by Knut Hamsun
“Oh, but really!” the doctor cried, jumping up. “You aren’t saying, are you, that—”
The table was set. The company entered the dining room, while the doctor went on jabbering. The conversation continued at the table. Nagel, who had been seated between the hostess and Miss Olsen, the young daughter of the chief of police, didn’t take part in it. By the time they broke up from the table, they were already deep into European politics. They had expressed their opinions of the Czar, Constans, and Parnell, and when they finally came to the Balkan Question, the drunk teacher had another opportunity to throw himself upon Serbia. He had just read the Statistische Monatschrift; the conditions there were terrible, the schools completely neglected....
“There is one thing which makes me extremely happy,” the doctor said, his eyes quite moist, “namely, that Gladstone is still alive. Fill your glasses, gentlemen, and we’ll drink a toast to Gladstone, yes, to Gladstone, that great and pure democrat, a man of the present and the future.”
“Wait a moment, let us too be in on it!” cried his wife. And she filled the women’s glasses with wine, filled them to overflowing in her eagerness, and passed the tray around with trembling hands.
Then they all drank the toast.
“Well, isn’t he a real man, though!” the doctor went on, smacking his tongue. “Poor fellow, he has had a cold for a while, but hopefully it will pass. There’s no living politician I would be so reluctant to lose as Gladstone. Goodness, when I think of him he appears like a lighthouse in front of me, sending its beams all over the world! ... You look so preoccupied, Mr. Nagel, don’t you agree?”
“Beg your pardon? Of course, I completely agree with you.”
“Of course. Well, there are many things about Bismarck too that impress me,9 but Gladstone!”
The doctor was still not being contradicted,10 everybody knew about his blessed chatter. In the end the conversation so flagged that the doctor proposed a game of cards to pass the time. Who would like to play? But at that point Mrs. Stenersen called from the other end of the room, “Well, I never! Do you know what Mr. Ølien has just been telling me? Mr. Nagel, you haven’t always thought as highly of Gladstone as this evening, have you? Mr. Øien once heard you in Kristiania—was it in the Workers’ Association?—where you thoroughly reviled Gladstone. A fine one you are! Is this really true? Oh, just you dare, just you dare!”
Mrs. Stenersen said this in good faith, smiling and holding her finger up in jest. She repeated that he had to say whether it was true or not.
Taken aback, Nagel replied, “That must be a mistake.”
“I wouldn’t say that you reviled him,” Øien said. “You protested vehemently. For example, I recall your saying that Gladstone was a bigot.”
“A bigot! Gladstone a bigot!” the doctor yelled. “Were you drunk, man?”
Nagel laughed. “I don’t think so. Well, perhaps I was, I don’t know. It does sound like it.”
“It certainly does!” the doctor said, appeased.
Nagel refused to explain himself and wanted to drop the subject, but Dagny Kielland again asked Mrs. Stenersen to keep at it. “Get him to explain what he meant. It would be such fun.”
“Well, what did you really mean?” the hostess asked. “Since you protested, you must have meant something by it. So, let’s hear! Besides, you will be doing us a favor, because if you men start playing cards, we’ll all be so bored.”11
“If it will amuse you all, that’s quite another matter,” Nagel answers.
Did he intend, by this remark, to sneer at himself and the part he was playing? His lips curled slightly.
He started by saying he couldn’t recall the occasion Mr. Øien was talking about.... “Have any of you seen Gladstone or heard him speak? What is most impressive about him when he speaks is the man’s candid behavior, his great sense of justice. It’s as though any suggestion other than his having a clear conscience was out of the question. How could that man ever do this great wickedness and sin against God! And he himself is so deeply saturated with this idea of a clear conscience that he presupposes the same among his listeners, truly presupposes that his listeners too have a clear conscience—”
“But that’s one of his nice traits, isn’t it? It shows his integrity and his humane thinking,” the doctor cut in. “How absurd!”
“I’m of the same opinion; I simply mention it as part of his profile, a nice feature of his portrait, heh-heh-heh. Let me cite an incident that I just recalled; well, maybe I don’t need to relate the whole incident, I’ll just mention the name Carey. I don’t know whether all of you remember how Gladstone, in his time as prime minister, accepted denunciations from Carey, the traitor. Subsequently he helped him over to Africa, so he could escape the revenge of the Fenians. However, that’s not the question, that’s another story, I don’t give any weight to the sort of peccadilloes a prime minister may be forced to commit now and then. No, to get back to what we were talking about, the fact is that Gladstone as a speaker has the clearest conscience imaginable.... If you had seen or heard Gladstone speak, I would only have to call attention to his facial expressions during the speech. He’s so certain of his clear conscience that his certainty is mirrored in his eyes, his voice, his posture and his gestures. His speech is simple and easy to understand, slow and everlasting; oh, how everlasting it is, his barrel is never empty! You should see how he distributes his remarks around the hall—a few to the ironmonger over here, a few to that furrier over there—how he knows what he’s talking about to such a degree that he seems to appraise his words at a crown a piece. It’s quite a sight, truly entertaining! Gladstone, you see, is a knight of the indisputable right, and it’s the cause of that right he champions. It would never occur to him to make any sort of concession to error. That’s to say: if he knows he has the right on his side, he is ruthless in using it, displaying it, raising it to the skies, letting it flutter before the eyes of his listeners to put his opponents to shame. His morality is of the healthiest and most enduring kind: he’s working for Christianity, for humanism and for civilization. If someone offered that man so and so many thousand pounds to save an innocent woman from the scaffold, he would save the woman, refuse the money with contempt, and afterward take no credit for it. Not at all; he would take no credit for it, that’s the sort of man he is. He is a tireless fighter, perpetually on the go doing good on our planet, girding his loins every day for justice, truth and God. And what battles he wins! Two and two is four, truth has won the day, glory be to God! ... Oh well, Gladstone can go beyond two and two; I once heard him during a budgetary debate demonstrate that seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-one, and he won a huge, crushing victory. Once again he was right, and the rightness shone in his eyes, quivered in his voice, and elevated him to greatness. But then I really had to pause and look at the man. I understood that he had a clear conscience, and yet I paused. I stand there pondering the number he had arrived at, three hundred ninety-one, and find that it’s correct, and yet I turn it over in my mind and say to myself, No, wait a minute! Seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-seven! I know it is ninety-one, of course, but I still say, against my better judgment, it’s ninety-seven, to be on a different side than this man, this professional of rightness. There’s a voice inside me that demands, Rise up, rise up against this pedestrian rightness! And I rise up and say ninety-seven from a burning inner necessity, in order to prevent my consciousness of right from being trivialized and debased by this man, who stands so indisputably on the side of right—”
“I’ll be damned, but I never heard such nonsense in my whole life!” the doctor shouts. “Does it offend you that Gladstone is always right?”
Nagel smiled—whether from meekness or affectation was hard to say. “It does not offend me,” he continued, “rather, it demoralizes me.12 Well, I don’t really count on being understood in this, but that doesn’t matter. Gladstone is a kind of knight errant of right and truth, his brain is rigid with acknowle
dged results. That two and two is four is, to him, the greatest truth under the sun. Shall we, then, deny that two and two is four? Of course not; and I say this to show that Gladstone is most certainly right. The question is whether you are sufficiently mad for truth to put up with it, whether your mind has become so blunted by truth that it can be bowled over by the bullwhip of a truth like that. That is the question.... Anyway, Gladstone is so right and his conscience so clear that it will never even occur to him to stop doing good for our planet. He must constantly be on the go, he’s in demand everywhere. And so he cuffs the world’s ears with his wisdom in Birmingham, in Glasgow, bringing a cork cutter and an attorney to the same political view, fighting like a Trojan for the cause he believes in, straining his old, faithful lungs to the utmost so that not one of his precious words will be lost on his listeners. And then, in the evening, when the performance is over and the people have cheered and Gladstone has taken his bows, he goes home and to bed; he folds his hands, recites a prayer and falls asleep, without the tiniest suspicion in his heart, without a hint of shame at having filled Birmingham and Glasgow—with what? He simply feels he has done his duty toward his fellow men and right by himself, and so he sleeps the sleep of the just. He wouldn’t be sinful enough to say to himself: Today you didn’t do very well, the two cotton spinners in the front row were bored, you made one of them yawn—he wouldn’t say this to himself, because he isn’t quite certain it’s true. And he refuses to lie, because lying is a sin, and Gladstone just won’t sin. No, he would say: I had the impression that a man yawned; strange to say, he seemed to yawn. But I must have been mistaken, the man probably didn’t yawn. Heh-heh-heh.... I don’t know whether it was something of the sort I said in Kristiania; but it doesn’t matter. At any rate, I confess that Gladstone’s so-called great mind has made anything but an overwhelming impression on me.”
“Poor Gladstone!” Mr. Reinert, the deputy, said.
Nagel made no reply.
“No, it wasn’t this you spoke about in Kristiania,” 0ien explained. “You raked Gladstone over the coals for his handling of the Irish and Parnell, and you said, among other things, that he was no great mind. I do recall your saying that. He was merely a powerful force, fairly good, but of an extremely ordinary kind, you said, Beaconsfield’s over-sized little finger.”
“I remember; I was denied the floor, heh-heh-heh. Good, I endorse that too, why not? It can’t get worse than it is already. But judge me leniently!”
Then Dr. Stenersen said, “Tell me, are you a member of the Conservative Party?”
Nagel opened his eyes wide in amazement; then he burst out laughing and replied, “Well, what do you think?”13
Just then the doorbell rang at the doctor’s office. Mrs. Stenersen jumped up; of course, now the doctor would have to go out again, worse luck. But nobody could break up yet, oh no, not before midnight anyway. Miss Andresen simply had to sit down again, Anna would bring more hot water, lots of hot water. It was only ten o’clock.
“Mr. Reinert, you aren’t drinking.”
Oh yes he was, he didn’t stint himself.
“Anyway, I won’t let you leave. You will stay, all of you. Dagny, you’re so quiet.”
No, Dagny was no quieter than usual.
At this moment the doctor came back from his office. They would have to excuse him, he had to be off; it was a serious case, a hemorrhage. Well, it was not so far away that he couldn’t be back in two or three hours; hoped to see them again then. “So long, everyone; so long, Jetta.”
The doctor left in great haste. A minute later he was seen with another man trotting down the road to the docks, he was in such a hurry.
“Now let’s dream up something,” Mrs. Stenersen said.... “Oh, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been bored staying here alone when my husband was away. It’s especially bad on winter nights, when I’m often not even sure he’ll ever get back.”
“You don’t have children, do you?” Nagel asked.
“No, we don’t.... Well, by now I’m more or less used to those long nights, but in the beginning it was terrible. I tell you, I was so afraid, so anxious and afraid of the dark—yes, I’m afraid of the dark too, I’m sorry to say—that sometimes I had to get out of bed and go lie down in the maid’s room.... But now you too, Dagny, must say something! What are you thinking about? Your sweetheart, of course.”
Dagny blushed, laughed shyly and replied, “Certainly I’m thinking about him. That’s only natural. But why don’t you ask Mr. Reinert what he’s thinking about? He hasn’t said a word all evening.”
Reinert protested; he had been chatting with the ladies, Miss Olsen and Miss Andresen, displaying considerable activity on the quiet, so to speak, being alert all the time and following the others’ political arguments; in short—
“You see, Miss Kielland’s fiancé has gone to sea again,” Mrs. Stenersen told Nagel. “He’s a naval officer, he’s gone to Malta—wasn’t it Malta?”
“Yes, Malta,” Dagny replied.
“Well, for such fellows getting engaged is quickly done! He drops by at his parents’ for two or three weeks, and then one evening ... Oh, those lieutenants!”
Fine men! Nagel thought. As a rule handsome, weather-beaten men with cheerful dispositions and open faces. And their uniforms were so nice, and they wore them with elegance. In fact, he had always been fascinated by naval officers.
Suddenly Miss Kielland turns around to Øien and asks with a smile, “That’s what Mr. Nagel says now. But what did he say in Kristiania?” Everyone laughed; Hansen, the lawyer, let out a drunken cry, “Yes, what did he say in Kristiania—in Kristiania? What did Mr. Nagel say there? Ha-ha-ha, oh dear! Skoal!”
Nagel clinked glasses with him and drank. Indeed, he had always been taken with naval officers. He would even go so far as to say that, if he were a girl, he would have a naval officer, or forget about it.
This brought renewed laughter; the lawyer enthusiastically clinked all the glasses on the table and drank. But suddenly Dagny said, “Lieutenants are supposed to be so ungifted. So you don’t believe that?”
“Nonsense.” But even if that were the case, he would still prefer a handsome man to an intelligent one, if he were a girl. Absolutely! And especially if he were a young girl. What could you do with a brain without a body? Well, one might say, what could you do with a body without a brain? Oh, there was a hell of a difference. Shakespeare’s parents couldn’t read. Why, Shakespeare himself probably couldn’t read very well, and yet he had secured a place in history. But however that might be, a girl would certainly get bored with an ugly learned man sooner than with a handsome dimwit.14 No, if he were a young girl and could choose, a handsome man would be his first choice. The man’s opinions about Norwegian politics, Nietzsche’s philosophy, and the Holy Trinity were for the birds.
“Come, let me show you Miss Kielland’s lieutenant,” Mrs. Stenersen said, bringing an album.
Dagny jumped up. An “oh no!” escaped her, but shortly she sat down again. “The picture is so poor,” she said, “he’s much better-looking than that.”
Nagel saw a handsome young man with a beard. He was sitting at a table, erect and unconstrained, his hand on his officer’s sword. His rather thin hair was parted in the middle. There was an English air about him.
“Yes, that’s true, he’s much more handsome than that,” Mrs. Stenersen agreed. “I was in love with him myself once, in my girlish days.... But won’t you take a look at the man next to him? It’s the young theologian who just died, Karlsen—his name was Karlsen. He lost his life a couple of weeks ago. It was very tragic. What’s that? Well, yes, he was buried the day before yesterday.”
It was a sickly-looking creature with hollow cheeks and lips so thin and pinched that they appeared like a line drawn across his face. His eyes were large and dark, his forehead exceptionally high and clear; but his chest was flat and his shoulders no broader than a woman’s.
This was Karlsen. That’s how he looked. Nagel tho
ught to himself that the face tallied with blue hands and theology. He was just about to remark that it was an uncanny face, when he noticed that Mr. Reinert moved his chair over to Dagny’s and began talking to her. So he continued turning the pages of the album, back and forth, and remained silent so as not to disturb.
“Since you have complained of my silence this evening,” Mr. Reinert said, “perhaps you’ll permit me to relate to you an experience from the visit of the Kaiser, a true story. I just happened to recall It—”
Dagny interrupted him and said softly, “Tell me, rather, what you’ve been having such fun with over there in the corner all evening. When I said you had been silent, you know, I simply meant to give you a warning. You were obviously being malicious again. It’s really mean of you to mimic and make fun of everything and everybody. True, it’s pretty awful the way he shows off that iron ring on his little finger, the way he holds it up, looks at it and polishes it. But it may well be he’s doing it quite unwittingly. At any rate, he didn’t carry on as badly as you made out he did. Still, he’s stuck-up and cracked enough to deserve it. But you, Gudrun, went too far, to laugh like that. He must have noticed that you were laughing at him.”
Joining them, Gudrun defended herself; she claimed it was all Mr. Reinert’s fault, he’d been so funny, quite irresistible. Just the way he had said, “Gladstone’s greatness has never impressed me—me!”
“Sh-sh, you’re talking too loud again, Gudrun. He heard you, yes, he did, he turned around. But did you notice—when he was interrupted, he never lost his temper, did he? He just gave us all an almost sorrowful look. Oh dear, I’m beginning to feel sorry that we’re sitting here gossiping about him.15 So let’s hear your story about the Kaiser’s visit, Mr. Reinert.”
The deputy told the story. Since it was no secret but a quite harmless incident involving a woman and a bouquet of flowers, he spoke louder and louder, until at last everyone was listening. The story was long-winded and took several minutes. When he finished, Miss Andresen said, “Mr. Nagel, do you remember last night, that story you told us about the choir in the Mediterranean?”