The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  HILDE: He went to consult father [Dr. Wangel] this afternoon. I should like to know what father thinks about him.

  BOLETTE: Father told me it was a thickening of the lungs, or something of the sort. He won’t live to be old, father says.

  HILDE: No! Did he say it? Fancy—that’s exactly what I thought.

  BOLETTE: For heaven’s sake don’t show it!

  HILDE: How can you imagine such a thing? Look, here comes Hans crawling up. Don’t you think you can see by the look of him that he’s called Hans?

  BOLETTE (whispering): Now do behave!

  And now up onto the “View” comes Hans Lyngstrand, puffing heavily, pathetically, disablingly after too strenuous and steep an uphill walk, and using for assistance Ellida’s parasol as a walking-stick. He thus establishes himself further as a ninny in the eyes of those disposed to be unsympathetic. Clearly poor old Hans—for all the costly medical treatment both in England and in Norway that he must have received in the three years since his exposure in the water and the consequent illness—has deteriorated considerably, though his spirits, his will not just to survive but to lead an active, creative life, are possibly stronger even than earlier.

  But it isn’t just contempt that my poor friend’s weak health brings out in those not altogether favorably disposed to him. The dreadful if bewitching Hilde taunts him with his inability to do this or that on account of his health, makes fun to his face of his belief that he is getting better (not in so many words, but we all realize this is what she is doing, though Hans himself doesn’t) and even derives an odd gloating satisfaction from the fact that he is deceived about his (that terrible word!) mortal illness:

  BOLETTE: Why are you always going about with him?

  HILDE: Oh, I only do that because of the weakness.

  BOLETTE: I’ve never noticed that you in the least pity him for it!

  HILDE: No, I don’t. But I think it so interesting.

  BOLETTE: What is?

  HILDE: To look at him and make him tell you it isn’t dangerous; and that he’s going abroad and is to be an artist. He really believes it all, and is so thoroughly happy about it. And yet nothing will ever come of it; nothing whatever. For he won’t live long enough. I feel that’s so fascinating to think of.

  BOLETTE: Fascinating!

  HILDE: Yes, I think it’s most fascinating. I take that liberty.

  A wave of loathing for this cruel child breaks over me. For a second I’m afraid I shall behave as I did on that never-to-be-forgotten evening at the Gateway and rise to my feet and speak out. But I do not. Besides Hilde is obviously totally unaware of the talents for love that the sick young would-be sculptor has inside him, which I sampled so memorably—like, if Johnston was to be believed, many another before me. But anyway, this girl’s conduct only makes the spectator feel fonder of Hans, and not simply out of pity. He has just remarked that he doesn’t altogether regret what he euphemistically calls his “weakness,” and the reason—“I think it’s because of it that everyone is so good and friendly, and kind to me.”

  Too much to feel here—no, honestly! That sentence will come back to me at some vulnerable hour of the night, and I shall have to face my own accusations, and confess that though the Hans I am seeing now will think of his one-time English friend as having been “good and friendly and kind”—that’s indeed what he said in the letters I skimmed—I also let him down, even betrayed him, for when he was living in Norway and still needed me, I showed no goodness, friendliness, or kindness. Quite the reverse. What misery I must have caused him.

  Mr. Ibsen and, with him, his audience have of course other concerns than Hans Lyngstrand and his health. Up at the View Dr. Wangel and his wife have a long and belatedly frank talk about the present failure of their marriage, inextricable from Ellida’s haunted mental condition. I know nothing of all this, of course, and focus my attention on it as best I can. I try to imagine the harsh blow it would be for me if Lucinda “went away” from me in the same way the Lady from the Sea has from her good doctor, for all his kindness, for all her surely sincere love for him—and if the previous man in her life (in my case now lolling in the seat next to me) was the cause of this self-distancing.

  Ellida tells Wangel of an involvement of hers ten years before, when she was still living at her father’s lighthouse out at Skjoldviken, not with the teacher Arnholm (as Dr. Wangel has half-supposed) but with a man whom nobody else in local waters knew, who was Second Mate on an American ship which had put in for repairs. And of course the moment I hear this I know what man she is about to introduce, to force imaginatively on us, her spectators. Once again, my pulse increases its beat, and this time refuses to revert to its normal rate for quite a while . . . A man is imminent who to Ellida’s face called himself Friman, but later, in ardent letters, signed himself Alfred Johnston—though probably wasn’t entitled to either name as he was in provenance a Norwegian Finlander—a Kven, as he had indeed, and only too memorably, told me himself.

  This Johnston (to call him this) fell for her so entirely, says she, that he insisted on an immediate betrothal; the current of feeling was flowing quick and fast and strong between the two of them. (Just as Johnston himself had attested to me—and earlier to Hans.) But there was another reason for the summary nature of the engagement ceremony; he would any minute be on a “wanted” list for a killing he had indeed just carried out—a crime Dr. Wangel himself knew about, as he went out to Skjoldviken personally to do a post-mortem on the dead body of the victim, the captain of that American ship—and so had to escape just as fast as possible.

  WANGEL: Yes, I remember it very well. It was on board that ship that the captain was found one morning in his cabin—murdered. I myself went out to make the post-mortem.

  ELLIDA: Yes, it was you.

  WANGEL: It was the second mate who had murdered him.

  ELLIDA: No one can say that for it was never proved.

  WANGEL: There was enough against him anyhow, or why should he have drowned himself as he did?

  ELLIDA: He did not drown himself. He sailed in a ship to the north.

  WANGEL: How do you know?

  ELLIDA: Well, Wangel—it was this second mate to whom I was betrothed . . . At that time he called himself Friman. Later in his letters he signed himself Alfred Johnston.

  WANGEL: And where did he come from?

  ELLIDA: From Finmark, he said. For the rest, he was born in Finland, had come to Norway there as a child with his father, I think.

  WANGEL: A Finlander, then . . .?

  ELLIDA: Well, then he told me he had stabbed the captain in the night.

  WANGEL: He said that himself! Actually said so!

  ELLIDA: Yes. But he had only acted rightly and justly, he said.

  WANGEL: Rightly and justly! Why did he stab him then?

  ELLIDA: He wouldn’t speak out about that. He said it was not fit for me to hear.

  What acts were those so unspeakable to a woman? I knew the answer, and could not repress a shudder. Somewhere in my head I heard the rain beat against the little shelter on the Esplanade . . .

  Anyway—so thoroughly had he cast his spell over poor Ellida, then little more than a girl—that she agreed to his proposal:

  “He took from his pocket a keyring—and drew a ring he always wore from his finger, and he took a small ring I had. These two he put on the keyring. And then he said we should wed ourselves to the sea. And with that he threw the keyring, and our rings, with all his might, as far as he could into the deep.”

  No playgoer, even one as unseasoned as myself, could fail to perceive from the intensity and the specific details of this conversation between man and wife—that the seaman, the “disappeared” Johnston will soon come back to claim his woman, “his” because according to his own relentless, primitive beliefs, the two of them have actually married. But I have a different type of knowledge to back this realization up; I already know that Johnston did come back to Molde because Hans in a letter to me described his une
xpected sighting of him—though there was no confrontation between them, even of the casual and merely literal kind. Below the surface of my conscious mind, I now begin to await the former bo’sun with painful tension.

  Not that everything about this man is menacing or malign. Asked what the two of them would talk about, Ellida replies:

  “About storms and calm. Of dark nights at sea. And of the sea in the glittering sunshiny days we spoke also. But we spoke mostly of the whales, and the dolphins, and the seals who lie out there on the rocks in the midday sun. And then we spoke of the gulls, and the eagles, and all the other sea birds. I think—isn’t it wonderful?—when we talked about such things it seemed to me as if both the sea beasts and sea birds were one with him.”

  And yes, Hans had told me this, and in a not dissimilar tone. Lyrically admiring. An inner voice whispers to me: And did he love the bo’sun too, your Hans? Did he offer himself to HIM?

  I hardly know how properly to respond to the Third Act—back in the Wangels’ garden, but in a sequestered part of it with a carp-pond and even more splendid views of the mountain-peaks—when the Stranger makes his reappearance in Ellida’s life, from the other side of the hedge, just as Hans did earlier on. Him I would not at first have recognized—he now has a bushy red beard and is no longer the drink-smelling disheveled specimen of the Esplanade shelter. Ellida does not recognize him to begin with. Then she takes a closer look, and cries out, as well she might: “The eyes! The eyes!” He has come to the town, he says, on a visiting English steamer (as a passenger, not as a working seaman), for no other purpose but to claim her, to take her. As his own. He begs her not to be frightened of him (though it’s hard to see how she can’t be this, given his complete assumption that she must submit to his will), and even in the presence of her husband, the long-suffering Wangel, he declares that Ellida and himself are bound to one another in a “wonderful” marriage. Just as he has faithfully kept himself for her all these years, while voyaging all the seas and visiting many lands, many continents, so she should have kept her vow to him and waited patiently for his return—which his letters promised her would one day be a reality. But he does protest that he doesn’t wish to take her, as her poor husband seems afraid he might, by brute force; she must come to him of her own free will.

  “I have kept the word I gave you. And so now you must think it over till tomorrow night. Now I’m going with the steamer up the fjord. Tomorrow night I will come again, and then I shall look for you here. You must wait for me in the garden . . .”

  Hans, the one person who could have understood and even cast light on this meeting after so many years between the two of them, has not been present at the scene. But he has (as I uniquely in this theatre know!) caught a glimpse of him:

  LYNGSTRAND (going quickly up to Ellida): Now, Mrs. Wangel, you must hear something wonderful.

  WANGEL: What is it?

  LYNGSTRAND: Fancy! We’ve seen the American.

  WANGEL: The American?

  HILDE: Yes, I saw him, too.

  LYNGSTRAND: He was going ’round the back of the garden, and thence on board the great English steamer.

  WANGEL: How do you know the man?

  LYNGSTRAND: Why, I went to sea with him once. I felt so certain he’d been drowned—and now he’s very much alive.

  WANGEL: Do you know anything more about him?

  LYNGSTRAND: No. But I’m sure he’s come to revenge himself upon his faithless sailor-wife.

  Is he right or wrong to say this? For making so absolute a demand on her as he just has done, imposing such a decision on somebody so vulnerable, does seem to me a kind of revenge.

  Now for the interval, and I have to say I’m grateful for it. I’m grateful even for Will’s hearty sociability for of course he wants to chat and smoke alongside practically everybody in the auditorium, all of them, it would seem, unimpressed by the play to the point of scorn.

  “If this is the work of a great master, I’ll eat my hat!” says Dan Havers, an older large-mustachioed, cynical-eyed man whose opinion Will much looks up to. “Will she or won’t this Ellida woman—Rose Meller at her very best, I have to say—go off with her tramp of a Stranger? Who can make a logical prediction? But then who could care? I’m jolly glad I wasn’t present when she and her inamorato had their endless conversations about nautical matters. There seems to me to have been a bally sight too much talk about the sea already as it is.”

  “Shh!” theatrically Will puts a finger to his lips and rolls his eyes. “I see a few members of the Ibsen Worshippers’ Tribe making their way down yonder gangway, and I don’t want ’em to hear us blaspheme. Come to think of it, I’m not at all sure we haven’t another Tribesman, another Ibsenite in our midst. Martin, come clean. Confess!”

  “I’m not confessing to anything of the kind,” I say, not wholly pleased by Will’s jauntily superior tone. “This is the first of his plays I’ve ever seen. But such a lot is yet to happen, so shouldn’t we wait till the end of the play before coming to any conclusion about it?”

  “Touché, my dear chap,” Dan Havers replies. (I think Will is not altogether pleased with me for saying what I just have—he likes to make up his mind about a thing speedily, indeed preferably on the spot.) “Possibly I’ve just met someone who’ll soon swell the benighted ranks of us theatre-reviewers, and do so in most distinguished fashion.”

  “Oh, you’d be wrong there,” Will tells him officiously, and maintaining a grin but there’s an edge to his voice. “Martin isn’t a literary chap at all.”

  Well, I was asking for that! Therefore, I’m at once relieved and anxious to take my seat again, and let the deep brownish-pinks, apple-greens, and gold all fade to make way again for a Norwegian garden toward the end of summer, with fjord and mountain-peaks to remind us that they continue even when human dramas come to their end.

  Hans Lyngstrand appears in a distinctly different light in the two acts that remain. Nobody wants him to talk about his past, nobody appeals to him to say any more about Johnston/Friman—something which surely could have been helpful to the Wangels. Instead he makes appeals on his own behalf, first to Bolette, then to Hilde, reminding them that he is soon to go south for the sake of both his health and his art—and where could that mean but Italy, for so long the Promised Land for so many Scandinavian artists, the more so if consumptive? He begs them to think of him in his long absence. He will be creating great works of art under a sunny sky while they stay back at home in the confines of Norway, but “it would be so delightful for me to know you were at home here thinking of me!” He says he has given marriage thought, but that it is certainly not for him at present—even assuming he could afford it, which he can’t; even with his patron’s help—Herr Strømme is not mentioned by name, but his presence is felt—this young artist is indigent. But he suggests that the understanding between him and each sister that he proposes it to will be in its way a de facto marriage.

  He sounds pretty silly, I have to say, conceited and crass, when he talks to the Wangel sisters in this fashion, and the laughter from the audience suggests they think this too. Theirs is not kindly, or even indulgent laughter.

  “How ridiculous he is being,” proclaim these guffaws. “This young sculptor is a noddy, a spoony.” Will joins in all the merriment, while I, who can’t really dissent from the general opinion of which it is an expression, now begin to wish the play would move swiftly to its conclusion. Would Hans have spoken in this vain, foolish manner? I can’t completely convince myself that he would not. There was, for all his many merits, some of which I have not perceived until this afternoon—at any rate until the interval—a little vanity, and a dram or two of foolishness in Hans Lyngstrand, there even when he crept into my attic-bedroom and lay himself down beside me, even possibly when he cast his body on mine and his tongue went into my mouth like a little fish after he’d spun me a preposterous tale about a peregrine falcon and a sailor-lad.

  All the same it is profoundly saddening (if rather too unders
tandable) to hear Bolette and Arnholm discussing the young man in the following terms:

  ARNHOLM: What is it, dear?

  BOLETTE: Oh! It’s that poor [pointing]—see out there.

  ARNHOLM: Is it your father?

  BOLETTE: No. It’s the young sculptor. He’s down there with Hilde.

  ARNHOLM: Oh, Lyngstrand! What’s really the matter with him?

  BOLETTE: Why, you know how weak and delicate he is.

  ARNHOLM: Yes. Unless it’s simply imaginary.

  BOLETTE: No, it’s real enough! He’ll not last long. But perhaps that’s best for him.

  ARNHOLM: Dear, why should that be best?

  BOLETTE: Because—because—nothing would come of his art anyhow.

  He will die young, she says, and that’s really for the good, because he has no artistic talent at all, and it would be painful for him ever to know this . . .

  But nobody says that he carries with him an individual self (a soul, if you like!) more precious than any quantifiable talent, artistic or otherwise. And nobody says that because of that he will execute something. Whether good or bad I still don’t think I have the ability to say, but stamped The Sailor’s Revenge is with his own irreducible personality.

  Naturally all attention now is on the choice that Ellida will make. The summer night gradually deepens over the Wangels’ garden, over the whole resort too and the fjord and the great mountains beyond. The Stranger—for such I too now call him (and was he, for all those ghastly moments of physical proximity, anything else to me?)—will turn up again, true to his vow, and Ellida herself, and increasingly her husband too, would now appear to believe that the force of Nature (or something of the sort) will exert itself into ensuring her departure with him.

  BALLESTED: But you know she [the English ship] comes from between the islands. You can’t see anything of her, and then she’s alongside of you.

  WANGEL: Tonight is the last voyage, then she will not come again.

  BALLESTED: A sad thought, doctor . . . The glad summertime will soon be over now. Soon all ways will be barred, as they say in the tragedy. It’s sad to think of. We have been the joyous children of summer for weeks and months now. It’s hard to reconcile yourself to the dark days—just at first, I mean. For men can accli-a-acclimatize [sic] themselves, Mrs. Wangel. Ay, indeed they can.