I
The Glahn family can go on advertising as long as they please for
Lieutenant Thomas Glahn, who disappeared; but he will never come back.
He is dead, and, what is more, I know how he died.
To tell the truth, I am not surprised that his people should still keep
on seeking information; for Thomas Glahn was in many ways an uncommon
and likable man. I admit this, for fairness' sake, and despite the fact
that Glahn is still repellant to my soul, so that the bare memory of him
arouses hatred. He was a splendidly handsome man, full of youth, and
with an irresistible manner. When he looked at you with his hot animal
eyes, you could not but feel his power; even I felt it so. A woman, they
say, said: “When he looks at me, I am lost; I feel a sensation as if he
were touching me.”
But Thomas Glahn had his faults, and I have no intention of hiding them,
seeing that I hate him. He could at times be full of nonsense like a
child, so kindly natured was he; and perhaps it was that which made him
so irresistible to women. God knows! He could chat with them and laugh
at their senseless twaddle; and so he made an impression. Once, speaking
of a very corpulent man in the place, he said that he looked as if he
went about with his breeches full of lard. And he laughed at that joke
himself, though I should have been ashamed of it. Another time, after we
had come to live in the same house together, he showed his foolishness
in an unmistakable way. My landlady came in one morning and asked what I
would have for breakfast, and in my hurry I happened to answer: “A bread
and a slice of egg.” Thomas Glahn was sitting in my room at the time--he
lived in the attic up above, just under the roof--and he began to
chuckle and laugh childishly over my little slip of the tongue. “A bread
and a slice of egg!” he repeated time over and over, until I looked at
him in surprise and made him stop.
Maybe I shall call to mind other ridiculous traits of his later on. If
so, I will write them down too, and not spare him, seeing that he is
still my enemy. Why should I be generous? But I will admit that he
talked nonsense only when he was drunk. But is it not a great mistake to
be drunk at all?
When I first met him, in the autumn of 1859, he was a man of
two-and-thirty--we were of an age. He wore a full beard at that time,
and affected woolen sports shirts with an exaggerated lowness of neck;
not content with that, he sometimes left the top button undone. His neck
appeared to me at first to be remarkably handsome; but little by little
he made me his deadly enemy, and then I did not consider his neck
handsomer than mine, though I did not show off mine so openly. I met him
first on a river boat, and we were going to the same place, on a hunting
trip; we agreed to go together up-country by ox-wagon when we came to
the end of the railway. I purposely refrained from stating the place we
were going to, not wishing to set anyone on the track. But the Glahns
can safely stop advertising for their relative; for he died at the place
we went to, which I will not name.
I had heard of Thomas Glahn, by the way, before I met him; his name was
not unknown to me. I had heard of some affair of his with a young girl
from Nordland, from a big house there, and that he had compromised her
in some way, after which she broke it off. This he had sworn, in his
foolish obstinacy, to revenge upon himself, and the lady calmly let him
do as he pleased in that respect, considering it no business of hers.
From that time onwards, Thomas Glahn's name began to be well known; he
turned wild, mad; he drank, created scandal after scandal, and resigned
his commission in the army. A queer way of taking vengeance for a girl's
refusal!
There was also another story of his relations with that young lady, to
the effect that he had not compromised her in any way, but that her
people had showed him the door, and that she herself had helped in it,
after a Swedish Count, whose name I will not mention, had proposed to
her. But this account I am less inclined to trust; I regard the first
as true, for after all I hate Thomas Glahn and believe him capable of
the worst. But, however it may have been, he never spoke himself of the
affair with that noble lady, and I did not ask him about it. What
business was it of mine?
As we sat there on the boat, I remember we talked about the little
village we were making for, to which neither of us had been before.
“There's a sort of hotel there, I believe,” said Glahn, looking at the
map. “Kept by an old half-caste woman, so they say. The chief lives in
the next village, and has a heap of wives, by all accounts--some of them
only ten years old.”
Well, I knew nothing about the chief and his wives, or whether there was
a hotel in the place, so I said nothing. But Glahn smiled, and I thought
his smile was beautiful.
I forgot, by the way, that he could not by any means be called a perfect
man, handsome though he was. He told me himself that he had an old
gunshot wound in his left foot, and that it was full of gout whenever
the weather changed.