THE VISIONARY
OR
PICTURES FROM NORDLAND
BY
JONAS LIE
_TRANSLATED FROM THE NORWEGIAN_
_BY JESSIE MUIR_
WITH A PREFACE
AND
PORTRAIT OF THE AUTHOR
LONDON.
HODDER BROTHERS
1894
* * * * *
PREFACE
Until a few years ago, Norway was an unknown country to most Englishmen.
Occasionally a sportsman went there to kill salmon or to shoot reindeer,
but the fjords, glaciers, mountains, and waterfalls were quite beyond
the reach of any but the most venturesome travellers. Still less was it
supposed that Norway possessed a modern school of poets and novelists.
Wergeland, Welhaven, Munch, and Moe among the former, Björnson, Ibsen,
Kjelland, and Lie among the latter, were, as far as Englishmen were
concerned, "to fortune and to fame unknown." All this has been changed;
sportsmen now complain that it becomes more difficult every year to hire
rivers. Tourists swarm over the country from the Naze to the North Cape.
Ibsen's dramas are played in London theatres, and his novels, and those
of Björnson and Lie, are read in Germany and in France, as well as in
England and America.
These three writers are of nearly the same age. Ibsen was born in 1828,
at Skien on the south-eastern coast of Norway; Björnson in the
Dovrefjeld in 1832; and Lie at Eker, near Drammen, in 1833. Five years
after his son's birth, Lie's father was appointed sheriff of Tromsö,
which lies within the Arctic Circle, and young Jonas Lauritz Edemil Lie,
to give him his full name, spent six of the most impressionable years of
his life at that remote port. There he heard from the sailors many
strange tales of romantic adventure and of hazardous escape from
shipwreck, with the not uncommon result that he wished to be a sailor
himself. He was, therefore, sent to the naval school at Fredriksværn;
but his defective eyesight proved fatal to the realisation of his wish
and the idea of a seafaring life had to be given up. He was removed from
Fredriksværn to the Latin School at Bergen, and in 1851 entered the
University of Christiania, where he made the acquaintance of Ibsen and
Björnson. He graduated in law in 1857, and shortly afterwards began to
practise at Konsvinger, a little town in Hamar's Stift between Lake
Miosen and the frontier of Sweden. Clients were not numerous or
profitable at Konsvinger; Lie found time to write for the newspapers and
became a frequent contributor to some of the Christiania journals.
Meantime, Ibsen and Björnson were becoming famous in Norway, and in 1865
Lie, perhaps in a spirit of emulation, decided to abandon law for
literature. His first venture was a volume of poems which appeared in
1866 and was not successful. During the four following years he devoted
himself almost exclusively to journalism, working hard and without much
reward, but acquiring the pen of a ready writer and obtaining command of
a style which has proved serviceable in his subsequent career. In 1870
he published "The Visionary,"--"Den Fremsynte"--of which a translation
is now, for the first time, offered to English readers. In the following
year he revisited Nordland and travelled into Finmark. Having obtained a
small travelling pension from the Government, immediately after his
journey to Nordland, he sought the greatest contrast he could find in
Europe to the scenes of his childhood and started for Rome. For a time
he lived in North Germany, then he migrated to Bavaria, spending his
winters in Paris. In 1882 he visited Norway for a time, but returned to
the continent of Europe. His voluntary exile from his native land ended
in the spring of 1893, when he settled at Holskogen, near Christiansund.
"The Visionary" was followed in 1871 by a volume of short stories
"Fortoellinger," and during the next year by a larger and more ambitious
book, "The Three-master Future,"--"Tremasteren Fremtiden"--a realistic
sketch of life in the northern harbours of Norway. Two years later "The
Pilot and his Wife"--"Lodsen og hans Hustru"--appeared, a book in every
respect greatly in advance of its predecessors. Though written almost
entirely in an Italian village it has been justly described by an able
critic as "one of the saltiest stories ever published." It placed Lie on
a higher pedestal than he had ever before occupied, and brought him into
line with Ibsen and Björnson. "The Pilot and his Wife" made its author a
popular Norwegian writer, and as it has been translated into several
European languages--there are, I believe, two English versions--it was
the first step towards the wider reputation Lie now enjoys. His next
book was hardly a success. Leaving, happily only for a time, Norwegian
folk and Norwegian scenes, he attempted, in 1876, a drama in verse,
"Faustina Strozzi," the plot of which is derived from an incident in
modern Italian history. He returned to Norwegian subjects in "Thomas
Ross" and "Adam Schrader," published in 1878 and 1879, which deal with
life and manners in Christiania; but even here he was not quite at home
and these two novels are not of his best work. "Rutland" and "Go
Ahead!"--"Gaa paa!"--are much better, and these two stories of Norwegian
life as exhibited in the merchant navy added greatly to Lie's popularity
at home.
"The Slave for Life"--"Livsslaven"--1883, is in a different vein. The
plot is strong and the writer shows himself a keen and careful observer
of human nature. Without imputing to him any attempt at imitating
Ibsen, "The Slave for Life" certainly exhibits that pessimistic view of
existence which is at once attractive to many and repulsive to not a few
of Ibsen's readers. "The Family of Gilge,"--"Familjen paa Gilge"--is of
a somewhat similar character. Ethical objections to these stories are,
perhaps, superfluous; it must be admitted that both are popular and have
added very considerably to Lie's fame. They were followed by "A
Whirlpool"--"En Malström"--1886; "A Wedded Life"--"En Samliv"--1887;
"The Story of a Dressmaker"--"Maisa Jons"--1888; and by "The Commodore's
Daughters"--"Kommandörens Döttre"--1889, which has enjoyed the good
fortune of being translated into English with an introduction by Mr.
Edmund Gosse, a most competent Scandinavian scholar. Since 1889 Lie has
published "Evil Forces"--"Onde Magter," a volume of poetry, and two
collections of shorter stories, "Otte Fortoellinger" and "Trold." He has
recently completed another novel, which will shortly appear, and is, it
is believed, to be entitled "Niobe." Jonas Lie completed his sixtieth
year on the 6th of November last, and this interesting occasion has been
celebrated by a festival given in his honour by the students of his old
University at Christiania. A special number of _Samtiden_, a Norwegian
magazine, has also been devoted to a series of articles on his life and
literary work.
The present volume, as has already been said, is a translation of Lie's
first story. His literary style is at times very colloquial, and his
sentences are often of great length, running on for ten, fifteen, or
even twenty lines without a full stop. The difficulty of rendering such
a mass of words into English prose without sacrificing the meaning, and
of maintaining the easy familiarity of the conversation has been fairly
overcome by the translator. The story is simple as compared with some of
Lie's later productions, but it will always be interesting, not only in
itself but as the earliest production of Norway's most popular novelist.
Ibsen and Björnson may be better known in England, in America, and on
the Continent of Europe, but Jonas Lie is dearer to the Norwegian heart.
He has laid the scene of "The Visionary" in Nordland, the home of his
childhood, the last district of Norway to receive the faith of
Christendom, and even now the abode of superstitions which have survived
centuries of Christian teaching. Except along the coast, and there towns
and villages are few and far between, Nordland is very sparsely occupied
by men of Norwegian birth. Fins and Laplanders wander over the interior
during the brief summer, and have, to some extent, intermarried with the
Norwegians on the coast, who are chiefly fishermen and sailors. The
seafaring life of the people and the slight intermixture of Fin and Lap
blood have not tended to lessen their superstitions, and, doubtless,
young Lie heard many a strange tale of sea-goblins and land-spirits as
he wandered in his boyhood along the quay and in the streets of Tromsö.
Many of the impressions he then received have contributed to the tragic
interest of "The Visionary." For "The Visionary" is a tragedy in which
resistless Fate hurries its victims to destruction. The hero, David
Holst, is one of those unhappy beings who seem doomed to a more than
ordinary share of the ills of life. He has inherited from his mother at
least a tendency to insanity, and he lives in fear of being involved in
a terrible catastrophe, from which he only saves himself by strong
efforts of will and by the recollection of the lost love of his youth.
The awful calamity which overtook him at the very moment his betrothal
to Susanna was sanctioned by her father proved, in fact, his salvation,
and delivered him from madness, but its effects were never eradicated.
Like Hamlet he found the times out of joint; but, instead of contending
with them, he patiently submitted to Fate and won for himself, if not
absolute peace, at least a certain amount of tranquillity. Throughout
his life he was subject to visions. In his earliest days the appearance
of a lady carrying a white rose marked the near approach of calamity. In
later life a vision of his beloved Susanna was sometimes vouchsafed to
him, and as he lay on his death-bed she came, after a long interval, as
if beckoning him to join her.
The other characters of the story are naturally drawn. David's stern,
yet not unkind father; the minister and his wife; the old clerk, and
Susanna herself, will soon make themselves known to the reader. The
refusal of Susanna to give up David when she learns that his doctor
fears he may become insane, and her victory over her father's objections
to her engagement, are proofs of Lie's insight into the depth and
steadfastness of the love of a good woman. The story of her death, of
the bringing home her body in the boat, and of the scene in the
death-chamber, are full of pathos, and are told with the simplicity of a
great artist.
"The Visionary" is written in the spirit of a true Nordlander, who is
ever contrasting life and nature in the south of Norway with life "up
there" at home, and with the more varied aspects of nature in Nordland.
The vivid description of the great storm are evidently impressions and
recollections of actual experience. Before he became an author Lie had
often mused
"On Man, on Nature, and on Human Life,"
and the first results of these musings were given to the world in "The
Visionary."
J.A.J.H.
* * * * *
CONTENTS
PART
I.--INTRODUCTION
II. NORDLAND AND NORDLANDERS
III. CHAP.
I.--HOME
II.--ON THE SHORE
III.--THE SERVANTS' HALL
IV.--AMONG THE VÆTTE ROCKS
V.--CONFIRMATION
VI.--AT THE CLERK'S
VII.--TRONDENÆS
VIII.--AT HOME
IX.--THE CHRISTMAS VISIT
X.--THE STORM
XI.--CONCLUSION
* * * * *
PART I
INTRODUCTION
* * * * *
INTRODUCTION
I know many people who have felt the same inclination that sometimes
comes over me, to choose bad weather to go out in. They are generally
men who have passed from a childhood lived in the open air of the
country, to an occupation which entails much sitting still, and for whom
the room sometimes seems to become too narrow and confined--or else they
are poets. Their recollection and imagination live, more or less unknown
to themselves, in a continual longing to get away from the confined air
of a room, and the barrack-life of a town.
So one day when the country comes into the town in the shape of a
downright storm of wind and rain, which shakes the tiles on the roofs,
and now and then flings one after you, while the streets become rivers,
and every corner an ambush from which the whirlwind makes a sudden
attack upon your umbrella, and, after a more or less prolonged and
adroit struggle, tears it, and turns it inside out, until at last you
stand with only the stick and the ribs left in your hand--at such a
time, it now and then happens that a quiet, dignified civil servant, or
business man, instead of sitting at home, as usual, in the afternoon in
his comfortable room after the day's toil in the office, says to his
wife that he "is sorry he must go out into the town for a little while."
And what he unfortunately must go out for is, of course, "business." For
little would it become a sedate, grave man, perhaps an alderman, and one
of the fathers of the town, to acknowledge, even to himself, that he is
childish enough to go and wander about in bad weather, that he only
wants to walk down to the quay to see the spray dash over the bitts, and
to watch the ships in the harbour playing at shipwreck. He must, of
course, have something to do there; if nothing else, at any rate to see
"ne quid detrimenti capiat respublica"; that is to say, that the town,
whose welfare, in one way or another, it is his business to look after,
is not blown down.
The fact is, there is a revolution in the streets--not a political
revolution, Heaven preserve him from that--but one which has an
attraction for him, because it awakens all his old recollections, and in
which, much to his disgrace, he contrives surreptitiously to join,
although, in its own way, it too defies all police arrangements, breaks
windows, puts out street-lamps, tears the tiles from the house-roofs,
damages piers and moorings, and chases police and watchmen into their
holes. It is Nature's loud war-cry, in the very midst of the civilised
town, to all the recollections of his childhood, to his imagination and
his love of Nature; and he obeys it like an old trumpeter's horse that
hears the signal of his youth, and instantly leaps the fence.
After an hour or two out in the storm, the fire in his veins is subdued,
and home he comes once more a quiet, grave man, carefully puts his stick
and goloshes in their accustomed places in the hall, and is pitied by
his wife, who has been anxious about him, and is now helping him off
with his wet things. Strange to say, he himself, in spite of adverse
circumstances, is in capital spirits that evening, and has such a number
of things to tell about this storm--every thing of course, as becomes
the occasion, in the form of anxiety lest damage should be done, or fire
break out in the town.
It was in such weather that I--a practising doctor, and having, as such,
good reason, both on my own account and on that of others, for being out
at all times of the day or night--one rainy, misty, stormy October
afternoon, roamed the streets of Kristiania, finding pleasure in letting
the rain dash in my face, while my mackintosh protected the rest of my
person.
Darkness had gradually fallen, and the lighted gas-lamps flared in the
gusty wind, making me think of the revolving lights on a foggy night
out on the coast. Now and again an unfastened door swung open and shut
again, with a bang like a minute gun. My inward comment on these
occasions was that, even in our nervous times, there must still be an
astonishing number of people without nerves; for such bangs thunder
through the whole house right up to the garret, as a gust fills the
passage, and doors fly open and shut, shut and open; everybody feels the
discomfort, but no one will take the trouble to go down and fasten the
origin of the evil; the porter is out in the town, and as long as he is
away the inmates must put up with an absence of all domestic comfort.
It was just such an unfastened, unweariedly banging door that led to
what I have to relate.
As I passed it, I heard a voice, which seemed familiar to me, an old
beloved voice--though at first I could not recall where I had heard
it--calling impatiently to the porter. It was on the subject of the
banging door. The man was evidently the only nervous individual in that
house; at any rate, the porter was not, for he appeared to be quite
wanting in feeling both for his door and for the man who had interested
himself in it, and was now fumbling in vain with a latch-key, which did
not appear to fit.
At last the porter came out of his subterranean hole, and it was during
a little altercation between the now placable and gentle voice, sorry
for its previous irritability, and the growling porter, that with all
the power of an awakened recollection I recognised my old friend of
student-days, David Holst, with whom I had lived three of the richest
years of my youth.
"If that is you, David, you must let me in before you lock the door!" I
cried, just as I should have done in the good old days, twenty years
before.
The door opened wide, and a warm shake of the hand from the dark
advancing form, told me that he had not needed to search so long through
the chambers of his memory as I, but had recognised me at once.
"Follow me!" were his only words, and then we mounted silently, he in
front and I behind, up the dark stairs, one, two, three floors and one
considerably narrower flight above. There he took my hand to guide me--a
very necessary proceeding, for, as far as I could make out, the way led
across a dark loft, hung with clothes-lines. He told me, too, to bend my
head.
As I mounted I drew my own conclusions. His hand--I remembered that in
old days he used to be rather proud of it--was damp, perhaps with mental
agitation, and he sometimes stopped as if to take breath. The narrow
garret-stairs whispered to me too, that my friend David, who in his
time had given promise of good abilities, could not have made great use
of them for his own worldly advancement.
He opened a door and bade me go in first.
Upon a table stood a lamp, whose shade concentrated the light round its
foot, in a circle of scarcely more than half a yard's radius, upon an
inkstand and papers which lay there, leaving the ends of the table in
apparent darkness. Behind the table was what looked like a black grave,
which, however, when the eye became accustomed to the abrupt transition
from light to shadow, revealed itself as a sofa, before which stood an
almost correspondingly long, painted, wooden table with square ends.
When two old friends meet in such a way, there is often, under their
frank manner, a secret shyness to overcome; for there is a layer of the
different experiences of many years that has to be cleared away.
After a short pause, my friend, as if with a sudden resolve, went
quickly up to the table and took the shade off the lamp, so that the
whole room became light.
"You see," said he, "things are just the same with me as in the old
days, only that there are now two garret windows instead of one, a few
more shelves with books, and a rather better monthly salary, which I
get by combining a teachership in one of the lower-class schools here,
with an easy post on a daily paper. It is all I need, you see. I moved
here from Bergen this spring, and ought properly to have paid you a
call, but have not yet managed it; when I have seen you in the street,
you have always looked as if you were too much taken up with your
practice. But now that I have you in my den, we will have a chat about
old times, and what you are doing. Take off your coat, while I go down
and see about getting some toddy made." Whereupon he replaced the lamp
shade, and disappeared through the doorway.
My friend's somewhat forced introductory speech did not seem natural to
me; it was as though, in his ready confidence, he were regulated rather
by my circumstances than by his own, and the whole thing gave me the
impression that at the outset he would parry all unnecessary questions.
As yet I, at least, had not said a word; indeed, I had not seen more of
my friend than a brief glimpse of his face, as he turned towards the
lamp and replaced the shade. Still I recognised, in spite of the
difference in age, the same thin, delicate, pale face, which, in the old
days, would sometimes assume such a beautiful, melancholy expression--it
was with that he was always photographed in my memory--but the features
had now acquired a striking sharpness, and in the quick glance I caught
there was an expression, both suffering and searching, which made me
indescribably sad. I have seen sick people look at me in the same way,
when they were afraid they were to be operated upon; and I thought I now
understood at any rate this much, that what wanted operating on here was
my friend's confidence, and this would require all my dexterity.
I was once the most confiding fellow under the sun; but since I became a
doctor and saw what people really are, I have become thoroughly
suspicious; for there is nothing in the whole world you may not have to
presuppose, even with the best of mortals, if you do not want to be
misled as to the cause of their disease. I suspect everybody and
everything, even, as the reader has seen above, those sedate men who go
out in stormy weather. An Indian does not steal more unperceived and
noiselessly through a primeval forest than I, when necessary, into my
patient's confidence; and my friend David had all at once become my
patient. He would scarcely succeed in deceiving _me_ any longer with his
talk about "old days" and a glass of punch in his "unchanged student's
den."
My first strategem was now hastily to continue the inspection of the
room, which my friend had somewhat cursorily allowed me to begin. I
took the lamp and began to look about me.
Under the sloping ceiling, against the wall opposite the sofa, was the
bed, with a little round table beside it. On some bookshelves, which
stood on the floor against the wall in the corner at the foot of the
bed, I recognised Henrik Wergeland's bust, even more defective about the
chin and nose than in my time, and now, in addition, blind in one eye;
he had fared almost as badly as the old pipe I used to smoke, which I
recognised again, in spite of its being cut and hacked in every
direction. For my friend had a habit of cutting marks in it while he sat
smoking, now and then throwing a word into the conversation to keep it
going, just as one throws fuel on a fire--it was the spirit of the
conversation, and that something should be said, rather than the thought
itself, he cared about. When sitting thus, his face often wore a
melancholy, peaceful expression, as if he were smiling at something
beautiful we others did not see.
Between the bed and the shelves I discovered some bottles, ordinary
spirit bottles, and the suspicion flashed like lightning through my
mind--I have, as I said, become suspicion personified, not naturally,
but through disappointment--that my friend was perhaps given to drink.
I put the lamp down upon the floor. In one bottle was ink, in the
second paraffin, and in the third, a smaller one, cod-liver oil, which
he probably took for his chest.
I remembered his clammy hand, his stopping, and heavy breathing on the
stairs, and I felt thoroughly ashamed that I could have been such a
wretch as to think the dear friend, I might also say ideal, of my youth,
was no better than any scamp in vulgar life, who positively ought to be
suspected.
I offered him, in silence, a penitent apology, while I read over the
titles on the backs of the books, recognising one and another. These
shelves seemed to be the bookshelves of his student days. I drew out a
thick volume, old "Saxo Grammaticus," which I remembered to have bought
at an auction, and presented to him; but now I found something quite
different to think about.
It happened with me as with a man who draws out a brick and suddenly
finds a secret passage--I all at once felt myself at the entrance to my
friend's secret, though, as yet, only before a deep, dark room through
which my imagination might wander, but which I could not really see,
unless my friend himself held the light for me.
What thus attracted my attention and rivetted my thought and
recollection to the spot, was no hole, but the head of a violin, with a
dusty neck, and a tangle of strings about the screws which was stuck up
at the back of the shelf. The fourth string hung loosely down; the
over-stretched, broken first had curled up, and under the two whole
strings the bridge lay flat, as I ascertained by taking several books
out of the row and feeling for it. I examined the violin, which I could
easily remove, as carefully as if I had found a friend ill and starving;
there was an unmended crack in the body. Enchained by old memories, I
could not help falling into a very sad frame of mind.
I put the books on the shelves again, replaced the lamp on the table,
and sat myself on the sofa, where puffing away at the pipe (I found on
it among others my own initials, cut by myself) I gave myself up to
reflections, which I will here impart to the reader even at the risk of
his thinking my friend is rather a long time getting the punch. Through
these reflections he will stand before the reader, as he did before my
mind's eye in the light of youthful recollections, and as the reader
must know him, if he will understand him.
Our acquaintance as students arose naturally from the fact that we were
both from Nordland. He was three or four years older than I, and his
being the trusted though anonymous theatrical reviewer on the H---- paper,
was enough of itself to give him, in my eyes, an official superiority,
before which I bowed.
But what worked still more strongly upon my youthful imagination was
his manner. There was something unusually noble about his slender figure
and his delicate, oval-shaped, earnest face, with the high forehead and
the heavy masses of dark, curly hair on the temples. His strongly-marked
eyebrows and a decided Roman nose drew one's attention away from his
eyes, which were light blue, and more in keeping with his pale and
beardless face than with his more energetic features. But yet it was his
eyes that gave one the first impression of him. I learned later to read
his features differently, and to see that in them was reflected the
meeting of the currents of that twofold nature by which his life was
gradually crushed out.
A sweet smile when he talked and a reserved manner gave him a
distinguished air, which at any rate impressed me greatly. He was the
only student I knew who did not wear a student's cap; he used to wear a
flat blue sailor's cap with a short peak, which suited him very well.
When he became eager, as might happen in a dispute--for he was a great
logician, though it was only his intellect that took part in a
discussion, and never, as far as I could see, his heart or his deeper
feelings--his voice would give way; it became overstrained and harsh, as
if from a weak chest. Such encounters always told upon him, and left him
in irritable restlessness for some time after.
One of his peculiarities was that he sometimes went on walking tours of
several days out in the country, both in summer and winter.
Companionship he would never hear of. Had he wished for it, he would
have asked me I knew, and therefore I never thought of forcing myself
upon him.
On these occasions he would set off without a knapsack; I noticed this
once when I happened to be roaming in the fields two or three miles [A
Norwegian mile is about seven English miles.] from a town, where I had
gone on a visit. When he came home again, he would be in capital
spirits, but before setting out he was always so silent and melancholy
that I had to sustain nearly the whole burden of the conversation. He
used to have periods of low spirits.
One indication of these moods was his manner in playing on the violin I
had now found with broken strings, at the back of his bookshelf. As it
lay there, it recalled the incidents of twenty years ago.
This violin he once held in high esteem; it had the place of honour on
his wall, with the bow beside it. It had been left him by a friend, an
old clerk, [Norw. "klokker," almost answering to the Scotch precentor,
but a klokker, in addition to leading the singing in church, has to read
the opening prayer and to assist the priest in putting on his
vestments.] at his home up in the north, who had taught him to play,
and had evidently been one of those musical geniuses who are never fully
appreciated in this world.
David loved to give play to his fancy, not only upon this violin--he had
a good ear, and had learnt not a little--but also about it: where it
really came from, and how old it might be? He would exceedingly have
liked an indistinct mark inside to mean that it was "possibly a
Cremona"; it was one of his weak points, and this room for conjecture
was evidently, in his eyes, one of the excellences of the violin.
David had a small collection of what he called classical music, long
compositions which he played from the notes. They were not much to my
fancy, and always struck me as being of a piece with what was strange in
his manner when he posed as a logician. When he played them it was more
like severe, mental, school exercise than anything his heart was in; and
he played as correctly as he argued or wrote.
The times when classical music and critical conversations ruled in his
room, were certainly those in which he felt his mind most in balance. He
was less hearty in manner then, even towards me.
But then would come times when the music-stand would remain in the
corner. He would sit for a long time looking straight before him, as if
lost in thought, and then give expression to his feeling, on his violin,
in all kinds of fantasies, which pleased my uncultivated ear far more
than his so-called classical music.
He sometimes played a variety of small pieces, and then gradually sank
into his own peculiar minor strain, and sometimes into a wonderfully sad
melody. I very seldom heard him play anything right through, and then
always in a kind of self-forgetfulness. At such times, I had a feeling
that he was confiding to me something beautiful that he had lost, and
over which he could never cease to mourn.
At a later period of our friendship he became, as I have said, more
irregular in his habits, and was seldom to be found at home; he would
sometimes talk ironically about his comrades, the professors and things
in general, and his sarcasm was almost biting.
I was privileged to take my friend's key, and go into his room, even
when he was not at home. If his violin hung uncared for, I knew that
something was wrong, and that his own condition answered to that of his
instrument. The first thing he did, when all was right again, was
carefully to put it in order.
But never during those times had I seen his treasure so badly treated
and neglected as when twenty years later, I found it again, dusty and
cracked at the back of the bookshelf. The reader will now be able to
understand how sorrowful were the reflections it aroused, and how it led
me to suspect the story of a joyless life; and I trust he will forgive
me for having taken him so far from David Holst's room--where I sat and
waited for my friend to come with the punch--into the land of my
youthful recollections. For three years we had been together almost
daily. After that David had to go out as tutor, and our ways parted, as
they so often do in this life.
And this evening we had met again.
There was a jingling in the passage, and immediately after David Holst
carefully opened the door for a servant-girl, who brought in a steaming
jug of hot water and other requisites for punch, which were most welcome
to a man who had been out several hours in the wind and rain, as I had
that very afternoon.
David found me installed on the sofa with his pipe in my mouth and his
slippers on my feet, just as he would have done in the old days, and
this I reckoned as one of my cunning artifices; for with these passes,
his pipe and slippers, I reinstated myself, without more ado, on the old
friendly footing. I felt like a general who is fortunate enough to open
the campaign by occupying a whole province.
In default of his accustomed place on the sofa, David drew a chair up
to the table and sat down opposite to me, with the punch tray between
us.
We were now once more on the banks of the same river of delight, in
which we had so often bathed and tumbled in our youth; but now we both
approached it more carefully.
In the course of conversation, he often leaned over towards me, as if
listening, and in this way his head came within the region of the lamp's
bright light. I then noticed that his hair was much thinner, and
sprinkled rather plentifully with grey, and that the perspiration stood
in beads on his no longer unwrinkled brow. His pallid, sharp-featured
face, and a strange brilliancy in his eyes, told me that either his
physical or his mental being hid an underground fire, perhaps no longer
quenchable. Thinking from his repeated fits of coughing, that his
bending over towards me arose quite as much from the fact that he was
tired and was trying to rest against the edge of the table, as from his
interest in the conversation, I determined to enter at once upon the
question of the state of his health, and thus put myself in possession
of yet another important outwork of his confidence.
I rose suddenly, determined and serious, and said that, as an
experienced doctor, I unfortunately saw that he was ill in no such
slight degree as he perhaps thought, and that, as he was evidently weak
and languid--as the drops of perspiration on his forehead showed--he
must, at any rate, at once seat himself on the comfortable sofa I had
hitherto occupied.
He acknowledged that going twice downstairs had been rather too much for
him--the first time he had only gone down to put an end to the
uncomfortable draught through the house--and willingly took his place on
the sofa at my desire.
It was his chest, he said. By the help of the stethoscope, I found that
this was only too true. His chest, indeed, was in such a condition that
it was only a question of gaining time, not of saving life; for one lung
was entirely gone, and the other seriously affected.
During the remainder of the evening, both he and I felt ourselves
re-established on the old footing, my authority as doctor now giving me
a slight superiority.
At nine o'clock, I declared that he must go to bed, and I told him that
the next morning I intended to come again, and prescribe what was
needful. I heard he was not to be at school before eleven: until that
hour he promised me not to go out.
When I came home, I found my wife in great anxiety about me. She could
not conceive how a sensible man, and a doctor into the bargain, who gave
others such good advice, could be out more than was necessary in such
dreadful weather; and I had been out in it the whole time since dinner.
There was nothing to be said to this, and I only considered, while she
talked, how I could best win her over to the cause which I now had at
heart. My wife had not the slightest acquaintance with my dying friend,
and, if I knew her aright, might even feel hurt when I told her that he
had, in a way, possessed my affection before I knew her.
Things turned out as I foresaw; for it was only after a rather doubtful
pause that she came up to me, and said that my best friend should of
course be dear to her.
And from that moment no one could have been more helpful than she.
Whatever she undertakes, she always does thoroughly, and she settled
that very evening how the matter should be arranged.
At ten the next morning I was up in my friend's room with my wife, and I
introduced her to him, saying that she wished to be regarded as an old
friend like myself. I told him, as consolingly as I could--but when I
said it, my wife looked away--that his illness absolutely required that
he should put himself under treatment for six months, until the warm
weather came and completed his cure, and that I hoped he would consent
to let me arrange matters at the school for him.
He was evidently both surprised and touched. Life had not offered him
friendship, he said; he was so little used to accept it, even when it
came to him as true and good as this was. After a little parleying, he
surrendered at discretion to my wife, who never liked being defeated.
He would not, however, move to our house, as I suggested, for he had a
fondness for this room, and, as he frankly said, he would not feel happy
if obligations of a pecuniary nature were introduced into the matter.
From this time I visited him as a rule every morning, and generally had
a little chat about different things in the town which I thought might
interest, or at any rate divert him.
My wife treated him in her own way. Contrary to what I had been a little
afraid of, she carried out no radical revolution in his housekeeping
arrangements. That the servant-girl had her reasons for coming up to him
so often, and that every day she waited in fear and trembling my wife's
quiet inspection whether the room were properly dusted and in order, he
could have no suspicion.
The only thing that my wife openly effected, was the sending of all
kinds of strengthening food. One of the children often went with the
maid who took these, and it sometimes amused and entertained him, to
keep the child with him for a while.
This new and unaccustomed state of affairs seemed at first to divert
him; but in the course of a month he began to be depressed again. Our
visits evidently troubled him, and, for this reason, were discontinued
for a time. He spent almost the whole day on the sofa at the dark end of
the room.
One evening the girl said she had heard a sound as of crying and sobbing
in his room, so she did not go in, but remained standing outside. A
little while after it seemed to her as if he were praying earnestly, but
she did not understand the words. The next evening she heard him playing
a soft melody, as if on a violin which did not give a clear sound.
The following morning when I came to him his mood was entirely changed,
and to my surprise I saw that his violin, dusted and with strings in
order, but still cracked, hung on the wall with the bow beside it. On
the table, by the bed, I noticed too an old Bible that I had never
before seen, probably because this treasure had always been kept in his
drawer as a sacred thing.
He looked more languid and worn out than usual; but his face wore a
beatified expression, as of a man who had wrestled with his fate, and
had won rest and resignation.
If possible, he said, he would like to speak to my wife that same
morning; but he would rather talk with me at once, and so I must sit
down for a little while.
With a smile--that same quiet, sweet, mysterious smile of his that I
knew so well, but which now seemed no longer to shun observation--he
turned to me saying, as he laid his hand on my shoulder and looked into
my face:
"My dear, kind Frederick! I know for certain, though I cannot tell you
why, that I shall not live to see the spring again. What is wanting
neither you nor any one else can give me, only God; but of all men you
have been the kindest to me, and your friendship has reached farther
than you would ever imagine. You have a right to know him who has been
your friend. When I am gone--and that will undoubtedly be this winter,
perhaps sooner than you, judging from my condition, think--you will find
some memoranda in my drawer; they are the history of my early youth, but
uneventful as that was, it has had its effect upon my whole life. It
will tell you that the world has been sad, very sad for me, and that I
am as glad as an escaped bird to leave it."
"There was a time," he added after some hesitation, "when I wished to be
buried in a churchyard up in Nordland; but now I think that the place
does not make any difference, and that one can rest just as peacefully
down here."
Saying which, he pressed my hand, and asked me to go for my wife.
When she came, she was surprised to see him brighter and in better
spirits than she had ever thought he could be. He wanted, he said, to
ask a favour of her. It was a whim of his; but, if he should be called
away, she must promise him to plant a wild rose upon his grave next
spring.
My wife understood how sad the request was when I told her what had
already passed; for David had looked so confident and bright when he was
talking to her, that the sorrowful element was absent.
My friend's prophecy about himself proved to be only too true. Though
his mood grew constantly brighter, so that he sometimes even had a gleam
of the joy of living, his illness went in the opposite direction, always
toward the worst.
One day I found him lying and watching from his bed--where he now spent
nearly the whole day--my little Anton, who had "made a steamboat" out of
his old violin-case--of which the lid was gone--and was travelling with
it on the floor, touching at foreign ports. When I came up to the bed,
David told me, smiling, that he had been at home in Nordland playing on
the beach again.
My wife had, meantime, become more and more his sick-nurse. She was with
him two or three times a day, and sat at his bedside. He often held her
hand, or asked her to read him something out of his old Bible. The
portions he chose were generally those in which the Old Testament
speaks of love and lovers. He dwelt especially on the story of Jacob and
Rachel.
My wife, who had now become very fond of him, confided to me one day
that she was sure she knew what my friend was suffering from; it was
certainly nothing but unrequited love.
She had never thought any one could look so touchingly beautiful as he
did, when death was near. When he lay still and smiled, it was as though
he were thinking of a tryst he should go to, as soon as he had done with
us here on earth.
One evening he asked my wife to sit with him. At nine o'clock a message
came for me; but when I got there, he was gone.
He had asked my wife to read to him, for the first time, a part of
Solomon's Song, where she found an old mark in his Bible. It was the
second chapter, in which both the bride and the bridegroom speak, and
which begins: "I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valley"; and
ends: "Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved,
and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains of Bether."
He had asked her to read it a second time, but during the reading he had
quietly fallen asleep.
And there he lay, beautiful in death, with a peaceful smile, as though
he were greeting just such a grove, on the other side of the mountains
of Bether.
Next summer there stood a wooden cross, and a blooming, wild briar-rose,
on a grave in one of the churchyards of the town. There rests my friend
David Holst.
* * * * *
As a beginning of the story of my friend's life, I found, laid aside, a
section, part of which seems to have been added at a riper age. It shows
with what strong ties nature had bound him to his home, and with what
affection he clung to it.
* * * * *
PART II
NORDLAND AND NORDLANDERS
* * * * *
NORDLAND AND NORDLANDERS
In so far as a man like myself, who lives in such a sad reality, dare
talk of illusions--how great, and what a number of illusions I have had
shattered, during the two or three years since I left my home in
Nordland, and became a student; how grey and colourless is the world
down here, how small and mean, compared with what I had imagined it as
regards both men and conditions of life!
This afternoon, I was out fishing in the fjord with some friends; of
course they all enjoyed themselves--and I pretended that I did. No, I
did not enjoy myself! We sat in a flat-bottomed, broad, ugly boat, that
they called a "pram," a contrivance resembling a washtub, and fished the
whole afternoon in muddy water a few feet deep, with a fine line,
catching altogether seven whiting--and then rowed quite satisfied to
land! I felt nearly sick; for the whole of life down here seems to me
like this pram, without a keel, by which to shape a course, without a
sail, which one cannot even fancy could be properly set in such a boat,
without rough weather, which it could not stand, and like this muddy,
grey, waveless sea outside the town, with only a few small whiting in
it. Life here has nothing else to offer than such small whiting.
While the others talked, I sat and thought of a fishing expedition when
_she_ was with me, out among the Vætte Rocks at home, in our little
six-oared boat--what a different kind of day, what a different kind of
boat, what a different experience! Yes, how unromantic, poor and grey,
life is down here among the rich, loamy, corn-producing hills, or on the
fjord of the capital, sooty with steamboat smoke, or even in the town
itself, compared with that at home! But if I uttered this aloud, how
these superior people would open their eyes!
They talk here of fishing, and are pleased with a few poor cod and
whiting. A Nordlander understands by fishing a haul of a thousand fish;
he thinks of the millions of Lofoten and Finmark, and of an overwhelming
variety of species, of whales, spouting through the sounds, and driving
great shoals of fish before them, as well as of the very smallest
creatures of the deep. The only fish that I know down here worth
noticing--and I always look at them whenever I come across them--are the
gold and silver fish, that you keep in a glass-bowl, just as you keep a
canary in a cage: but then they are from another fairyland in the
south.
When a Nordlander speaks of birds he does not mean as they do here, only
a head or two of game, but an aërial throng of winged creatures,
rippling through the sky, flying round the rocks, like white foam, or
descending like a snowstorm on their nesting-places; he thinks of
eider-duck, guillemot, diver and oyster-catcher swimming in fjord and
sound, or sitting upon the rocks; of gulls, ospreys and eagles, hunting
in the air; of the eagle-owl, hooting weirdly at night in the
mountain-clefts--in short, he means a whole world of birds, and has a
little difficulty in confining his ideas to the poor capercailzie,
surprised and killed by a sportsman in the midst of a love-frolic, when
the sun is rising over the pine-clad hills.
Instead of the fruit-gardens here, he has the miles of cloudberry moors
at home. Instead of a poor, uniform shore with nothing but mussels, he
remembers a grand beach strewn with myriads of marvellously tinted
shells.
All natural conditions are intensified in Nordland, and are far more
powerfully contrasted than in the south of Norway. Nordland is a
boundless stone-grey waste, as it was in primæval times before man began
to build, but in the midst of this there are also countless natural
treasures; it has a sun and a summer glory, whose day is not twelve
hours only, but an uninterrupted period of three months, during which,
in many places, one must wear a mask as protection against the swarms of
mosquitoes; but, on the other hand, the night is a time of darkness and
horror, lasting nine months. Everything there is on a gigantic scale
without the gradual transitions between extremes, upon which the quiet
life here in the south is built; in other words, there are more
occasions for fancy, adventure and chance, than for calm reasoning, and
quiet activity with certain results.
A Nordlander, therefore, down here, is at first apt to feel like
Gulliver, who has come to Lilliput, and, on the whole, does not get on
well among the inhabitants, until he has screwed down his old customary
ideas to the simple proportions of their insignificant life; in short,
until he has taught himself to use his intellect, instead of his fancy.
The Lap on snow-shoes with his reindeer, the Fin, the Russian, not to
mention the constantly moving Nordlander himself, who, though slow on
land, is quick in his boat--are all undeniably far more interesting
people than the dull southern rustic, whose imagination reaches scarcely
farther than his own field, or to wondering whereabouts in the pasture
he must go to fetch his horse.
When Southerners talk about storms and waves, they mean a little bit of
a storm and rough sea in the Kristiania Fjord, which can even do a
little damage in the harbour; and they consider it deeply affecting when
a clumsy boatman is drowned. A storm suggests something very different
to my mind: a sudden down-rushing wind from the mountains, which carries
away houses--for which reason they are secured with ropes at home; waves
from the Arctic Sea, which bury high rocks and islands in foam, and roll
ground-seas of innumerable fathoms' depth, so that vessels are suddenly
dashed to pieces in the middle of the ocean; crowds of brave men sailing
for their very lives before the wind, and not for their lives only, but
also to save the dearly-won cargo for the sake of those at home, and,
even in deadly peril, trying to lend a hand to a capsized comrade; I
think of the shipwreck of countless boats and vessels on a winter
evening, in the hollows of the foaming waves. It would, for once, be
worth while to see such waves (usually three in succession, and the last
the worst) advancing with their crests higher than the custom-house
roof, and bearing on their shoulders a yacht, which has to be run
ashore, rushing into Kristiania's peaceful little harbour, carrying
ships up with them into the town, and followed by correspondingly fierce
bursts of wind, lifting off the very roofs. If they came, I know well it
would be _me_ they wanted, _me_ the poor visionary, hidden away in the
civilisation of the town, who, they consider, belongs to them; and I
think a moment after the terror I should greet them as friends from
home, although they came bearing death and destruction on their wings.
They would, for once, show to all this civilised littleness the terrible
grandeur and greatness of the mighty ocean, and flavour the insipidity
of the town with a little sea-salt terror. I should like to see a whale
squeezed in between Prince's Street and Custom-house Street, glaring at
a family on the upper floor, or the fine, gold-laced policemen trying to
bring into court a stranded sea-goblin. I should like, too, to see the
town's theatrical reviewers, who are accustomed to see "Haupt und
Statsaction" in vaudevilles twice a week, stand with their eye-glasses
to their eyes, before such a play, which, without more ado, would swamp
all their critical ideas and inkstands, and show them death and horror
in real downright earnest.
How such a reviewer would grow in ability to understand what is imposing
and powerful in a poetical composition, and in the desires it awakens,
if he only once in his life had seen the "Horseman," [A remarkable
mountain in Nordland.] on a stormy day, with its height of 1700 feet,
riding southwards out in the surf, while his cloak fluttered from his
shoulder towards the north, and, besides the giant himself in his
might, had seen, in prefect illusion, the horse's head, his ear, his
neck, his snaffle and his majestic chest.
It is up in the north that northern popular imagination, from the time
of the myths, has laid the home of a whole army of wickedness; there the
Fin folk have practised their magic arts, and woven their spells; and
there by the dark, wintry-grey breakers of the Arctic Sea, live yet the
ancient gods of evil, driven out to earth's farthest limits, those
demoniacal, terrible, half-formless powers of darkness, with whom the
Aases fought, but St. Olaf, with his victorious, dazzling, cross-hilt
sword, "turned to stock and stone."
That which can so easily be put aside as superstition, when one is
sitting safely in the middle of civilisation--and yet still lives as a
natural power in the people--is represented, on the whole, in pigmy
proportions in the south. Here they have a little terror of small
hobgoblins, good-natured fairies, a love-sick river-sprite, and so
forth, beings who with us in the north, almost go about our houses like
superstition's tame domestic animals. You have there, too, good-natured
elves, who carry on their peaceful boating and coasting trade invisibly
among the people. But then, in addition, natural terror creates a whole
host of wicked demons, who draw people with an irresistible power, the
ghosts of drowned men, who have not had Christian burial, mountain
ogres, the sea-sprite, who rows in a half boat, and shrieks horribly on
the fjords on winter nights. Many who really were in danger have let
their chance of safety go for fear of him, and the visionaries can
actually see him.
But if Nature's great power, brooding with crushing weight over life on
this wintry, surf-beat, iron-bound coast, which lies in twilight for
nine months, and for three of these altogether loses the sun, creates a
terror of darkness in the mind, yet the north also possesses in the same
extreme the exactly opposite character, a warm, sunny, summer nature,
clear-aired, heavily scented, rich with the changing beauty of countless
colours; in which objects at ten or twelve miles' distance across the
sea-mirror, seem to approach within speaking-distance; in which the
mountains clothe themselves with brownish green grass to the very
top--in Lofoten to a height of 2000 feet--in which the small birch woods
wreathe themselves up on the slopes and ravines, like white,
sixteen-year-old maidens at play; in which too the air is laden, as in
no other place, with the scent of the growing strawberries and
raspberries there, and when the day is so hot, that you are compelled to
walk in shirt-sleeves, and you are longing to bathe in the rippling sea,
always saturated with sunshine, and perfectly clear to the very bottom.
The powerful aroma and bright colour of things growing there, have been
attributed by the learned to the strong light that fills the atmosphere,
when the sun is above the horizon uninterruptedly the whole twenty-four
hours. And in no other place can such deliciously flavoured strawberries
or raspberries, nor such fragrant birch-boughs, be gathered as in
Nordland.
If there is a home for a wonderfully beautiful idyl, it must be in the
fjord-valleys of Nordland in the summer-time. It is as though the sun
kisses Nature all the more lovingly, because he knows how short a time
they have to be together, and as if they both, for the time, try to
forget that they must part so soon. Then the hill grows green as if by a
sudden miracle, and the bluebell, the dandelion, the buttercup, the
dog-daisy, the wild rose, the raspberry and the strawberry spring up in
lavish abundance, by every brook, on every hillock, on every
mountain-slope; then hundreds of insects hum in the grass as in a
tropical land; then cows, horses, and sheep are driven up the hills and
the mountain-sides, while the Fin from the highlands comes down into the
valley with his reindeer and waters them in the river; then the
cloudberry moors lie reddening for many a mile inland; then there is
quiet, sunny peace in every cottage, where the fisherman is now sitting
at home with his family, putting his tackle in order for the winter
fishing; for in Nordland the summer is more beautiful than in any other
place, and there is an idyllic gladness and peace over Nature, which is
to be found nowhere else.
The Nordlander, too, has a touch of Nature's caressing softness in his
character; when he can manage it, he is fond of living and dressing
well, and lodging comfortably; with regard to delicacies, he is a
thorough epicure. Cod's tongue, young ptarmigan, reindeer-marrow, salted
haddock, trout, salmon and all kinds of the best salt-water fish,
appropriately served with liver and roe, nourishing reindeer-meat and a
variety of game are, like the fresh-flavoured cloudberries, only
every-day dishes to him. And the Fin as well as the Nordland plebeian is
also childishly fond of all sweet things, and his "syrup and porridge"
are widely known.
Brought up in the midst of a nature so rich in contrasts and
possibilities, and amidst scenes of the utmost variety, from the wildest
grandeur to the tenderest beauty, charm and fascination, the Nordlander
is, as a rule, clever and bright, often indeed brilliant and
imaginative. Impressionable as he is, he yields easily to the impulse of
the moment. If there is sunshine in your face, there is sure to be
sunshine in his. But you must not be mistaken in him, and take his
good-nature for perfect simplicity--as is often done here in the south.
Deep in his soul there lurks a silent suspicion, unknown even to
himself, he is always like a watchful sea-fowl that dives at the flash
of the gun, and before the bullet has had time to strike the spot where
it just now lay on the water. He has been used from childhood to think
of the unexpected, the possibility of all possible things in Nature, as
a sword hanging over every peaceful, quiet hour, and he generally
carries this instinct with him in his intercourse with his
fellow-creatures. While you are talking to him, he may dive into his
mind like the sea-fowl, but you do not suspect it, and are not therefore
disconcerted. This introspection may occur while he has tears in his
eyes, and in moments when he is most deeply affected--it is his nature,
and he will always retain a dash of it, even when he has moved, with all
his belongings, from natural into civilised surroundings. He eludes you,
steals, with his imagination and his watchful suspicion, in, among, and
around your thoughts; indeed, if he is a really talented Nordlander--I
am too dull and disinterested to be able to do it--I believe that,
without your suspecting it, he can go, with his hands in his pockets,
right through your mind, in at your forehead, and out at the back of
your head. He would be invaluable as a detective or a diplomatist, if
only he had more strength of character, and succumbed with less childish
weakness to the influence of the moment; but these are unfortunately
his weak points. I am speaking now of the strong trait in the national
character as it shows itself in the more conspicuous natures, and would
not be misunderstood to mean that men of character are not to be found
in Nordland too--many a time, perhaps oftener than elsewhere, they are
hardened into something grand.
In a native Nordland family there will generally be found--such, at
least, is my belief--some drops of Fin blood. It has been remarked
elsewhere that in the Sagas, when the greatest peasant races in
Halgoland were spoken of as descended from half-trolls, or
mountain-ogres, this only meant Finnish descent. Our royal families were
of Finnish extraction, and Fin was a good-sounding name borne by the
greatest men in the land--for instance, Fin Arnesen. [One of Olaf the
Holy's most trusted men.] Harald Haarfager and Erik Blodöxe both married
Fin maidens. The mystic sense-affecting influence which has been
ascribed to them, was only the erotic expression of the great national
connection between the two differently derived elements; the
fair-haired, blue-eyed, larger-minded and quieter Norwegian, and the
dark, brown-eyed Fin, quick of thought, rich in fancy, filled with the
mysticism of nature, but down-trodden and weak in character. The Fin,
to this very day, goes as it were on snow-shoes and sings minor strains,
while many a Norwegian, in his pride of race, little suspects that he
has any connection with that despised people.
There is also, in my experience, a great difference in our national
character, which depends upon whether the crossing has taken place with
the weak Laplander, or with the well-grown, strong, bold Fin. It makes a
difference in temperament, as great as between minor and major in the
same piece of music. That touch of rich colour in our nation, of which
the poet Wergeland's endless wealth of imagery and flight beyond logic
are a representation, is certainly Finnish--at any rate, there is very
little of it in our old Sagas. And it can be understood from this, what
grandeur of nature the Fin has added to the Norwegian character. The Fin
admixture has been a great and essential factor in the composition of
the mental qualities of our people at the present day.
I have often talked with people about this Finnish admixture, which, in
a near degree, is looked upon almost as a disgrace, and I have found a
surprisingly large number who were secretly of my opinion. Finnish
admixture makes energetic, logical, bold, enterprising men; it has, to a
great extent, given a backbone to the character of our Eastland and
Trondhjem people. In Nordland, on the contrary, the Lap element is
predominant, and has in a measure altered the character of the people.
The Fin-Norwegian is master of Nordland nature; the Lap-Norwegian is
subject to it, and suffers under its oppression.
Nature's contrasts in Nordland are too great and extreme for the mind of
the race that lives there not to be exceedingly liable to receive
permanent injury from them. The extreme melancholy and sadness which is
found there in the poor man, and which so often results in mental
derangement and suicide, has most undoubtedly its connection with and
reason in these natural conditions; in the long winter darkness with its
oppressive, overwhelming scenes that crush down the mind in
light-forsaken loneliness; and in the strong and sudden impressions
that, in the dark season as well as in the light, affect all too
violently the delicate inner fibres of being. I have thought over these
things as perhaps no one else has done--thought, while I myself have
been suffering under them; and I understand--although again, when it is
a question of my own person, I do not understand it in the least--why
"second sight," _fremsynethed_ as it is called in Nordland, can there,
just as in the Shetland and Orkney Isles, make its appearance, and be
inherited in a family. I understand that it is a disease of the mind,
which no treatment, no intelligence or reflection can cure. A visionary
is born with an additional sense of sight. Beside his two sound eyes, he
has the power of looking into a world that others have only a suspicion
of, and when the occasion comes it is his doom to be obliged to use his
extraordinary power; it will not be stopped with books or by intelligent
reflection; it will not be suppressed even here in the "enlightened
capital": it can at the most only be darkened for a while with the
curtain of forgetfulness.
Ah! when I think how, at home in Nordland, I pictured to myself the
king's palace in Kristiania, with pinnacles and towers standing out
grandly over the town, and the king's men like a golden stream from the
castle court right up to the throne-room; or Akershus fortress, when the
thundering cannon announce the king's arrival, and the air is filled
with martial music and mighty royal commands; when I think how I
pictured to myself "the high hall of light," the University, as a great
white chalk mountain, always with the sunshine on its windowpanes; or
how I imagined the Storthing [Norwegian parliament] Hall, and the men
who frequent it, whose names, magnified by fancy, echoed up to us, as
though for each one there rang through the air a mighty resounding bell,
names like Foss, Sörenssen, Jonas Anton Hjelm, Schweigaard, and many
others; when I compare what I, up in the north, imagined about all this,
with the "for our small conditions--most respectable reality," in which
I now live and move--it is like a card-castle of illusions, as high as
Snehætten, [Snehætten--a mountain in the Dovre range, 7400 feet high.]
falling over me. Until I was over twenty years of age, I lived only in a
northern fairyland, and I am now for the first time born into the world
of reality: I have been spell-bound in my own fancy.
If I were to tell any one all this, he would certainly--and the more
sensible the man was the more surely--be of opinion that my good Examen
Artium [Artium--an examination to be passed before admittance to the
University is granted.] must clearly have come about by some mistake.
But if life depends on theoretical reasoning and knowledge, I have,
thank God, as good abilities as most men. And I know that in them I have
a pair of pliant oars, with which, as long as I require to do so, I
shall be able to row my boat through practical life without running
aground. The load which I have in the boat, at times so very heavy, but
then again so blissfully beautiful, no one shall see.
I feel a longing to weep away the whole of this northern fairy tale of
mine, and would do it if I could only weep away my life with it. But
why wish to lose all the loveliness, all the illusion, when I must still
bear with me to my dying day the sadness it has laid upon me?
It will be a relief to me in quiet hours to put down my recollections of
this home of mine, which so few down here understand. It is the tale of
a poor mentally-diseased man, and in it there are more of his own
impressions than of outward events.
* * * * *
PART III
* * * * *
CHAPTER I
_HOME_
My father was a country merchant, and owned the trading-place, ----ven
in West Lofoten. He was really from Trondhjem, whence he had come north,
as a destitute boy, in one of those small vessels which are sent from
that city to Lofoten, to trade during the fishing season. In his youth
he had gone through a great deal, and had even worked for a time in a
boat's crew, as a simple fisherman, until he at last got a place as
shop-boy with Erlandsen the merchant, whose son-in-law he became.
My father, in middle age, was a handsome man, black-haired and
dark-skinned, with sharp, energetic features, and in height rather short
than tall. He always wore a brown duffel, seaman's jacket, and glazed
hat. In manner he was stern, and not very accessible; it was said, too,
that he was rather a hard man--for which the severe school of life
through which he had passed was perhaps to blame. If this manner, on the
one hand, made him few friends, on the other, it gained for him a
greater confidence in business matters, in which he was prompt and
expeditious, always claiming to the utmost what he considered to be his
due. People feared him, and would not willingly be on bad terms with
him.
We have generally only flashing recollections of what has happened
before our eighth year, but these flashes last for a whole lifetime. I
have in my mind just such a picture of my poor unhappy mother. I know
her better from that than from all I have heard about her since; from
what I have been told she must have had fair hair and soft blue eyes,
have been pale and delicate, and in figure rather tall. She was also
very quiet and melancholy.
She was Erlandsen's only daughter, and was married to my father while he
was yet a subordinate in Erlandsen's service, and it was said that it
was the old man who brought about the union, thinking it the best way to
provide for her future.
I remember a warm summer day, and the mowers in their shirt-sleeves,
mowing with long scythes, out in the meadow: I was with my mother, as
she passed by them, knitting. Outside the fence lay a half-bare rocky
hill, behind which my mother had a bench. Above this on a stony heap
grew raspberry-bushes, and beside them stood a few small birch-trees.
While I was scrambling about among the stones, picking raspberries,
father called my mother.
When she had gone away, there came over to me from the other side of the
hill a tall, pale lady, who seemed older than mother, dressed in black,
with a stand-up, white, frilled collar; she looked at me very kindly,
and stretched out to me a wild rose spray she had in her hand.
I did not feel at all afraid, and it did not seem as if she were a
stranger. Then she nodded sadly to me in farewell, and went back the
same way she had come.
When mother returned I told her that such a kind, strange lady had been
there, but she must have been in great sorrow, and now she was gone.
My mother--I remember it, as if it were yesterday--stood still for a
minute, as white as a sheet, looking at me with anguish in her eyes, as
if we were both going to die, then she threw her arms above her head,
and fell fainting to the ground.
I was too frightened to cry, but I remember that, while she lay
stretched insensible on the grass by the bench, I threw myself upon her,
crying, "Mother! mother!"
A little while after I had come running to father, who stood in his
shirt-sleeves over in the meadow, mowing with the others, and had said,
sobbing, that mother was dead.
From that hour my mother was out of her mind. For many years she had to
be constantly watched in her own room, and my father must have had many
a sad hour. Afterwards she was taken to a lunatic asylum in Trondhjem,
where two years later she died, without having come to her right mind
for one moment.
The person who had the charge of me during this time was old Anne Kvæn,
a pock-marked, masculine-looking woman, with little brown eyes, rough,
iron-grey hair, strongly marked, almost witch-like features, and as a
rule a short, black clay pipe in her mouth. She had been my mother's
nurse, and was attached to her with her whole soul. When my mother went
out of her mind, she begged earnestly to become her guardian in the blue
room; but this had to be given up, as it was evident that it was just
her presence that most excited the patient's mind. My mother could not
bear to see father either, and me they never dared show her at all.
Old Anne Kvæn had been my mother's only confidante. She was extremely
superstitious and strange. In her imagination, hobgoblins and gnomes
occupied the store-house and boat-house, as surely as my father resided
in the main building; and under the mountain to the east of the harbour,
the underground people carried on, invisibly, their fishing and trading
with Bergen, just as my father did his, visibly, in the world. Old Anne
had certainly filled my poor mother's head with her mystic
superstition, to no less an extent than she did mine. There were all
kinds of marks and signs to be made from morning till night, and she
always wore an uneasy look, as though she were keeping watch. When a
boat came in, you ought to turn towards the sea, and spit, and mutter a
few words against sea-sprites. She could see every man's double. [The
spirit which every one is supposed to have as a follower and companion
through life.] On its account the door must be shut to quickly after any
one had gone out; and she could always hear a warning beforehand when
father was coming home from a journey.
When Anne Kvæn had no longer leave to go into the blue room to my
mother, she silently went through all kinds of performances outside the
door. I remember once standing on the stairs, and seeing her bowing and
curtseying, wetting her finger every now and then, drawing on the door
with it, and muttering, until I fled in terror.
In her incantation formulæ, the word "Jumala" often occurred, the name
of the Bjarmers' old god, whose memory, in the far north, is not so
completely eradicated as one would think, and who to this day has
perhaps some sacrificial stone or other on the wide mountain wastes of
Finland. Against Lap witchcraft--and a suspicion of it was fastened on
almost every Lap boat that landed at the quay--she also had her charms;
she apparently melted down Fin and Christian gods together in her
mystical incantations, for the confounding of Lap witchcraft.
In the midst of such mental impressions as these, I grew up.
The parsonage, with the white-towered church beside it, lay only a short
way from us, down by the sea, on the right-hand side of the bay, looking
out from our trading-place, which lay farther in.
There was a tutor in the place--we always called him "the student"--and
I went to lessons every day with the minister's two children, a bright
boy of the name of Carl, who was a year younger than I, namely twelve,
and his sister Susanna, of exactly the same age as myself, a blue-eyed
wild child, with a quantity of yellow hair, which was always requiring
to be pushed back from her forehead; when she could do so unnoticed by
the student, she made all kinds of faces and grimaces across at us, to
make us laugh.
The tutor was, in fact, exceedingly strict, and inspired the greatest
respect. The torture in which we sat when at school, not daring to look
up at one another for fear our laughter should break out, was really
anything but pleasant; for every time it exploded we fared very badly;
in the first place, we had our hair pulled and our ears boxed, and in
the next, long written harangues in our mark-books about our behaviour.
Susanna was often utterly merciless; it came to such a pass, that with
only a little wink in the corner of her eye, she could instantly put us
in a state of fever, so that we would sit with cheeks as red as apples,
and our eyes fastened on our books, until we could contain ourselves no
longer. She tried especially to work upon me, though she knew I must pay
dearly for misconduct at home; for father was a severe man, who had very
little comprehension of children.
In play hours, we romped with more animation than children generally
indulge in.
In contrast to the strict, gloomy life at home, with father always
either out on business, or up in the office; where, from the blue room,
often came noises and cries from my poor insane mother, and where Anne
Kvæn was always going about, like a wandering spirit, playing with the
parsonage children was like a life in some other and happier, more
sunshiny part of the globe.