Chapter 4 — Edele's death, Niels's atheism

The summer of Niels's twelfth year goes by; Edele does not recover. By autumn it is clear to the household that she will not. The pastor of the parish — a decent, well-meaning man, a friend of the family — begins to come more often and to stay longer. He brings the consolations of his office in the only form he knows: gently, by stages, in the language of an old faith he himself relies on. He sits by her bed and reads. He offers prayers. He asks, eventually, the questions that clergymen ask of the dying. Edele receives him with the courtesy of a Copenhagen drawing-room. She does not argue with him. She does not, in her last weeks, become the figure of religious recovery the pastor is hoping for. She thanks him. She refuses what he is offering. She does it without bitterness and without softening; she does it as a person who has long since arranged her interior on lines that do not require what he has come to give.

She dies. The chapter is restrained about the death itself; what it shows is the texture of those final weeks — the pastor's patience, Edele's self-possession, the family's helpless attendance, and the boy at the edge of the room. Niels is twelve and has loved her in the way a boy loves a beautiful older woman who arrives like weather and treats him as if he might one day be a man. He has watched the pastor visit. He has watched her receive him. He has watched her, at the end, decline a god she does not believe in. She does not lecture him on the position. She holds it.

The novel does not give Niels a speech in this chapter. It gives him a position. From this bedside forward he is what the rest of the book will call him — a man without God. He has not arrived at the position by reading; he has arrived at it by watching a person he loved die well without it. This is the hinge the rest of the novel turns on. Every later test of Niels's atheism — the affair, the friend's death, the prayer for his son, the priest at his own bedside thirty-odd years later — is being measured against the room he is leaving at the end of this chapter. The novel will not give him another anchor as steady. It does not need to.