"And he thought, there are so many who sit in church with wretched shoes on, and so many at home, who dare not venture to church because of their miserable shoes, or the rest of their miserable garments. Who are they who have such wretched shoes and clothing? They who have worked most, worked until they are broken with toil.
"But those who have not worked have ten pairs of shoes, they could have a thousand; and clothes too, in the greatest superfluity. He had not been to church, he said, but he knew that there they held forth as though it were the most natural thing in the world that those who had shoes should give them to those who had none. You would gather from the preaching that Jesus Himself had taught it, Jesus had come to make all men happy, and this was the best way! For it is written, 'He went about doing good.'
"But they all went home from church just as they came; and no exchange of shoes took place, nor exchange of clothing either. One went back to his superfluity of leisure, the other to his poverty and want, and those who had not been able to go at all, because they were too poor, remained after the service as they had been before it.
"Such, you see, is our Christianity, he said. And he had a right to speak, I can tell you, because he shared his 'superfluity' with others."
"But still you live in a certain comfort?"
"Yes, in his opinion every one had a right to do so. The man who recognised that he was called on to sacrifice his comfort also should do it; but for most educated people comfort was the indispensable condition of work and help the foundation of happiness. And there was a charm of beauty about it, too, which is a rare incentive.
"No, what he demanded was that all those who could should support themselves—hear that, my daughter!—and that those who had superfluity should employ it in work which should be fruitful for others. He called that Church cowardly and shameless which did not make that demand without respect of persons."
"Like Tolstoï, then?"
"No, they were very different. Tolstoï is a Slav by birth, Ivan the Terrible and Tolstoï both of them; for these contradictions pre-suppose each other. The one did everything by force, the other resists nothing. The one had to crush all wills under his own in order to make room for himself, the other will willingly yield, knowing that a desire, once satisfied, dies. The Slav impulse towards tyranny, the Slav impulse towards martyrdom, the same passionate excess in both. Born of the same people, and under the same conditions.
"All the freedom we in Western Europe enjoy we have attained by keeping bounds, not for ourselves alone but for others. And also by resisting. It is weakness that knows no limits: strength ordains limits and observes them."
"But yet the Bible teaches——"
"Yes, yes, but the Bible is from the East too; the Westerns act in opposition to the Bible. What I am saying comes from your father."
"Did he know Tolstoï?"
"No, but what I have been saying is older than either the Bible or Tolstoï."
"Then he was a great orator?"
"That I could hardly venture to call him; he could not be reckoned among the prophets, but among the seers.
"Now don't interrupt me. He believed that in another hundred years to live in idleness and superfluity would be looked upon by most people as now we look upon a life of fraud and crime."
"Oh, mother, how did you feel about it?"
"His voice seemed to surge and vibrate in my ears both day and night. A storm-cloud seemed to surround me. Not as though he thundered or commanded. No, it was his personality, and something in the voice itself. It was deep and restrained, as though from a cavern; it came fitfully, but without cessation. I believe he spoke for over two hours. Whomever he happened to look at looked at him, and if he looked away the other continued to gaze—he couldn't help it, you understand. His eyes blazed with inward fire, he stood bending forward like a tree on a hillside. The image of the forest rose in my mind. Later, when I was nearer to him, the breath of the forest seemed to hang round him. And his skin was so clear! For instance, that part of his throat which was not sunburnt, because he stooped. When he lifted his head, you can't imagine how pure and fair it was.
"Ah, how have I drifted into this train of thought? But never mind, I have drifted into it—and I will follow it out—it takes me to your father's side again! O Magne, how I loved him! how I shall always love him!" She burst into tears—the girl's heart beat against hers. The softened colours of wood and plain in the uncertain light, the strenuous roar of the river seemed to sunder them from each other; the surroundings were at war with their mood; but the more closely did they cling together, each supporting the other.
"Magne, you mustn't ask me to put what I have to say to you in any sort of order. I only know the point I am aiming at.
"Yes, he was like the nature that surrounded him, fashioned on a generous scale and rich with hidden treasures: so much I dimly grasped. Everything I saw was new to me, the face of nature as well as the rest. I had travelled, but not in Norway.
"It is said of us women that we are not able to analyse those whom we love, but only worship them in the abstract. But he had a friend, his best friend; he could analyse him; the poet. He was present at Karl Mander's last meeting, and he came to me from it when your father was dead. We talked together of everything as much as I then could. He wrote about him the most beautiful things that have ever been written. I know them by heart; I know everything by heart that has been worthily written about your father."
"Do you know what it was he wrote?"
"'If the landscape I see around me could speak like a human being; if the dark lofty ridge could find speech to answer the river, and those two began to talk across the underwood, then you would know the impression made when Karl Mander had spoken so long that the vibration of his deep voice and the thoughts it uttered had melted into one.
"'Halting and with difficulty, as though from inward depths clumsily fumbling for words, he always arrived at the same goal. The thought was at last as clear and lucid as a birch leaf held against the sunlight.'"
"Was it then——"
"No, don't interrupt me! 'Karl Mander often seemed to me as unlike all other people as though he belonged to a different order of things. He was not like an individual, he represented a race. He swept by like a mighty river: at the mercy of chance and natural obstacles, perhaps, but ever rolling on. So was he, both in life and in speech. Neither was his voice merely individual, it had in it the reverberation of a torrent—a melancholy, captivating harmony, but monotonous, unceasing.'"
"That surely is what the sea sounds like, mother?"
The mother was as much carried away by her memories as animated in her movements, as eager in her glance as a young girl. Now she stopped.
"Like the sea, do you say? No, no, no, not like the sea. The sea is only an eye. No, dear, not like the sea; there were warm depths and hiding-places in his nature such as the sea has not. One had a sense of intimate security and comfort with him. He was capable of the most self-forgetting devotion. Listen further. 'Karl Mander was chosen,' he wrote, 'chosen as a forerunner before the people's own time should come—chosen because he was good and blameless; his message to futurity was not soiled in his soul.'"
"That is beautiful."
"Child, can you imagine how I was carried away? I had had a vague feeling that the surroundings of my life were unreal; here was something that was real.
"And he himself! We women do not love that which is lofty merely because it is lofty; no, there must be a certain weakness too—something that appeals to our help; we must feel a mission. And you cannot conceive how powerful and yet powerless he was."
"How powerless, mother?"
"Well, when he came—in that condition——"
"Yes, of course."
"And his way of expressing himself. He never found the right words first, he stopped and changed them even as they poured out. And, in the meantime, if he caught something up in his hand he stood there with it. If it were the tumbler—and it generally was—he grasped it tightly, and so, because of it, would keep his hand still for a quarter of an hour at a time. His personality was so pathetically simple, or how shall I express it? He was a seer, not a prophet—yes, I told you that before. But seers are quite different, they don't know themselves so well, they have absolutely no vanity. Heavens, how I longed to go and take off his cuffs! One could see that he was not accustomed to wear them: some one must have told him that it would not do to make a speech from a platform without cuffs on. He had crumpled and tumbled them; they had come unfastened, or perhaps never had been fastened; they got in the way and slipped over his hands. He struggled with them. There was something wrong about the waistcoat too; it was buttoned wrong, I believe, and puckered up at one side, so that it showed one of his braces—to me at any rate, where I sat looking at him sideways and with the light full upon him. Ah, that mighty creature with the stooping head! The tears rose in my eyes. Who would not have been willing to follow him?
"I felt as deeply as it could be felt that he must be helped. I did not know that I was to help him; I only knew that he must be helped and sustained."
A rush of memory so overpowered her that she could not go on, she turned away.
PART III
The daughter saw her mother in a new light. Surely this was not she who ordered and managed her house, who sent wise letters to her, with earnest, well-weighed words! How her passion had transfigured and beautified her!
"But how did you feel, dearest mother?"
"I was not conscious of what I felt. We went away from there the day after, and our next halting-place was close to his two farms. I had my wits so far about me, however, that when some of us had to be quartered out, I chose the house which was nearest his. And when the tempest within me was no longer to be resisted I wrote to him, without signing my name. I asked him for an interview. He was to meet me on the road that went through his wood, between his house and ours. I dropped the letter into his own letter-box on the road. You can imagine what a state I was in when I tell you that I had appointed ten o'clock in the evening, as I thought that then it would be dark! I had not noticed that it was still light at that time, so far north had we come. The result was that I did not dare to go out until eleven, and then I was sure there would be no one to meet. But there he was! Mighty and stooping, his hat pressed together in his hand, he came forward, hesitatingly, shyly, and awkwardly, glad. 'I knew it was you,' he said."
"Oh, mother! what did you do?"
"All at once I began to wonder where I had got the courage from! I did not even know what I wanted with him! When I saw him I could have turned and fled. But his wonderful gait, those long firm strides, his hat in hand, his shaggy head.... I felt I must see it all. And the wonderful thing he said: 'I knew it was you.' How could he have known it? I don't remember whether I asked him, or if he saw my surprise, but he explained that he had seen me as we came away from the lecture; he had heard who I was. It was wonderful to hear the deep voice, which for me meant something so absolutely exceptional, as though resounding from the far future, making embarrassed excuses for having said anything that might have wounded me. Before he succeeded in getting out 'wounded you,' he stammered—'wounded the Queen—wounded the Queen and her ladies—wounded you!' He had so many other subjects he might have touched upon, and so many other themes he might have chosen. He could have said so much that was good of the Queen, much that he knew to be true; but he had forgotten it. So he went on, his eyes looking into mine—trusting, but commanding eyes, whose attraction I felt. There seemed to be an echo in the silent wood of his unfathomable honesty. And his eyes went on repeating, 'Don't you believe it, too?' No one can imagine how unconscious he was of the effect they produced. He spoke, and I listened, and we drew nearer and nearer to each other. But the joy I felt, and which could not find words—what should I have said? At last it became uncontrollable—it burst all bounds. I suddenly heard myself laugh! And you should have seen how, all of a sudden, he laughed with me! Laughed, so that the woods re-echoed! The fishermen were just rowing past to be at their post when the sun should rise. They rested on their oars and listened. They all knew the sound of his laughter. I recognised its sound from the time when I saw him coming between his two satellites. There was a faun in him—a northern faun, of course, a wild man of the woods, unrestrained, but innocent, leading two bears, one under each arm! Yes, something of that kind. Not a troll, you understand, for they are stupid and malignant."
"You say 'innocent,' mother? How do you mean that he was innocent, since he was so wild?"
"Because nothing harmed him. Whatever he might have known or experienced, he remained a great child all the same. Yes, I tell you, refined and as aloof from evil. He had such a power of refinement in himself that what did not appeal to his nature was annihilated by it. It no longer existed for him."
"Oh, mother, how was it all? Oh, why have you been given this experience, and not I!" She had hardly spoken the words when she turned and ran swiftly away. The mother let her alone; she sat on a stone and waited her return. It was good to rest with her thoughts. She sat a long time alone, and would willingly have sat longer; but the clouds began to gather. Then Magne came back with a nosegay of the most beautiful wild flowers and delicate grasses arranged about a fir branch covered with cones, grey-green young cones.
"Mother, he was like this nosegay, wasn't he? What, dear mother, are you crying?"
"I am crying for joy, my child; for joy and regret both together. One day you will come to understand that those are the most comforting tears in the world."
But Magne had thrown herself down on the ground by her side. "Mother, you don't know how happy you have made me to-day!"
"I see I have, dear child; I was right to wait; it was a struggle, but I did right."
"Mother, dear mother, let us go back to the forest at home, to the road through our forest! Let me hear more! It was there it happened, then! Mother, tell me! What came next, sweetest mother! Ah, how lovely you are! There is always something fresh to discover in you."
The mother stroked her hair in silence, soothingly.
"Mother, I know that woodland road on summer nights. Laura walked there with me when she was engaged, and told me how it all happened, and the fishers rode past that time too, just as we came to an opening. We hid ourselves behind a great boulder; and the thrush began to sing, and many other birds, but the thing that affected me most was the scented air."
"Yes, doesn't it? And that is why I have always thought since that the woodland scent hung around Karl. Ah, I must tell you how curiously unconscious he was—what other word can I use? We stood still and looked over the lake. 'Oh, what a longing that gives,' said I. 'Yes, a longing to bathe, doesn't it?' said he."
Magne broke into hearty laughter; the mother smiled. "Now it no longer seems so strange to me. The water was more to him than it is to us—he used to plunge into a bath at the most unexpected times: when he was not to be found in his farms or at his office, that was always where he was. It was his strongest natural craving; he loved the cold embrace of the elements, he said.
"And how he laughed to himself when he saw how I was laughing! We laughed in unison."
"Then, mother, what happened? I can really wait no longer."
"I came home just as other people were getting up. And the next night was like that one, and the next after that, and the next after that again. One night it rained, and we both walked along under the same umbrella, and that was what brought things to a climax."
"To a climax?—how?"
"After once being obliged to walk arm-in-arm, we always went arm-in-arm afterwards."
"But other people, mother? Weren't you afraid of what they would say?"
"No; other people didn't exist for me. I can't remember how it all went on—it happened that one night we had sat down."
"Ah! now we are coming to it!"
"I asked to be allowed to sit down; I felt I could walk no longer. The night was glorious—silence and we two! He went on talking with his eyes looking into mine; he didn't know himself how they shone with happiness. I couldn't speak—I could hardly breathe—I was obliged to rest. And a few minutes after I sat on his knee."
"Was it he who——"
"I cannot quite remember. I only remember the first time my arms were about his neck and my face against his hair and beard. It was rapture, something absolutely new—it was bliss. The feeling of those giant arms round me transported me far, far away. But we were there on the boulder all the same."
"Were you as though beside yourself——?"
"Yes, that is just it! that is what it is called—but it really means being in possession of oneself, raised up to higher things. By his side I was myself twice over. That is love; nothing else deserves the name."
"Mother, mother! it was you, then, who sprang into his arms! It was you!"
"Yes, I am afraid it was I. I suppose he was too modest, too shy to begin that sort of thing. Yes, I know in my heart it was I. For life must be preserved. It was a question of nothing less. To be able to help him, to follow him, and worship him, and give myself up to him, that or nothing. I believe, too, that that was what I said to him, if I did say a single word."
"Oh, you know that you said it!"
"I believe I did; but in looking back upon such moments as those one does not know whether one was feeling or speaking." She looked out into the long valley. She stood like one who is about to sing, with lifted head and open mouth, listening for the music before it sounds. But it was not so: it was the sound of bygone music that she heard.
A little while afterwards she said quite softly—the daughter was obliged to draw nearer to her, for the sound of the river swallowed up some of the words:
"Now you shall hear something, Magne; you have never heard it from me, and others are not likely to have told you."
"What is it, mother? You almost frighten me."
"At the time I met your father I was already engaged."
"What do you say? You, mother?"
"Yes, I was engaged, and was to be married; and it was my last month with the Queen. The engagement had taken place, and was to be carried out with the highest sanction."
"But to whom?"
"Ah, that is it! Didn't I tell you before, that at the time I met your father I was in absolute despair?"
"You, mother? No."
"I did not believe that life had anything to offer, or that I had anything to wait for. Most girls who arrive at the age of twenty-eight without anything having happened to them, anything that is worth rousing themselves for, believe that nothing is worth caring about. The age, or about that age, is the most perilous."
"How do you mean?"
"That is when most girls come to despair."
She took her daughter's arm, which she pressed, and so they walked on together.
"I must confess it all to you"—but there she stopped.
"Who was it, mother?" She said it so softly that her mother didn't hear, but she knew what it was.
"It was some one for whom you have but small respect, my child. And you are right."
"My uncle?"
"How did that occur to you?"
"I don't know. But was it he?"
"Yes, it was. Yes, I see you don't understand it. I never understood it myself, either. Think of your father, and of him! And just about the same time, too. What do you think of me? But, oh! take care of yourself, my child."
"Mother?"
"Well, well—you have a mother, and I had none. And I was at Court, and, as I told you, at the perilous age when nothing seems worth caring about any longer. Of course I, too, had been playing the same game that I have been looking on at to-day, but not with your aptitude. Yes, you may turn away your face. I had come to feel a certain disgust with life—for myself among the rest—and so I went on refusing people till it was too late in the day."
"But—with my uncle!" Magne broke out again.
"We looked upon him differently at that time. But I don't want to go into all that again now. I will only admit that it was horrible. So you may think what you like about it—I mean as to how it came about."
The daughter took her arm away and looked at her mother.
"Yes, Magne, we don't always do as we mean to do, and I have told you I was at the perilous age. And so you can understand how I felt when I saw your father—there was something more than pettiness and frivolity in me after all."
"But the others, mother! How could you put it in the proper light to the others, to the Court, to our relations, to my uncle, and all his people? Surely there must have been a fuss and a scandal that you had to hold up your head against?"
"Wait, Magne, we will let all that alone till later. There were no 'others' at all! Some fishermen had seen us, and they had taken measures to find out who I was. Before it was known I had gone away, and within one month I was his wife. I had fallen into the hands of a man who did things thoroughly and at once. He was too simple to conceive any other way than to go straight forward. So it took place without any obstacles."
"And what did people say? Was it a good thing for my father—I mean in people's opinion—that he had married you?"
"You mean that he should marry a maid of honour?" she smiled. "Do you know what people said of it? Why, Karl Mander had publicly maligned the Queen—one of her maids of honour had heard him, and a month after she had eloped with him. That was about it. She had chosen the roughest man in the country. That was what people said."
"Naturally."
"A year after a tourist wrote in a newspaper that he had seen the runaway maid of honour standing at the washing-tub. Ha, ha! It was true enough for that matter. You had come, then, and it was harvest-time, and I was obliged to lend a hand. We both did."
"Mother, mother, what was he like at home? When you were together, I mean? Wasn't it perfect? It must have been the greatest and best thing the world had to give? Mother, mother, all my life I must be grateful to you for having treasured this up for me till now, for before I should not have understood it."
"Yes, isn't it so? Such things cannot be told to a child, nor to a half-grown girl. But I am not telling you, now, only for the sake of telling you. You ask how things were when we were together. Picture him to yourself first. An unselfish, devoted nature that was very little understood, by some few perhaps, in a way, but even by them not adequately. The result was that when he believed he had found sympathy, he poured himself out so unrestrainedly that people laughed at him. If he were in company he drank, or rather was made to drink, until he was tipsy, and so let his untamable nature take the bit in its teeth. Do you know—yes, I must tell you this. At a party a lady (she is now married to the captain here) set to work to draw him out for the amusement of the others. She was very bright and witty; she appeared to be entirely carried away by him, so that she could not listen to him enough, could not question him enough, and all the while poured more and more wine into his glass. She drank with him; she made all the others drink with him."
"Good heavens, mother!"
"Do you know where it all ended? In the cowhouse. They locked him into the cowhouse by himself. His frenzy of rage brought on a nervous attack. She it was whom he saw from the window as he stood on the platform that day. It was then he became sober."
The mother and daughter walked on in silence.
"You knew nothing of all this at that time, did you, mother?—not until later?"
"No; if I had known it, I believe I should have gone straight up to him, taken him by the hand, and greeted him with all my heart."
"I should too, mother!"
"Since my life with him I have thought a great deal. Do you know, I believe geniuses have this characteristic of confiding impulsiveness, and therefore the people and conditions that surround them are of all the greater importance. But most important of all is it that they should have a woman's help. And, according to the nature of that help, so things go with them. Karl Mander had got into the habit of speaking in monologues. He got on best among peasants. They disturbed him least. Books, meditations, farming, bathing, and now and then an orgie, a speech, or, for preference, one on top of the other—that had been his life up to then."
"But he didn't drink, mother? There was no need for him to drink, was there?"
"No more need than for you or for me. It was simply an outburst of mere high spirits, or repressed longing for happiness. So the last time——"
"Yes, that time! Oh, why were you not there?"
"You had come to us then, my child, and I could not; I was nursing you at my breast. The whole thing would have gone off happily, if some one at the banquet after the meeting had not been so imprudent as to propose my health! Then he let himself go! There was the theme of themes, and he had never unbosomed himself about it to any one! The toast applied the match to his inward fire; his exultant joy blazed up. He made a speech in praise of at least twenty of my characteristics, of marriage, of fatherhood. He——"
She could not go on. She sat down, her daughter by her; they were both in tears. The roar of the river swept pitilessly past them, and yet it seemed to bring them a kind of comfort. All the tears we may shed avail nothing. It goes on its way, and nothing arrests its determined course to the sea.
Through the voice of nature the whispers of memory brought back his tragic end. It came over them both again how, after the banquet, he wanted to refresh himself with a bath. How every one tried to dissuade him, but it was no use. How he sprang in from a great height, took longer and longer strokes out, as though each one of them were taking him home, was seized by cramp and sank.
"Mother, there is so much I still want to hear about your life together." Then, after a moment: "Mother, you must give me that too! Yes, you have told me so much, so very much about it. But not just the thing I want to know now! The love, mother, the devotion between you both! Mother, that must have been something too wonderful to realise."
"Beyond all comprehension, my child! Beyond all understanding! And, do you know, the calumnies that were spread about us, especially the miserable anonymous letters, all kinds of meanness, it all helped. For each time we found in each other a perfect refuge. He was not so thin-skinned in such matters as I. It was through me that he first came to understand them—how to manage the petty incidents of social life. The leaders of society in this little country are not of pure Norwegian race, but of foreign descent. A man like him could never learn to keep pace with them. But I was one of them, and, through the effect on me, he understood! When he once was started on a line of thought you can't imagine how fast he went. He was a discoverer, an investigator by nature. But when he first rightly found out what I had exposed myself to by choosing him, ah! how the thought of it spurred him on! If ever any one has been rewarded here on the earth, he rewarded me. Night and day, the whole summer, the whole autumn, the whole winter, the whole spring, we were never apart. Our life was one continued flight from the outer world, but it was a flight into Paradise. He refused all invitations; he had hardly time to speak to the people who came to see him; he would not have them in the house. He and I, and I and he, in the big rooms, and the smaller ones, he in mine or I in his. And on the country roads, in the fields, in the mountain pastures, on the lake, on the ice, working, superintending together, together always, or if we were away from each other it was but to meet again at the very earliest moment. But the more we were together the more I came to understand the wealth of his nature. What impressed me most about him was not the flow of ideas, it was the man himself. To fathom his perfect uprightness, clear to the very bottom, gave me the most glorious moments I have known. His devotion to me—or what shall I call it?—was all summed up in one image—his mighty head on my lap! There he often rested it, and always said, 'How good it is to be here!'"
And the daughter laid her head in her mother's lap and sobbed.
It began to rain. They rose and went home again. The little assembly house up by the station loomed more indistinct but more inviting through the rain. And the landscape took on a greater harmony of tints and greater friendliness; the scent from the birch-trees seemed trebled.
"Yes, my child. I believe I have given you some of his aspirations. Have I not?" She bent down towards her face.
Instead of answering, the daughter pressed closer to her.
They waited a moment before going on.
"You have a longing, yearning nature; you inherited it, and I have stimulated it in you by what I learnt from him. I have put great objects, noble men and women before you. So did he; I have plunged you into lofty thoughts, as he plunged in nature to refresh his own. I knew when I sent you away from me that I was acting in accordance with his spirit. But I knew best with what armour you were equipped: it came to you from him. And yet.... Magne!"
The daughter instinctively drew her arm from within the mother's and stood still. She needed to rest on her own strength, as it were.
"Yes, I see it; that is the third time to-day. You feel that I am taking hold upon you; and I will take hold upon you. It was at the party at your uncle's that you said to me, when I was going in to supper, 'Mother, you might as well keep on your gloves.' You were ashamed of my work-hardened hands."
"Mother, mother!" The daughter covered her face and turned away.
"I will tell you this, my child, that without these work-hardened hands you would not be what you are now; if you have lived in a society where it is considered shameful for a woman to have such hands, you have lived in an evil society. And to-day you enjoyed that society, enjoyed it as though you believed you yourself had attained a certain greatness in it."
"No, mother; no, no!"
"Yes, you did! You may perhaps have felt a pang of conscience or of fear; that may be, for I was there. But now the moment has come for you to choose; I wanted your choice to be made before you should cross the threshold of your father's house, my child. Work—or else the other thing."
"Oh, mother, you wrong me! If only you knew!"
"If I can make you love your father—and I shall do all I can, and you have capacity—if I can make you really, rightly love him, then I know all that you will be able to do. We women must love in order to have faith."