by David Miller
Surely I needed every penny I had left now? Was there any possibility of my coming into more money before giving my lecture? Thank you, I would carry the bag myself.
But the porter already had hold of it. That remarkably kind person didn’t seem to find it any trouble at all. Payment seemed to be the last thing on his mind, and he carried it in such an innocent way, as though he was prepared to die for the owner of such a bag.
“Wait!” I called out and stopped. “Where do you think you’re going with that bag?”
He smiled.
“That’s for you to decide,” he answered.
“Correct,” said I. “That’s for me to decide, not you.”
We had already passed one bed-and-breakfast place in a basement-café and it was my idea to enquire for a room there. I had to get rid of the porter as quickly as possible, so that I could sneak back to the basement without him knowing.
I gave him a 50-øre piece.
Still he held his hand out.
“I carried the bag for you yesterday too,” he said.
“That is for yesterday,” I said.
“And I’ve just carried it now too,” he said.
It was highway robbery.
“And this is for today,” I said, tossing another 50-øre piece into his palm. “Now please get out of my sight.”
The porter went. But he looked back several times and kept his eye on me.
I made my way to a bench and sat down. It was rather chilly, but once the sun had risen it warmed up. I dozed off and must have slept for quite a while, for when I awoke the street was full of people and smoke was curling up from the chimneys. I walked back to the basement-café and made an arrangement with the woman there. Bed-and-breakfast 50 øre per night.
After the two-day wait was over I again walked out to Carlsen the lawyer’s house in the country. Again he advised me to cancel the lecture, but I would on no account be talked out of it. In the meantime I had paid for an insertion in Arentsen’s newspaper giving the date, place and topic of my lecture.
When I then tried to pay for the pavilion, which would have left me temporarily without funds, Carlsen, a remarkable man, said:
“There’s no need to pay until after the lecture.”
I misunderstood him and took offence.
“Are you perhaps under the impression that I haven’t got the eight kroner?”
“Goodness me no! But it’s by no means certain you’ll actually get the use of the pavilion, and if that happens then obviously there will be nothing to pay.”
“I have already advertised the lecture,” I told him.
He nodded.
“I saw that,” he answered. Shortly afterwards he said:
“Will you still speak if less than fifty people turn up?”
I found this question actually rather offensive, but after thinking it over I said that fifty would be a poor showing, but that yes I would still do it.
“But not for just ten?”
At this I burst out laughing.
“You will forgive me. There are limits.”
We spoke no more about it and I did not pay for the pavilion. Carlsen and I then began talking about literature. He rose in my estimation, and was clearly an interesting man, even though his views and opinions suffered by comparison with my own.
When we parted company he wished me a really good turn-out for the lecture that evening.
I returned to my basement in excellent spirits. The battleground was prepared – earlier in the day I had given a man 50 øre to walk round handing out my 500 cards, so now the whole town knew about the event.
My mood became strangely elevated, and as I contemplated the important task I was about to perform I became dissatisfied with my little basement home and its wretched occupants. Everyone wanted to know who I was and why I was living there. The landlady, the woman behind the counter, explained that I was a learned man who spent his whole day writing and studying and that people were not to bother me with questions. She was invaluable to me. The people who used the café were hungry working men and street porters in shirtsleeves who popped in to get themselves a cup of hot coffee or a lump of black pudding spread with butter and cheese. Sometimes they were unpleasant and abused the landlady because the waffles were stale or the eggs too small. When they found out I was going to lecture in the Park Pavilion itself they wanted to know how much tickets were. Some of them said they were interested in hearing me, but 50 øre was too much, and they began debating the ticket-price with me. I promised myself not to allow such people to upset me; they had absolutely no breeding at all.
There was a man in the room next to mine who spoke a horrible mixture of Swedish and Norwegian. The landlady referred to him as “the director”. He always caused a stir when he breezed into the dining-room, not least because of his habit of dusting the seat of his chair with his handkerchief before sitting down. He was a real dandy, with an expensive way about him. I noticed that when he ordered a sandwich he was always most particular that it be served “on fresh bread and with best butter”.
“Is it you who’s giving the lecture?” he asked me.
“Yes he’s the one,” answered the landlady.
“You’re taking a big chance,” he said, continuing to address himself to me. “You don’t even advertise. Haven’t you seen the way I advertise?”
It dawned on me who he was: the anti-spiritualist, the man with the apes and the wild beasts.
“I advertise with posters this big,” he went on. “I stick them up all over the place, wherever there’s room. Big writing on them. You must have seen them. I’ve got drawings of the beasts on them too.”
I pointed out that my lecture was on the subject of literature. Art, in a word. Intellectual matters.
“Doesn’t make a damn bit of difference!” he scoffed. And then he compounded his insolence by saying that it would be a different matter if I worked for him. “I need a man to introduce the animals and I would prefer a stranger who isn’t known to the people here. If someone they know gets up the audience starts shouting “Look, look, it’s only Petterson, what does old Petterson know about wild beasts?”
I turned away in silent contempt, unwilling to dignify such shameless talk with a response.
“I’ll pay you five kroner a night,” he continued. “Think on it.”
At this I rose from my seat and left the room. I had no choice. Clearly the director was afraid of the competition; worried that I would steal his audience away from him he was looking to make some sort of deal with me, to buy me off. Never! I said to myself. Never will I allow myself to be seduced into betraying the world of art. Mine is the way of the ideal.
At seven o’clock I carefully brushed my clothes and set off for the Park Pavilion. I knew my lecture well and my head was ringing with the lofty and elegant phrases I would be using. I felt a powerful certainty that it would go down well and in my mind I could hear already the telegraph wires jangling with the news of my success.
It rained. The weather was perhaps not so kind as it might have been. But a public hungry for literature would not allow themselves to be put off by a drop of rain. And the streets were full of people, couples walking arm in arm beneath umbrellas. It struck me that they were all going in the opposite direction to me, which is to say, not in the direction of the Park Pavilion. Where did they think they were going? Hm, must be the plebs on their way to see the apes at the Workers’ Hall.
The ticket-seller was at his post.
“Anyone here yet?” I asked.
“Not yet,” he answered. “But there’s a good half-hour to go.”
I went inside and took a walk round the massive auditorium, my footsteps echoing like hoof-beats. Ah God, if there were a full house sitting there now, row upon row of heads, men and women squashed together, all just waiting for the speaker! But not a soul!
I waited out the long half-hour. No one came. I wandered out and asked the ticket-seller what he made of the situation. He was cautious, bu
t optimistic. In his opinion it wasn’t lecturing weather, people didn’t like going out when it was raining so heavily. Anyway, they would probably all turn up at the last minute.
And we waited.
At last a man came hurrying through the pouring rain, paid his 50 øre and went inside.
“Here they come,” said the ticket-seller, nodding his head. “Drammen people have this terrible habit of turning up for things at the last minute.”
We waited. No one else came. Eventually the only spectator joined us outside.
“Beastly weather,” he said.
I recognised Carlsen the lawyer.
“I don’t think you’re going to get anyone this evening,” he said, “It’s pelting down!” Then, noticing my downcast expression, he added:
“I knew it when I saw the barometer. It sank much too quickly. That’s the reason I advised you not to give your lecture.”
But the ticket-seller was still on my side.
“We should wait another half-hour,” he said. “Bound to be at least 20 or 30 turn up at the very last moment.”
“I don’t think so,” said the lawyer, buttoning up his coat. “And while I remember,” he added, “there is, naturally, nothing to pay for the hire of the pavilion.”
He doffed his hat, said goodbye and left.
The ticket-seller and I waited another half-hour and continued to discuss the situation. It was an embarrassing business and I felt thoroughly humiliated. On top of that the lawyer had gone off without getting his money back. I was all for going after him, but the ticket-seller advised against it.
“I’ll keep it,” he said. “That way you only owe me another 50 øre.”
But I gave him another krone. He’d stuck to his post and I wanted to show my appreciation. He thanked me warmly, we shook hands and off he went.
I wandered home, a beaten man. Numb with shame and disappointment I drifted through the streets scarcely knowing where my feet were taking me. To add to my distress I realised at a certain point that I no longer had the money for the train back to Kristiania.
The rain kept falling.
Presently I passed a large building. From the street I could see the lights of a box-office in the foyer. It was the Workers” Hall. Latecomers were still turning up, buying their tickets and disappearing through the great doors into the hall. I asked the ticket-seller how many were inside. The house was almost full.
That damned director. He’d beaten me in style.
I sneaked back to my lodgings and went quietly to bed, with nothing to eat and nothing to drink.
In the middle of the night there was a knock on the door and a man came in carrying a candle. It was the director.
“How did the lecture go?” he asked.
Under any other circumstances I would have thrown him out straightaway. Now, however, I was too crushed to put up any kind of front at all and I said merely that I had cancelled it.
He smiled.
“It wasn’t the right weather for a lecture on serious literature,” I explained. He should have been able to see that for himself.
He was still smiling.
“The barometer just collapsed,” I said.
“I had standing-room only,” he replied. Then he stopped smiling, apologised for disturbing me and explained his errand.
It was a most curious errand: he had come once again to offer me work as the presenter of his beasts.
I was mortally offended and asked him, very firmly, kindly to leave me in peace.
Instead he sat down on my bed with the candle in his hand.
“We can at least discuss it,” he said. He explained that the local man he had hired to present the beasts had indeed been recognised by the audience. He himself – the director – had gone down extremely well with his exposure of the spiritualists’ trickery; but his speaker, the man from Drammen, had ruined all his good work. “Look, it’s Bjørn Pedersen,” people shouted. “Where d’you get the badger from, Bjørn?” And Bjørn Pedersen, keeping to the script, explained that it wasn’t a badger at all but a hyena from the African bush that had already eaten three missionaries. Then the people booed and jeered because they thought he was trying to make fools of them. “I don’t understand it,” said the director. “I blackened his face and put a wig on his head and still they recognised him.”
I couldn’t see what concern all this was of mine and I turned over to face the wall.
“Think on it!” said the director before he left. “I might stretch it to six kroner a night if you’re good.”
Never would I be a party to such vulgarity! A man had his honour to consider.
The following day the director approached me and asked me to look over the speech about the beasts, correct the grammar, brush up the language here and there. He offered me two kroner.
In spite of all, I accepted. I was doing the man a favour really, and it was, after all, a service in the cause of literature. Moreover, I needed the two kroner. Before commencing, however, I warned him in the strongest possible terms not to mention my involvement to anyone.
I spent all day on it, reworking the speech from beginning to end, injecting life and humour into the descriptions, adorning it with similes, warming more and more to my task. It was a work of art in itself to be able to make so much out of a few wretched animals. Late in the evening, when I read it out to the director, he said he had never heard a speech like it in his life, it had made a remarkable impression on him. In recognition of this he paid me not two but three kroner.
This both moved and encouraged me, and to some extent restored my faith in my literary mission.
“If only I had someone good enough to deliver such a lecture,” he sighed. “But where is such a man to be found in Drammen?”
I began thinking. It really would be a disaster if a speech like that were to fall into the hands of some Bjørn Pedersen or other to mutilate with his atrocious delivery. The thought was almost unendurable.
“I might, perhaps, on certain conditions, consent to deliver the lecture,” I said.
The director sat up.
“What conditions? I’ll pay you seven kroner,” he said.
“That’s fine. My main condition is that it must remain a secret between you and me who the speaker is.”
“I give you my word.”
“Because as I’m sure you’ll understand,” I said, “a man with my mission in life can hardly let it get about that he gives talks on wild beasts.”
No, he understood that.
“And of course, if it were not effectively my own composition from start to finish then I would not even contemplate doing it.”
No, he understood that too.
“In that case I am quite prepared to help you out.”
The director thanked me.
At seven o’clock we went together to the Workers’ Hall for me to be shown the animals and given some basic instruction in how to deal with them.
There were two apes, a turtle, a bear, two wolf cubs and a badger.
There was nothing whatever in my “presentation” about wolves and badgers, though it abounded with references to a certain species of hyena from the African bush, a rare pine marten, and a sable, both “as mentioned in the Bible”, and an enormous American grizzly. I had prepared an excellent joke about the turtle, that she was a real lady who would eat nothing but turtle soup.
“Where are the sable and the marten?” I asked.
“Here!” cried the director, pointing to the wolf cubs.
“And the hyena?”
He pointed decisively to the badger: “Here is the hyena.”
I grew heated and angry. I said:
“This will not do at all. This is false pretences. I must believe in the truth of what I’m saying, with all my heart and soul.”
“Let’s not fall out over a trifle like this,” said the director. He produced a bottle of brandy from somewhere and poured me a drink. To show that I had nothing personal against him, that it was just his di
rty dealings I objected to, I accepted. We drank together.
“Please don’t drop me in it,” he said. “It’s such a wonderful speech, and the beasts aren’t that bad, not really that bad at all. Look at this great bear here. Give the speech, everything’ll be all right.”
The first spectators were filing into the hall and the director was becoming more and more anxious. His fate was in my hands, and it would become me to use my power with discretion. Moreover, I realised that it would be impossible to make the necessary alterations to my speech in the short time remaining before the show. And I did not see how anyone could put as much into the description of a badger as into an account of the ways of the ferocious hyena. Clearly, any alterations would only weaken my work to a degree I found indefensible. I informed the director of this.
He understood completely, and poured me another drink.
The performance began in front of a full house. The director himself – the anti-spiritualist – astounded everyone with his tricks. He pulled a string of handkerchiefs out of his nose, produced the Jack of Clubs from the pocket of an old woman sitting near the back of the house, and made a table walk across the floor without touching it. Finally he dematerialised himself, disappearing through a trapdoor in the floor of the stage. The audience went wild, the applause was thunderous. Now it was the turn of the beasts. The director brought them on one at a time, and it was my task to describe them.
I realised at once that I could not hope to emulate the director’s success; however, I did hope that the more discerning members of the public might appreciate my presentation. In this I was not disappointed.
Once the turtle was out of the way I had only land-dwelling animals to deal with, and in my speech I had linked them all with the story of Noah, who kept two of every kind of animal that was unable to live in the water. But things dragged a bit and the audience’s good mood seemed to have deserted it. The marten and the sable didn’t get the recognition they deserved, not even when I mentioned how many expensive furs from the backs of these animals the Queen of Sheba was wearing when she visited King Solomon. And then gradually things began to improve. Inspired by my biblical subject-matter, and the two glasses of brandy, my speech grew colourful, rich, passionate. I threw my script aside, I improvised, extemporised, and when I was done the whole house applauded and there were even a few cries of “Bravo!”