Chapter 9 — Hjerrild, Christmas Eve

The chapter opens on a winter evening in Copenhagen. The streets are empty in the way the streets of a Christian city are empty on Christmas Eve. Niels has not gone home to Lönborggaard for the holidays. His mother is dead; his father is at Lönborggaard alone with the housekeeper; the affair with Mrs. Boye is over and she is married. He is, for the first time in the novel, simply alone in the city. He walks for a while; he stops at Hjerrild's rooms.

Hjerrild — the editor and journalist, fifteen years older than Niels, who has watched the younger man with quiet attentiveness since the night of the declaration — receives him without surprise. They have a fire. They have a bottle. They begin to talk. The conversation moves, by stages, to the subject Niels has been carrying since Edele. Hjerrild defends a life lived without God but lived quietly. He argues, as a man who has read more and lived longer, that the position is true but not the kind of truth one should make a banner of. There are believers in every room; there are families to consider; there is, even in 1850s Copenhagen, the simple courtesy of not stripping people of consolations one is free to do without. He defends, in effect, the private atheism of the educated nineteenth-century gentleman.

Niels disagrees. He argues — with the stubbornness of a man who has held a position since boyhood — that the position is not real if it is not declared. To live secretly without God while letting the world go on as if one believed is to participate in the deception. He insists, against Hjerrild's gentler reading, that the cost of declaring the position is the proof one is sincere about it. The chapter does not arbitrate. It lets the two men sit with their disagreement. The fire burns down. Hjerrild walks Niels to the door. Outside, the city is keeping its Christmas; the bells are ringing for the late service; Niels walks home through the snow with the argument unresolved. The novel will resolve it for him only at his own deathbed, twenty years later, with the priest at the door.