Four wrinkles of compassion appeared on her brow.
“You must really excuse us, but unfortunately we haven’t yet got the pictures hung up,” said Raben cynically, shoving his grinning face forth from the dark room.
Loud laughter. Jastrau cautiously edged his chair away from the others.
“But we’ll have pictures there yet,” bellowed the judge, his face a deep red. “They’ll be there—along with our humane administration of justice. You can be sure of that.”
“And beds with innerspring mattresses,” seconded Vuldum.
“And female servants,” Krog sniggered, peering around nearsightedly in all directions.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, we treat them too well,” said the judge, seizing hold of the conversation again. He spoke with a professional air. “It’s really an out-and-out rest home.”
So that was how they felt about it. And here he sat, Editor Ole Jastrau, in tails and white tie.
“But just the same, I’d like to see it sometime when there’s someone in there—ah, yes.” It was Fru Kryger’s singsong voice, and she lifted her shoulders voluptuously as she spoke.
‘Well, well,” sighed the judge in mock resignation, while Raben laughed. “Then I don’t suppose I can do anything except invite the entire company for an inspection tour of our jail cells—sometime when there are animals in the cage, mind you.”
Jastrau got up quietly. Here among this group, he suddenly felt like a person in disguise, like a sober fool at a carnival. Had he believed that he belonged here? Why did the memory of the two hooligans who had been locked in the cell next to his suddenly become so warmly intimate and pleasant? Was it there that he belonged—down at the lowest level of existence where things were so nice? Did he want to go to the dogs? He wanted to—yes, he had to. The thought gave him a wholesome feeling—a sense of liberation. Then he could reveal himself as the person he was, get on intimate terms with himself.
“We’ll take you at your word,” Fru Kryger screamed in an outburst of joyful hysteria.
“Yes, yes—of course. But then I’ll have to have everybody’s address or phone number,” said Asmussen, laughing. “Raben, my dear secretary, you’ll have to note them down.”
While the others laughed, Raben sat down at the table and began to write in his notebook. Everyone was elated, and they all crowded around him. Johanne poked her head over his shoulder and made sure that he got all the addresses correct.
Jastrau stared at her and felt his anger rising. She too was going around in a mask. Yes, she was. It was only that she wore the mask better than he. He, in full-dress clothes and possibly with disease germs lurking within him, venomous, thread-like organisms that in an instant multiplied as rapidly as people did over a period of a thousand years. Nevertheless, he was just as good as the others, as good as any of them despite his sudden fear and fit of shivering, and it was unfair that he alone of all these people should feel shabby and unclean in every way, he alone—
In self-righteous indignation he poured himself another strong whiskey and soda.
“A stiff double, what?” said Kryger, laughing.
Jastrau sent him a macabre nod and took the glass away from his mouth.
Just then Asmussen’s hoarse laughter cut through the chatter. “But look here, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “—what shall we do if there happens to be a prominent animal there in the cell, ha ha?”
“But decent people don’t get locked up there!” exclaimed Krog’s sister-in-law naively. The remark suited her Madonna coiffure.
“Really?” said the judge.
There was a fresh wave of laughter, and then everyone began talking at once.
“What do you think about Dr. Harren?” Raben asked ironically.
“And Engineer Ivan Kramer,” trumped Krog.
“Attorney Tingslev,” Vuldum said quietly but incisively, going Krog one better.
Was that really how it was? Jastrau drank and smiled at the same time. Greetings to all good fellows from Peter Boyesen.
“Professor Geberhardt,” yelled Krog, his pale eyes popping behind the spectacles.
“No. Now I must protest!” exclaimed Kryger vociferously. He got up from his chair. “He wasn’t guilty of anything like that—”
He looked around at the ladies, who were enjoying themselves immensely.
“That’s right, by God. He’s one of the contributors to Danmark. I’d completely forgotten that.” And Krog laughed exuberantly.
“That’s not why I’m objecting,” Kryger asserted, waving his hand in an imperious gesture. “He has broken with us and gone to Berlin.”
“What’s that?” exclaimed Vuldum with evident interest. His gray eyes shone brightly.
Kryger nodded.
“But the university? What about it, what about it?” Krog stammered in his perplexity.
“He’ll no longer be teaching business science.”
“This is really sensational, damned if it isn’t!” Asmussen exclaimed.
Everyone stared at Kryger, who bit his lip and smiled.
“Well, it wasn’t really supposed to be announced just yet,” he said circumspectly and took out his watch. “But then, it’s too late for it to get into the other papers now, so it doesn’t make any difference. We’re printing it tomorrow.” He smiled and looked relieved.
“It’s really scandalous having that Bolshevik occupy a professor’s chair in this country,” Krog said indignantly. He pronounced the words “professor’s chair” with great dignity.
“He’s really a conservative,” Kryger protested.
“He’s a devil, he is,” chuckled Asmussen.
“But why doesn’t he want to—?” Krog did not get the question finished.
“That sort of thing can happen these days too,” interrupted Kryger, smiling and shrugging his shoulders. “People sometimes throw up everything and don’t want to go on.”
Just then Jastrau set his glass down on the table with a loud thump, and several of the guests stared at him. His eyes were glazed with alcohol.
“Right,” he said in a gruff voice.
“Now Jastrau is drunk,” Vuldum whispered to Raben, and Raben nodded knowingly.
Johanne frowned.
But Jastrau bit off the tip of a cigar so violently that the end of it was left ragged. His eyes had a vicious, remote look.
And suddenly he left the gathering and withdrew into the dark room. Yes, he had drunk too much. The darkness flickered before his eyes. He had to calm himself. He took up a position near the window and gazed down at the empty street with its nocturnal lights.
Professor Julius Geberhardt. He had seen pictures of him in the newspapers. A face that was at once rugged and crafty-looking, disorderly hair with wisps of it sticking out behind the ears, turndown collars and that sort of humbug. A professor. Member of the board of directors. An expert on the law governing the sale of securities. An extremely troublesome gentleman whom the powers of high finance had in vain attempted to have stamped as insane. And now he had finally become tired and had thrown it all overboard, his position and his title.
Wasn’t that going to the dogs?
“Are you standing here dreaming?” asked Krog, suddenly looming up out of the darkness. “A lovely evening, isn’t it, even if I do say so myself.” He rubbed his hands together in satisfaction. “And now we’re going to have a little smørrebrød with beer and snaps.”
“This about Professor Geberhardt—” Jastrau could not get it off his mind. The darkness kept flickering unsteadily. “Geberhardt,” he repeated.
“Yes. My God—what a relief that is. But I have to get out in the kitchen. A host has his duties.”
A relief! So that was the way they felt about it. Jastrau screwed up his eyes. A relief! One of the few men who fought against the disintegration of capitalism and the political structure. But troublesome. He disappeared from the scene, and my God, what a relief!
A slight smarting pain again made itself felt, like a dev
il whispering something in his ear. But now it no longer reminded him only of a ridiculous escapade. It signified something revolutionary. He was made of different stuff than the others there that evening. Chaotically, his thoughts took shape as a revolt against all dissembling and hypocrisy. He drew himself up straighter. That slight prophylactic pain was a mark of distinction. He was more honest than—
The company went in to the smørrebrød table, chattering about all sorts of nonsense. But Jastrau’s eyes were screwed up and full of malice. His silence was conspicuous. Johanne glanced uneasily at him several times.
There was smørrebrød with herring, and there was snaps. Perhaps that would help.
The conversation was strained, a bit unstable. When the guests had drunk a snaps, only one, their faces suddenly relaxed. Yes, after the whiskey, the snaps was a help. Relaxed lower lips, glistening eyes, head-strong opinions.
And what were they talking about? Professor Geberhardt. Everyone expressed himself strongly.
Nevertheless, things seemed to get a little out of control when Jastrau put in a few heated words:
“Damn it! There’s no freedom of speech in this country.”
It was his tone rather than the idea that was out of place. It revealed an arrant fanaticism, introduced an alien note.
And now Vuldum was again sitting familiarly beside Johanne.
“No, I’ll be damned if there is,” Jastrau repeated angrily, as if someone had protested. But no one had. They merely dodged the issue. Kryger shifted his chair a little farther away and surveyed him with a sidelong glance.
“Oh, now, we mustn’t get into a discussion of politics again,” Fru Krog complained.
“No, now we’d better go home and get to bed,” said Judge Asmussen. “I can tell by your eyes, frue.” He had not touched the snaps.
“Already?” Kryger hastened to say.
“Oh, you never get tired, Otto,” his wife interjected with a hopeless smile.
“We’re not all as rugged as you, Herr Editor,” sighed the judge.
“And besides, you have that important case tomorrow,” said his wife, raising her nose perceptibly.
“Yes,” came the feeble answer.
But when the guests finally had taken their leave and stood out on the sidewalk in the bluish light of the streetlights, ready to get into their cabs, it seemed that for the first time Kryger really began to feel expansive. His eyes sparkled.
“What do you say we go to the Golden Age Club?” he proposed eagerly.
The host and hostess stood in the doorway.
“You’re indefatigable,” Krog called out to him as he suppressed a yawn. “But you won’t insist on me going with you. Some other time—some other time. Then I’ll be up to it.”
Jastrau stood leaning against one of the taxis. He was nodding a bit.
“You’ll come along, won’t you, frue?” Vuldum said ingratiatingly to Johanne.
But she stole a sidelong glance at her husband’s tired figure leaning against the cab.
“No, Ole has to go home.”
There were handshakes. Suddenly Ole Jastrau found himself sitting in a taxi. He raised his hat in a farewell gesture. Johanne sat beside him, nodding to the shadowy figures outside.
“Ole has to go home,” he repeated provocatively. “Ole has to go home.”
Then they drove off.
“What did you really mean by that remark?” he asked in a spiteful tone.
“That you have to go home and get to sleep,” she answered wearily, settling back in the seat and drawing her wrap around her.
“I? Sleep? You probably think I’m drunk,” he commented snidely.
“Now, now—the driver can hear us,” she said in a low tone. It sounded almost as if she were hissing at him.
“It’s remarkable how generous you are.”
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, sitting up with a start.
“That you turn down Vuldum’s company in order to get your drunken husband home to bed.”
The sentence was spoken in a well-modulated tone of disdain, so clear, sober, and vindictive that no one would have suspected Jastrau of being drunk. His eyes were small and Mongoloid in his sallow, ravaged face.
Johanne looked at him, appalled.
“Why you’re out of your mind!” she burst out.
“I saw what I saw.” He leaned over with his hot face close to hers. “And I heard what I heard.”
“You’re talking riddles. Ooh—stop breathing in my face!”
“I heard what I heard,” Jastrau went on, jerking his head away from her. Suddenly a feeling of savagery took possession of him. “I heard what I heard—yes, I heard Joachim Michelsen’s voice very clearly today. Don’t think you can fool me. I heard it—I—I—”
He gasped for breath. He felt his heart contracting, and a pain shot through his chest.
“No—I can’t take it any longer. I won’t—”
Johanne drew her wrap closely about her so that it no longer touched him. There was a space between them, but he could detect her body growing rigid. He did not look at her.
But then it came.
“Why did you turn those photographs around at home?” she asked harshly.
And in his mind’s eye he saw himself as he had been there in the apartment—how, unable to rest because of dissipation and the whiskey in his system, he had paced back and forth through the rooms and suddenly felt himself tormented by the two faces, the photographs of his mother and his son, how he had had a feeling that they could see right through him, and then he had turned the pictures around.
So Johanne had noticed it.
And there she sat in the corner of the cab, pale as a corpse and unassailable. He sensed his powerlessness, and it made him desperate. Something had to happen. But he could not speak.
Suddenly he bent forward, rapped on the window in back of the driver, and signaled frantically for him to stop.
“What do you want? Have you gone completely crazy?” Johanne cried out in bewilderment.
The taxi slowed and then came to a stop. Jastrau already had the door open so that the breeze came whistling in. And then, with one leap, he was out on the edge of the sidewalk.
At a loss to know what was going on, the driver turned on the light inside the cab. Johanne sat silent and pale with the black evening wrap around her. She made not a single voluntary movement, merely rocked back and forth momentarily like a statue because the car had stopped so suddenly, and then regained her equilibrium.
Jastrau’s lips were trembling. He wished that his rash act could be undone. He wanted to get back into the cab. But that triumphant silence must be conquered. He had to win this battle, and he would. A stupid conquest. What did the cab driver think? And then he reached into his pocket, grabbed his keys, tossed them into the cab. Out with his wallet too, and into the cab with it. Inexplicable. A silent, violent scene. And Johanne sat there in the feeble light, staring straight ahead like a person who was dying.
Without a word, Jastrau turned his back on her and began walking out Vesterbrogade. The glow from the arc lights, the broad, glistening, car tracks, the shadowy figures on the street corners, white legs flashing, women, and up above the roofs the blue-black night sky and some stars; he sensed the street as an extension of his soul, as a confirmation that something conclusive had occurred, as an extraordinary, incomprehensibly calming influence. Behind him, he heard the taxi start and get under way. It must be it, because there was not another car on the street at the moment. He would not turn around, but must simply keep walking. Then the taxi could catch up with him, draw up alongside the curb, and stop. And then they could talk to each other. The taxi had to come.
But the sound of the engine became fainter and fainter, and finally he had to turn around and look.
What he saw was the rear end of the cab. The taillight like a red cat’s eye in the distance. It turned a corner down near Vesterbro’s square and disappeared.
Disappeared.
> And once again he was swallowed up by the night. Again he was aware of an inexplicable feeling of peace, a calmness of spirit, as if all his life he had known that this was the way it would turn out. Whatever happened from now on would be nothing but details—trivia. Indeed, the things that had happened during the last few days were trivia, superficial details which in themselves had no significance but which, seen in connection with other events, meant that—well, what did they mean?
Had he been unfaithful? Unfaithful? He could not really remember. Had it been something he had really experienced? Or only a figment of his imagination? The jail cell. Was that something he had imagined? Peter Boyesen sends greetings—A hallucination.
And Oluf. “Where have you and Mother been all this time?” A high-pitched boyish voice over the telephone, an unrealistic manifestation of reality, his living son fading away into unreality. A hallucination. For now he would probably never get to see Oluf again.
“Where have you and Mother been all this time?”
Something to set his mind on. The Golden Age Club. Ah, that made him feel better. A current of cool night air caressed his forehead. And with his topcoat flapping in the breeze so that his white shirt front twinkled and seemed to lure him on, he kept walking out toward the darkness of Frederiksberg Allé. He perceived it as a shadowy night-refuge that lay behind the bright lights around the newsstand at the Værnedam crossroad.
A woman stopped. But he kept walking heedlessly, his coat flapping about him, as if hurrying along an accustomed route, farther and farther out Frederiksberg Alle with its newly planted trees, their sparse branches bristling ridiculously—outwards—outwards—like mere twigs. How nice the car tracks looked, as lovely as a bright nocturnal sky when the headlights of the cars speeding by plowed the darkness away from them. A long street. Endless. There was a world of space out there, out above the darkness of Frederiksberg Park and the dimly discernible yellow gatekeepers’ houses flanking the castle, a wide expanse of starry sky, an atmosphere of nature and wide-open spaces.
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