Produced by David Starner, Marc D’Hooghe, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
MARRIED
By August Strindberg
CONTENTS
ASRA
LOVE AND BREAD
COMPELLED TO
COMPENSATION
FRICTIONS
UNNATURAL SELECTION
AN ATTEMPT AT REFORM
A NATURAL OBSTACLE
A DOLL’S HOUSE
PHOENIX
ROMEO AND JULIA
PROLIFICACY
AUTUMN
COMPULSORY MARRIAGE
CORINNA
UNMARRIED AND MARRIED
A DUEL
HIS SERVANT
THE BREADWINNER
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Strindberg’s works in English translation: Plays translated by Edwin
Bjorkman; _Master Olof_, American Scandinavian Foundation, 1915; _The
Dream Play, The Link, The Dance of Death_, New York, Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1912; _Swanwhite, Simoon, Debit and Credit, Advent,
The Thunderstorm, After the Fire,_ the same, 1913; _There Are Crimes
and Crimes, Miss Julia, The Stronger, Creditors, Pariah_, the same,
1913; Bridal Crown, _The Spook Sonata, The First Warning, Gustavus
Vasa_, the same, 1916. Plays translated by Edith and Warner Oland,
Boston Luce & Co., Vol. I (1912), _The Father, Countess Julie, The
Stronger, The Outlaw_; Vol. II (1912), _Facing Death, Easter, Pariah,
Comrades_; Vol. III (1914), _Swanwhite, Advent, The Storm, Lucky Pehr_,
tr. by Velma Swanston Howard, Cincinnati, Stewart & Kidd Co., 1912.
_The Red Room_, tr. by Ellie Schleussner, New York, Putnam’s, 1913;
_Confession of a Fool_, tr. by S. Swift, London, F. Palmer, 1912; _The
German Lieutenant and Other Stories_, Chicago, A. C. McClurg & Co.,
1915; _In Midsummer Days and Other Tales_, tr. by Ellie Schleussner,
London, H. Latimer, 1913; _Motherlove_, tr. by Francis J. Ziegler,
Philadelphia, Brown Bros., 2nd ed., 1916, _On the Seaboard_, tr. by
Elizabeth Clarke Westergren, Cincinnati, Stewart & Kidd Co., 1913;
_The Son of a Servant_, tr. by. Claud Field, introduction by Henry
Vacher-Burch, New York, Putnam’s, 1913; _The Growth of a Soul_, tr. by
Claud Field, London, W. Rider & Co., 1913; _The Inferno_, tr. by Claud
Field, New York, Putnam’s, 1913; _Legends, Autobiographical Sketches_,
London, A. Melrose, 1912; _Zones of the Spirit_, tr. by Claud Field,
introduction by Arthur Babillotte, London, G. Allen & Co.
INTRODUCTION
These stories originally appeared in two volumes, the first in 1884,
the second in 1886. The latter part of the present edition is thus
separated from the first part by a lapse of two years.
Strindberg’s views were continually undergoing changes. Constancy was
never a trait of his. He himself tells us that opinions are but the
reflection of a man’s experiences, changing as his experiences change.
In the two years following the publication of the first volume,
Strindberg’s experiences were such as to exercise a decisive influence
on his views on the woman question and to transmute his early
predisposition to woman-hating from a passive tendency to a positive,
active force in his character and writing.
Strindberg’s art in _Married_ is of the propagandist, of the fighter
for a cause. He has a lesson to convey and he makes frankly for his
goal without attempting to conceal his purpose under the gloss of
“pure” art. He chooses the story form in preference to the treatise as
a more powerful medium to drive home his ideas. That the result has
proved successful is due to the happy admixture in Strindberg of
thinker and artist. His artist’s sense never permitted him to distort
or misrepresent the truth for the sake of proving his theories. In
fact, he arrived at his theories not as a scholar through the study of
books, but as an artist through the experience of life. When life had
impressed upon him what seemed to him a truth, he then applied his
intellect to it to bolster up that truth. Hence it is that, however
opinionated Strindberg may at times seem, his writings carry that
conviction which we receive only when the author reproduces’ truths he
has obtained first-hand from life. One-sided he may occasionally be in
_Married_, especially in the later stories, but rarely unfaithful. His
manner is often to throw such a glaring searchlight upon one spot of
life that all the rest of it stays in darkness; but the places he does
show up are never unimportant or trivial. They are well worth seeing
with Strindberg’s brilliant illumination thrown upon them.
August Strindberg has left a remarkably rich record of his life in
various works, especially in his autobiographical series of novels. He
was born in 1849 in Stockholm. His was a sad childhood passed in
extreme poverty. He succeeded in entering the University of Upsala in
1867, but was forced for a time on account of lack of means to
interrupt his studies. He tried his fortune as schoolmaster, actor,
and journalist and made an attempt to study medicine. All the while he
was active in a literary way, composing his first plays in 1869. In
1874 he obtained a position in the Royal Library, where he devoted
himself to scientific studies, learned Chinese in order to catalogue
the Chinese manuscripts, and wrote an erudite monograph which was read
at the Academy of Inscriptions in Paris.
His first important literary productions were the drama _Master Olof_
(1878) and the novel _The Red Room_ (1879). Disheartened by the
failure of _Master Olof_, he gave up literature for a long time. When
he returned to it, he displayed an amazing productivity. Work followed
work in quick succession--novels, short stories, dramas, histories,
historical studies, and essays. _The Swedish People_ is said to be the
most popular book in Sweden next to the Bible. The mere enumeration of
his writings would occupy more than two pages. His versatility led him
to make researches in physics and chemistry and natural science and to
write on those subjects.
Through works like _The Red Room_, _Married_, and the dramas _The
Father_ and _Miss Julia_, Strindberg attached himself to the
naturalistic school of literature. Another period of literary
inactivity followed, during which he passed through a mental crisis
akin to insanity. When he returned to the writing of novels and dramas
he was no longer a naturalist, but a symbolist and mystic. Among the
plays he composed in this style are _To Damascus_, _The Dream Play_,
and _The Great Highway_.
Strindberg married three times, divorced his first two wives, but
separated amicably from the third. He died in 1913. The vast
demonstration at his funeral, attended by the laboring classes as well
as by the “upper” classes, proved that, in spite of the antagonisms he
had aroused, Sweden unanimously awarded him the highest place in her
literature.
THOMAS SELTZER.
ASRA
He had just completed his thirteenth year when his mother died. He
felt that he had lost a real friend, for during the twelve months of
her illness he had come to know her personally, as it were, and
established a relationship between them which is rare between parents
and children. He was a clever boy and had developed early; he had read
a great many books besides his schoolbooks, for his father, a
professor of botany at the Academy of Science, possessed a very good
library. His mother, on the other hand, was not a well-educated woman;
she had merely been head housekeeper and children’s nurse in her
husband’s house. Numerous births and countless vigils (she had not
slept through a single night for the last sixteen years), had
exhausted her strength, and when she became bedridden, at the age of
thirty-nine, and was no longer able to look after her house, she made
the acquaintance of her second son; her eldest boy was at a military
school and only at home during the week ends. Now that her part as
mother of the family was played to the end and nothing remained of her
but a poor invalid, the old-fashioned relationship of strict discipline,
that barrier between parents and children, was superseded.
The thirteen-year-old son was almost constantly at her bedside,
reading to her whenever he was not at school or doing home lessons.
She had many questions to ask and he had a great deal to explain, and
therefore all those distinguishing marks erected by age and position
vanished, one after the other: if there was a superior at all, it was
the son. But the mother, too, had much to teach, for she had learnt
her lessons in the school of life; and so they were alternately
teacher and pupil. They discussed all subjects. With the tact of a
mother and the modesty of the other sex she told her son all he ought
to know of the mystery of life. He was still innocent, but he had
heard many things discussed by the boys at school which had shocked
and disgusted him. The mother explained to him all she could explain;
warned him of the greatest danger to a young man, and exacted a
promise from him never to visit a house of ill-fame, not even out of
curiosity, because, as she pointed out, in such a case no man could
ever trust himself. And she implored him to live a temperate life, and
turn to God in prayer whenever temptation assaulted him.
His father was entirely devoted to science, which was a sealed book to
his wife. When the mother was already on the point of death, he made a
discovery which he hoped would make his name immortal in the scientific
world. He discovered, on a rubbish heap, outside the gates of Stockholm,
a new kind of goose-foot with curved hairs on the usually straight-haired
calyx. He was in communication with the Berlin Academy of Sciences, and
the latter was even now considering the advisability of including the new
variety in the “Flora Germanica”; he was daily expecting to hear whether
or not the Academy had decided to immortalise his name by calling the
plant Chenopodium Wennerstroemianium. At his wife’s death-bed he was
absentminded, almost unkind, for he had just received an answer in the
affirmative, and he fretted because neither he nor his wife could enjoy
the great news. She thought only of heaven and her children. He could not
help realising that to talk to her now of a calyx with curved hairs would
be the height of absurdity; but, he justified himself, it was not so
much a question of a calyx with straight or curved hairs, as of a
scientific discovery; and, more than that, it was a question of his
future and the future of his children, for their father’s distinction
meant bread for them.
When his wife died on the following evening, he cried bitterly; he had
not shed a tear for many years. He was tortured by remorse, remembered
even the tiniest wrong he had ever done her, for he had been, on the
whole, an exemplary husband; his indifference, his absent-mindedness
of the previous day, filled him with shame and regret, and in a moment
of blankness he realised all the pettishness and selfishness of his
science which, he had imagined, was benefiting mankind. But these
emotions were short-lived; if you open a door with a spring behind it,
it will close again immediately. On the following morning, after he
had drawn up an announcement of her death for the papers, he wrote a
letter of thanks to the Berlin Academy of Sciences. After that he
resumed his work.
When he came home to dinner, he longed for his wife, so that he might
tell her of his success, for she had always been his truest friend,
the only human being who had never been jealous or envious. Now he
missed this loyal companion on whose approval he could count as a
matter of course; never once had she contradicted him, for since he
never told her more than the practical result of his researches, there
was no room for argument. For a moment the thought occurred to him
that he might make friends with his son; but they knew each other too
little; their relationship was that of officer and private soldier.
His superior rank did not permit him to make advances; moreover, he
regarded the boy with suspicion, because the latter possessed a keener
intellect and had read a number of new books which were unknown to
him; occasionally it even happened that the father, the professor,
plainly revealed his ignorance to his son, the school-boy. In such
cases the father was either compelled to dismiss the argument, with a
few contemptuous remarks to “these new follies,” or peremptorily order
the school-boy to attend to his lessons. Once or twice, in self-defence,
the son had produced one or other of his school-books; the professor
had lost his temper and wished the new school-books to hell.
And so it came about that the father devoted himself to his
collections of dried plants and the son went his own way.
They lived in a quiet street to the left of the Observatory, in a
small, one-storey house, built of bricks, and surrounded by a large
garden; the garden was once the property of the Horticultural Society,
and had come into the professor’s possession by inheritance. But since
he studied descriptive botany, and took no interest in the much more
interesting subjects of the physiology and morphology of plants, a
science which was as good as unknown in his youth, he was practically
a stranger to living nature. He allowed the garden with its many
splendours to become a wilderness, and finally let it to a gardener on
condition that he and his children should be allowed certain
privileges. The son used the garden as a park and enjoyed its beauty
as he found it, without taking the trouble to try and understand it
scientifically.
One might compare the boy’s character to an ill-proportioned
compensation pendulum; it contained too much of the soft metal of the
mother, not enough of the hard metal of the father. Friction and
irregular oscillations were the natural consequences. Now he was full
of sentiment, now hard and sceptical. His mother’s death affected him
beyond words. He mourned her deeply, and she always lived in his memory
as the personification of all that was good and great and beautiful.
He wasted the summer following her death in brooding and novel-reading.
Grief, and to no small extent idleness, had shaken his whole nervous
system and quickened his imagination. His tears had been like warm April
showers falling on fruit trees, wakening them to a precocious burgeoning:
but alas! only too often the blossoms are doomed to wither and perish in
a frosty May night, before the fruit has had time to set.
He was fifteen years old and had therefore arrived at the age when
civilised man attains to manhood and is ripe to give life to a new
generation, but is prevented from doing so by his inability to
maintain a family. Consequently he was about to begin the ten years’
martyrdom which a young man is called upon to endure in the struggle
against an overwhelming force of nature, before he is in a position to
fulfil her laws.
* * * * *
It is a warm afternoon about Whitsuntide. The appletrees are gorgeous
in their white splendour which nature has showered all over them with
a profuse hand. The breeze shakes the crowns and fills the air with
pollen; a part of it fulfils its destination and creates new life, a
part sinks to the ground and dies. What is a handful of pollen more or
less in the inexhaustible store-house of nature! The fertilised blossom
casts off its delicate petals which flutter to the ground and wither;
they decay in the rain and are ground to dust, to rise again through the
sap and re-appear as blossoms, and this time, perhaps, to become fruit.
But now the struggle begins: those which a kind fate has placed on the
sunny side, thrive and prosper; the seed bud swells, and if no frost
intervenes, the fruit, in due time, will set. But those which look
towards the North, the poor things which grow in the shadow of the
others and never see the sun, are predestined to fade and fall off;
the gardener rakes them together and carts them to the pig-sty.
Behold the apple-tree now, its branches laden with half-ripe fruit,
little, round, golden apples with rosy cheeks. A fresh struggle
begins: if all remain alive, the branches will not be able to bear
their weight, the tree will perish. A gale shakes the branches. It
requires firm stems to hold on. Woe to the weaklings! they are
condemned to destruction.
A fresh danger! The apple-weevil appears upon the scene. It, too, has
to maintain life and to fulfil a duty towards its progeny. The grub
eats its way through the fruit to the stem and the apple falls to the
ground. But the dainty beetle chooses the strongest and soundest for
its brood, otherwise too many of the strong ones would be allowed to
live, and competition would become over-keen.
The hour of twilight, the gathering dusk, arouses the passionate
instincts of the beast-world. The night-crow crouches on the newly-dug
flower-bed to lure its mate. Which of the eager males shall carry the
prize? Let them decide the question!
The cat, sleek and warm, fresh from her evening milk, steals away from
her corner by the hearth and picks her way carefully among daffodils
and lilies, afraid lest the dew make her coat damp and ragged before
her lover joins her. She sniffs at the young lavender and calls. Her
call is answered by the black tom-cat which appears, broad-backed like
a marten, on the neighbour’s fence; but the gardener’s tortoise-shell
approaches from the cow-shed and the fight begins. Handfuls of the
rich, black soil are flying about in all directions, and the
newly-planted radishes and spinach plants are roughly awakened from
their quiet sleep and dreams of the future. The stronger of the two
remains in possession of the field, and the female awaits complacently
the frenetic embraces of the victor. The vanquished flies to engage in
a new struggle in which, perhaps, victory will smile on him.
Nature smiles, content, for she knows of no other sin than the sin
against her law; she is on the side of the strong for her desire is
for strong children, even though she should have to kill the “eternal
ego” of the insignificant individual. And there is no prudery, no
hesitation, no fear of consequences, for nature has plenty of food for
all her children--except mankind.
* * * * *
After supper he went for a walk in the garden while his father sat
down at his bed-room window to smoke a pipe and read the evening
paper. He strolled along the paths, revelling in the delicious odours
which a plant only exhales when it is in full bloom, and which is the
finest and strongest extract of etheric oils, containing in a
condensed form the full strength of the individual, destined to become
the representative of the species. He listened to the nuptial song of
the insects above the lime trees, which rings in our ears like a
funeral dirge: he heard the purring call of the night-crow; the ardent
mewing of the cat, which sounds as if death, and not life, were
wooing; the humming note of the dung-beetle, the fluttering of the
large moths, the thin peeping of the bats.
He stopped before a bed of narcissus, gathered one of the while,
starry flowers, and inhaled its perfume until he felt the blood
hammering in his temples. He had never examined this flower minutely.
But during the last term they had read Ovid’s story of Narcissus. He
had not discovered a deeper meaning in the legend. What did it mean,
this story of a youth who, from unrequited love, turned his ardour
upon himself and was consumed by the flame when he fell in love with
his own likeness seen in a well? As he stood, examining the white,
cup-shaped petals, pale as the cheeks of an invalid with fine red
lines such as one may see in the faces of consumptives when a pitiless
cough forces the blood into the extremest and tiniest blood-vessels,
he thought of a school-fellow, a young aristocrat, who was a
midshipman now; he looked like that.
When he had inhaled the scent of the flower for some time, the strong
odour of cloves disappeared and left but a disagreeable, soapy smell
which made him feel sick.
He sauntered on to where the path turned to the right and finally lost
itself in an avenue planted on both sides with elm-trees whose branches
had grown together and formed an arch overhead. In the semi-darkness,
far down the perspective, he could see a large green swing, suspended
by ropes, slowly moving backwards and forwards. A girl stood on the
back board, gently swinging herself by bending her knees and throwing
her body forward, while she clung, with arms raised high above her head,
to the ropes at her side. He recognised the gardener’s daughter, a girl
who had been confirmed last Easter and had just begun to wear long
skirts. To-night, however, she was dressed in one of her old dresses
which barely reached to her ankles.
The sight of the young man embarrassed her, for she remembered the
shortness of her skirt, but she nevertheless remained on the swing. He
advanced and looked at her.
“Go away, Mr. Theodore,” said the girl, giving the swing a vigorous
push.
“Why should I?” answered the youth, who felt the draught of her
fluttering skirts on his throbbing temples.
“Because I want you to,” said the girl.
“Let me come up, too, and I’ll swing you, Gussie,” pleaded Theodore,
springing on to the board.
Now he was standing on the swing, facing her. And when they rose into
the air, he felt her skirts flapping against his legs, and when they
descended, he bent over her and looked into her eyes which were
brilliant with fear and enjoyment. Her thin cotton blouse fitted
tightly and showed every line of her young figure; her smiling lips
were half-open, displaying two rows of sound white teeth, which looked
as if they would like to bite or kiss him.
Higher and higher rose the swing, until it struck the topmost branches
of the maple. The girl screamed and fell forward, into his arms; he
was pushed over, on to the seat. The trembling of the soft warm body
which nestled closely in his arms, sent an electric shock through his
whole nervous system; a black veil descended before his eyes and he
would have let her go if her left shoulder had not been tightly
pressed against his right arm.
The speed of the swing slackened. She rose and sat on the seat facing
him. And thus they remained with downcast eyes, not daring to look one
another in the face.
When the swing stopped, the girl slipped off the seat and ran away as
if she were answering a call. Theodore was left alone. He felt the
blood surging in his veins. It seemed to him that his strength was
redoubled. But he could not grasp what had happened. He vaguely
conceived himself as an electrophor whose positive electricity, in
discharging, had combined with the negative. It had happened during a
quite ordinary, to all appearances chaste, contact with a young woman.
He had never felt the same emotion in wrestling, for instance, with
his school-fellows in the play-ground. He had come into contact with
the opposite polarity of the female sex and now he knew what it meant
to be a man. For he was a man, not a precocious boy, kicking over the
traces; he was a strong, hardy, healthy youth.
As he strolled along, up and down the garden paths, new thoughts
formed in his brain. Life looked at him with graver eyes, he felt
conscious of a sense of duty. But he was only fifteen years old. He
was not yet confirmed and many years would have to elapse before he
would be considered an independent member of the community, before he
would be able to earn a living for himself, let alone maintain a wife
and family. He took life seriously, the thought of light adventures
never occurred to him. Women were to him something sacred, his
opposite pole, the supplement and completion of himself. He was mature
now, bodily and mentally, fit to enter the arena of life and fight his
way. What prevented him from doing so? His education, which had taught
him nothing useful; his social position, which stood between him and a
trade he might have learned. The Church, which had not yet received
his vow of loyalty to her priests; the State, which was still waiting
for his oath of allegiance to Bernadotte and Nassau; the School, which
had not yet trained him sufficiently to consider him ripe for the
University; the secret alliance of the upper against the lower
classes. A whole mountain of follies lay on him and his young
strength. Now that he knew himself to be a man, the whole system of
education seemed to him an institution for the mutilation of body and
soul. They must both be mutilated before he could be allowed to enter
the harem of the world, where manhood is considered a danger; he could
find no other excuse for it. And thus he sank back into his former
state of immaturity. He compared himself to a celery plant, tied up
and put under a flower-pot so as to make it as white and soft as
possible, unable to put forth green leaves in the sunshine, flower,
and bear seed.
Wrapped in these thoughts he remained in the garden until the clock on
the nearest church tower struck ten. Then he turned towards the house,
for it was bed-time. But the front door was locked. The house-maid, a
petticoat thrown over her nightgown, let him in. A glimpse of her bare
shoulders roused him from his sentimental reveries; he tried to put
his arm round her and kiss her, for at the moment he was conscious of
nothing but her sex. But the maid had already disappeared, shutting
the door with a bang. Overwhelmed with shame he opened his window,
cooled his head in a basin of cold water and lighted his lamp.
When he had got into bed, he took up a volume of Arndt’s _Spiritual
Voices of the Morning_, a book which had belonged to his mother; he
read a chapter of it every evening to be on the safe side, for in the
morning his time was short. The book reminded him of the promise of
chastity given to his mother on her death-bed, and he felt a twinge of
conscience. A fly which had singed its wings on his lamp, and was now
buzzing round the little table by his bedside, turned his thoughts
into another channel; he closed the book and lit a cigarette. He heard
his father take off his boots in the room below, knock out his pipe
against the stove, pour out a glass of water and get ready to go to
bed. He thought how lonely he must be since he had become a widower.
In days gone by he had often heard the subdued voices of his parents
through the thin partition, in intimate conversation on matters on
which they always agreed; but now no voice was audible, nothing but
the dead sounds which a man makes in waiting upon himself, sounds
which one must put side by side, like the figures in a rebus, before
one can understand their meaning.
He finished his cigarette, blew out the lamp and said the Lord’s Prayer
in an undertone, but he got no farther than the fifth petition. Then he
fell asleep.
He awoke from a dream in the middle of the night. He had dreamt that
he held the gardener’s daughter in his arms. He could not remember the
circumstances, for he was quite dazed, and fell asleep again directly.
On the following morning he was depressed and had a headache. He
brooded over the future which loomed before him threateningly and
filled him with dread. He realised with a pang how quickly the summer
was passing, for the end of the summer meant the degradation of
school-life. Every thought of his own would be stifled by the thoughts
of others; there was no advantage in being able to think independently;
it required a fixed number of years before one could reach one’s goal.
It was like a journey on a good’s train; the engine was bound to remain
for a certain time in the stations, and when the pressure of the steam
became too strong, from want of consumption of energy, a waste-pipe had
to be opened. The Board had drawn up the time-table and the train was
not permitted to arrive at the stations before its appointed time. That
was the principal thing which mattered.
The father noticed the boy’s pallor, but he put it down to grief over
his mother’s death.
Autumn came and with it the return to school. Theodore, by dint of
much novel-reading during the summer, and coming in this way, as it
were, in constant contact with grown-up people and their problems and
struggles, had come to look upon himself as a grown-up member of
society. Now the masters treated him with familiarity, the boys took
liberties which compelled him to repay them in kind. And this
educational institution, which was to ennoble him and make him fit to
take his place in the community, what did it teach him? How did it
ennoble him? The compendiums, one and all, were written under the
control of the upper classes, for the sole purpose of forcing the
lower classes to look up to their betters. The schoolmasters
frequently reproached their pupils with ingratitude and impressed on
them their utter inability to realise, even faintly, the advantage
they enjoyed in receiving an education which so many of their poorer
fellow-creatures would always lack. No, indeed, the boys were not
sophisticated enough to see through the gigantic fraud and its
advantages.
But did they ever find true joy, real pleasure in the subjects of
their studies for their own sakes? Never! Therefore the teachers had
to appeal incessantly to the lower passions of their pupils, to
ambition, self-interest, material advantages.
What a miserable make-believe school was! Not one of the boys believed
that he would reap any benefit from repeating the names and dates of
hated kings in their proper sequence, from learning dead languages,
proving axioms, defining “a matter of course,” and counting the anthers
of plants and the joints on the hindlegs of insects, to knowing the end
no more about them than their Latin names. How many long hours were
wasted in the vain attempt to divide an angle into three equal sections,
a thing which can be done so easily in a minute in an _unscientific_
(that is to say practical) way by using a graduator.
How they scorned everything practical! His sisters, who were taught
French from Ollendorf’s grammar, were able to speak the language after
two years’ study; but the college boys could not say a single sentence
after six. Ollendorf was a name which they pronounced with pity and
contempt. It was the essence of all that was stupid.
But when his sister asked for an explanation and enquired whether the
purpose of spoken language was not the expression of human thought,
the young sophist replied with a phrase picked up from one of the
masters who in his turn had borrowed it from Talleyrand. Language was
invented to hide one’s thoughts. This, of course, was beyond the
horizon of a young girl (how well men know how to hide their
shortcomings), but henceforth she believed her brother to be
tremendously learned, and stopped arguing with him.
And was there not even a worse stumbling-block in aesthetics, delusive
and deceptive, casting a veil of borrowed splendour and sham beauty
over everything? They sang of “The Knights’ Vigil of Light.” What
knights’ vigil? With patents of nobility and students’ certificates;
false testimonials, as they might have told themselves. Of light? That
was to say of the upper classes who had the greatest interest in
keeping the lower classes in darkness, a task in which they were ably
assisted by church and school. “And onward, onward, on the path of
light!”
Things were always called by the wrong name. And if it so happened
that a light-bearer arose from the lower classes, everybody was ready
and prepared to extinguish his torch. Oh! youthful, healthy host of
fighters! How healthy they were, all these young men, enervated by
idleness, unsatisfied desires and ambitions, who scorned every man who
had not the means to pay for a University education! What splendid
liars they were, the poets of the upper classes! Were they the
deceivers or the deceived?
What was the usual subject of the young men’s conversation? Their
studies? Never! Once in a way, perhaps, they would talk of certificates.
No, their conversation was of things obscene; of appointments with
women; of billiards and drink; of certain diseases which they had heard
discussed by their elder brothers. They lounged about in the afternoon
and “held the reviews,” and the best informed of them knew the name of
the officer and could tell the others where his mistress lived.
Once two members of the “Knights’ Vigil of Light,” had dined in the
company of two women on the terrace of a high-class restaurant in the
Zoological Gardens. For this offence they were expelled from school.
They were punished for their naïveté, not because their conduct was
considered vicious, for a year after they passed their examinations
and went to the University, gaining in this way a whole year; and when
they had completed their studies at Upsala, they were attached to the
Embassy in one of the capitals of Europe, to represent the United
Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway.
In these surroundings Theodore spent the best part of his youth. He
had seen through the fraud, but was compelled to acquiesce! Again and
again he asked himself the question: What can I do? There was no answer.
And so he became an accessory and learned to hold his tongue.
His confirmation appeared to him to be very much on a level with his
school experience. A young minister, an ardent pietist, was to teach
him in four months Luther’s Catechism, regardless of the fact that he was
well versed in theology, exegesis and dogmatics, besides having read the
New Testament in Greek. Nevertheless the strict pietism, which demanded
absolute truth in thought and action, could not fail to make a great
impression on him.
When the catechumens were assembled for the first time, Theodore found
himself quite unexpectedly surrounded by a totally different class of
boys to whom he had been used at school. When he entered the
assembly-room he was met by the stare of something like a hundred
inimical eyes. There were tobacco binders, chimney sweeps, apprentices
of all trades. They were on bad terms and freely abused one another,
but this enmity between the different trades was only superficial;
however much they quarrelled, they yet held together. He seemed to
breathe a strangely stifling atmosphere; the hatred with which they
greeted him was not unmixed with contempt, the reverse of a certain
respect or envy. He looked in vain for a friend, for a companion,
like-minded, dressed as he was. There was not a single one. The parish
was poor, the rich people sent their children to the German church which
was then the fashion. It was in the company of the children of the
people, the lower classes, that he was to approach the altar, as their
equal. He asked himself what it was that separated him from these boys?
Were they not, bodily, endowed with the same gifts as he? No doubt, for
every one of them earned his living, and some of them helped to keep
their parents. Were they less gifted, mentally? He did not think so, for
their remarks gave evidence of keen powers of observation; he would have
laughed at many of their witty remarks if he had not been conscious of
his superior caste. There was no definite line of demarcation between
him and the fools who were his school-fellows. But there was a line here
Was it the shabby clothes, the plain faces, the coarse hands, which
formed the barrier? Partly, he thought. Their plainness, especially,
repulsed him. But were they worse than others because they were plain?
He was carrying a foil, as he had a fencing lesson later on. He put it
in a corner of the room, hoping that it would escape attention. But it
had been seen already. Nobody knew what kind of a thing it really was,
but everybody recognised it as a weapon of some sort. Some of the
boldest busied themselves about the corner, so as to have a look at
it. They fingered the covering of the handle, scratched the guard with
their nails, bent the blade, handled the small leather ball. They were
like hares sniffing at a gun which had been lost in the wood. They did
not understand its use, but they knew it for something inimical,
something with a hidden meaning. Presently a belt-maker’s apprentice,
whose brother was in the Life Guards, joined the inquisitive throng
and at once decided the question: “Can’t you see that it is a sword,
you fools?” he shouted, with a look at Theodore. It was a respectful
look, but a look which also hinted at a secret understanding between
them, which, correctly interpreted, meant: You and I understand these
things! But a young rope-maker, who had once been a trumpeter in a
military band, considered this giving of a verdict without consulting
him a personal slight and declared that he “would be hanged if it
wasn’t a rapier!” The consequence was a fight which transformed the
place into a bear-garden, dense with dust and re-echoing with screams
and yells.
The door opened and the minister stood on the threshold. He was a pale
young man, very thin, with watery blue eyes and a face disfigured by a
rash. He shouted at the boys. The wild beasts ceased fighting. He
began talking of the precious blood of Christ and the power of the
Evil One over the human heart. After a little while he succeeded in
inducing the hundred boys to sit down on the forms and chairs. But now
he was quite out of breath and the atmosphere was thick with dust. He
glanced at the window and said in a faint voice: “Open the sash!” This
request re-awakened the only half-subdued passions. Twenty-five boys
made a rush for the window and tried to seize the window cord.
“Go to your places at once!” screamed the minister, stretching out his
hand for his cane.
There was a momentary silence during which the minister tried to think
of a way of having the sash raised without a fight.
“You,” he said at last to a timid little fellow, “go and open the
window!”
The small boy went to the window and tried to disentangle the window
cord. The others looked on in breathless silence, when suddenly a big
lad, in sailor’s clothes, who had just come home on the brig _Carl
Johan_, lost patience.
“The devil take me if I don’t show you what a lad can do,” he shouted,
throwing off his coat and jumping on the window sill; there was a
flash from his cutlass and the rope was cut.
“Cable’s cut!” he laughed, as the minister with a hysterical cry,
literally drove him to his seat.
“The rope was so entangled that there was nothing for it but to cut
it,” he assured him, as he sat down.
The minister was furious. He had come from a small town in the
provinces and had never conceived the possibility of so much sin, so
much wickedness and immorality. He had never come into contact with
lads so far advanced on the road to damnation. And he talked at great
length of the precious blood of Christ.
Not one of them understood what he said, for they did not realise that
they had fallen, since they had never bee different. The boys received
his words with coldness and indifference.
The minister rambled on and spoke of Christ’s precious wounds, but not
one of them took his words to heart, for not one of them was conscious
of having wounded Christ. He changed the subject and spoke of the
devil, but that was a topic so familiar to them that it made no
impression. At last he hit on the right thing. He began to talk of
their confirmation which was to take place in the coming spring. He
reminded them of their parents, anxious that their children should
play a part in the life of the community; when he went on to speak of
employers who refused to employ lads who had not been confirmed, his
listeners became deeply interested at once, and every one of them
understood the great importance of the coming ceremony. Now he was
sincere, and the young minds grasped what he was talking about; the
noisiest among them became quiet.
The registration began. What a number of marriage certificates were
missing! How could the children come to Christ when their parents had
not been legally married? How could they approach the altar when their
fathers had been in prison? Oh! what sinners they were!
Theodore was deeply moved by the exhibition of so much shame and
disgrace. He longed to tear his thoughts away from the subject, but
was unable to do so. Now it was his turn to hand in his certificates
and the minister read out: son: Theodore, born on such and such a
date; parents: professor and knight ... a faint smile flickered like a
feeble sunbeam over his face, he gave him a friendly nod and asked:
“And how is your dear father?” But when he saw that the mother was
dead (a fact of which he was perfectly well aware) his face clouded
over. “She was a child of God,” he said, as if he were talking to
himself, in a gushing, sympathetic, whining voice, but the remark
conveyed at the same time a certain reproach against the “dear father,”
who was only a professor and knight. After that Theodore could go.
When he left the assembly-room he felt that he had gone through an
almost impossible experience. Were all those lads really depraved
because they used oaths and coarse language, as his companions, his
father, his uncle, and all the upper classes did at times? What did
the minister mean when he talked of immorality? They were more savage
than the spoilt children of the wealthy, but that was because they
were more fully alive. It was unfair to blame them for missing
marriage certificates. True, his father had never committed a theft,
but there was no necessity for a man to steal if he had an income of
six thousand crowns and could please himself. The act would be absurd
or abnormal in such a case.
Theodore went back to school realising what it meant “to have received
an education”; here nobody was badgered for small faults. As little
notice as possible was taken of one’s own or one’s parent’s weaknesses,
one was among equals and understood one another.
After school one “held the reviews,” sneaked into a cafe and drank a
liqueur, and finally went to the fencing-room. He looked at the young
officers who treated him as their equal, observed all those young
bloods with their supple limbs, pleasant manners and smiling faces,
every one of them certain that a good dinner was awaiting him at home,
and became conscious of the existence of two worlds: an upper and an
under-world. He remembered the gloomy assembly-room and the wretched
assembly he had just left with a pang; all their wounds and hidden
defects were mercilessly exposed and examined through a
magnifying-glass, so that the lower classes might acquire that true
humility failing which the upper classes cannot enjoy their amiable
weaknesses in peace. And for the first time something jarring had come
into this life.
However much Theodore was tossed about between his natural yearning
for the only half-realised temptations of the world, and his newly
formed desire to turn his back on this world and his mind heavenwards,
he did not break the promise given to his mother. The religious
teaching which he and the other catechumens received from the minister
in the church, did not fail to impress him deeply. He was often gloomy
and wrapped in thought and felt that life was not what it ought to be.
He had a dim notion that once upon a time a terrible crime had been
committed, which it was now everybody’s business to hide by practising
countless deceptions; he compared himself to a fly caught in a spider’s
web: the more it struggled to regain its freedom, the more it entangled
itself, until at last it died miserably, strangled by the cruel threads.
One evening--the minister scorned no trick likely to produce an effect
on his hard-headed pupils--they were having a lesson in the choir. It
was in January. Two gas jets lighted up the choir, illuminating and
distorting the marble figures on the altar. The whole of the large
church with its two barrel-vaults, which crossed one another, lay in
semi-darkness. In the background the shining organ pipes faintly
reflected the gas flames; above it the angels blowing their trumpets
to summon the sleepers before the judgment seat of their maker, looked
merely like sinister, threatening human figures above life size; the
cloisters were lost in complete darkness.
The minister had explained the seventh commandment. He had spoken of
immorality between married and unmarried people. He could not explain
to his pupils what immorality between husband and wife meant, although
he was a married man himself; but on the subject of immorality in all
its other aspects he was well-informed. He went on to the subject of
self-abuse. As he pronounced the word a rustling sound passed through
the rows of young men; they stared at him, with white cheeks and
hollow eyes, as if a phantom had appeared in their midst. As long as
he kept to the tortures of hell fire, they remained fairly indifferent,
but when he took up a book and read to them accounts of youths who had
died at the age of twenty-five of consumption of the spine, they
collapsed in their seats, and felt as if the floor were giving way
beneath them! He told them the story of a young boy who was committed
to an asylum at the age of twelve, and died at the age of fourteen,
having found peace in the faith of his Redeemer. They saw before their
shrinking eyes a hundred corpses, washed and shrouded. “There is but one
remedy against this evil,” went on the minister, “the precious wounds of
Christ.” But how this remedy was to be used against sexual precocity, he
did not tell them. He admonished them not to go to dances, to shun
theatres and gaming-houses, and above all things, to avoid women; that
is to say to act in exact contradiction to their inclinations. That this
vice contradicts and utterly confounds he pronouncement of the community
that a man is not mature until he is twenty-one, was passed over in
silence. Whether it could be prevented by early marriages (supposing a
means of providing food for all instead of banquets for a few could be
found) remained an open question. The final issue was that one should
throw oneself into the arms of Christ, that is to say, go to church, and
leave the care of temporal things to the upper classes.
After this admonishment the minister requested the first five on the
first form to stay behind. He wished to speak to them in private. The
first five looked as if they had been sentenced to death. Their chests
contracted; they breathed with difficulty, and a careful observer might
have noticed that their hair had risen an inch at the roots and lay over
their skulls in damp strands like the hair of a corpse. Their eyes stared
from their blanched sockets like two round glass bullets set in leather,
motionless, not knowing whether to face the question with a bold front,
or hide behind an impudent lie.
After the prayer the hymn of Christ’s wounds was sung; to-night it
sounded like the singing of consumptives; every now and then it died
away altogether, or was interrupted by a dry cough, like the cough of
a man who is dying of thirst. Then they began to file out. One of the
five attempted to steal away, but the minister called him back.
It was a terrible moment. Theodore who sat on the first form was one
of the five. He felt sick at heart. Not because he was guilty of the
offence indicated, but because in his heart he considered it an insult
to a man thus to have to lay bare the most secret places of his soul.
The other four sat down, as far from each other as they could. The
belt-maker’s apprentice, who was one of them, tried to make a joke,
but the words refused to come. They saw themselves confronted by the
police-court, the prison, the hospital and, in the background, the
asylum. They did not know what was going to happen, but they felt
instinctively that a species of scourging awaited them. Their only
comfort in their distressing situation was the fact that _he_, Mr.
Theodore, was one of them. It was not clear to them why that fact
should be a comfort, but they knew intuitively that no evil would
happen to the son of a professor.
“Come along, Wennerstroem,” said the minister, after he had lighted
the gas in the vestry.
Wennerstroem went and the door closed behind him. The four remained
seated on their forms, vainly trying to discover a comfortable
position for their limbs.
After a while Wennerstroem returned, with red eyes, trembling with
excitement; he immediately went down the corridor and out into the
night.