Chapter 3 — Bigum, the arrival of Edele

The years have passed. The world is no longer the realm of wonder it had been. The dim recesses behind the elder bushes, the haunted attic rooms, the gloomy stone passage under the Klastrup road — none of it lurks there any longer. Niels and Frithjof, the pastor's son, have grown out of the games where a barrel hoop was a ship and a stable door was England. Niels is twelve, nearly thirteen, and a book and a corner of the sofa are enough for him now. When the book will not bear him to the shores of his longing, he hunts up Frithjof and tells him the tale the book would not yield. Their stories grow into a single long story that never ends, lives and dies with one generation after another, and folds in everything Niels reads or sees or admires or knows he ought to admire.

About a month after Niels's twelfth birthday, two new faces appear at Lönborggaard. The first is the new tutor, Mr. Bigum, a candidate for holy orders standing at the threshold of his forties. He is small but with the stocky strength of a work-horse, slightly stooping, his eyeballs betraying that he is slightly deaf. He loves music and plays his violin with passionate devotion. Above all he is a philosopher — not one of the productive kind, who builds systems, but one who privately believes his intellect is wider than any other man's and who takes a curious pleasure in the world's failure to notice. He has been given a non on his examination for a degree. Oh, there is rapture in feeling the brutal stupidity of an existence that tosses him aside as poor chaff while he knows in his own mind that his lightest thought is worth a world.

The second newcomer is Edele Lyhne, Lyhne's twenty-six-year-old sister. She has lived for years in Copenhagen with a wealthy uncle, in a whirl of balls and festivities; she has been admired everywhere and envied as faithfully. Her health has given way, the doctors have prescribed fresh air and milk, and she has been sent home. She finds Lönborggaard insufferable — the mealtimes regulated by the sun, the smell of lavender in the cupboards, the Spartan chairs, the very air. There is no one she can talk to; not one of them catches the precise shade of meaning that is the essence of what she says. And to be called Aunt Edele — how it grates. The chapter closes on a Sunday in early August: Niels has forgotten to gather the cornflowers Edele asked for and runs up to the house with them in the afternoon, and the long, half-worshipful attention the boy will pay her over the next chapter is already in motion.