes the woeful plight of the hero until the boy can see no way out, and more than once he presses his cheek against hers and whispers, with eyes full of tears, "But it isn't really true?" When she runs out of fairy stories she begins to tell him about the heroes of war and peace, choosing those who lend themselves to a moral about the power that dwells in a single soul that wills one thing only. A few years after Niels was born she had brought a stillborn second son into the world, and from him she has built a phantom paragon — Promethean longings, Messianic courage — whose imagined life she serves up to Niels as a model.

The boy is not deceived. He understands that to be like ordinary people is contemptible and that he is expected to be a hero. He accepts the assignment in his imagination. But on weary days he feels the assignment as a fraud: he suspects himself of caring only for the petty, of belonging in his secret heart to the rabble that would gladly stone the heroes. On those days he shuns his mother and seeks out his father — the steady fields, the matter-of-fact talk, the absence of any expectation that the boy be exalted. He feels at home there too. The chapter closes on a child who already understands, without being able to say so, that he lives between two temperaments and has not chosen between them. The novel will not, in the end, ask him to choose; it will let the consequences of not choosing be his life.