Part 9

"Yes, but the fact is as I say."

The Swede remained in the hotel, and therefore the Norwegian was relegated to solitude. In order to while away the time he made use of the flora of the neighbourhood in order to study the biology of plants. For this purpose he carried about with him on his walks a morphia syringe, intending to see whether the plants were sensitive to this nerve poison. He wished to prove by experiment that they possess a sensitive nervous system.

One afternoon he sat drinking a glass of wine at a garden restaurant on the outskirts of the village. Over his table hung the branches of an apple-tree, laden with small red apples. These were suitable for his purpose. Accordingly, he stood on his chair, made an insertion with the morphia syringe in the twig which bore the apple, but pressed too hard, so that it fell. At that instant he heard a cry and halloo from the wooded slope behind him, and saw an angry man, followed by his wife and child, come rushing towards him with uplifted stick. "There! I have him at last!" he cried.

Him! He was mistaken for an apple stealer for whom they had been watching.

The Norwegian summoned all his Buddhistic philosophy to his aid, got down from the chair, and sat expecting to be led off by gendarmes as he had been caught in the act. It was impossible to explain his conduct, for none of the authorities could approve such an eccentric act as the inoculation of an apple-tree with morphia.

Meanwhile a minute passed while the angry man was running along by a fence and entering the enclosure. Like one condemned to death, the Norwegian sat there awaiting a blow from the stick as an earnest of what was to follow. He was firmly resolved to die like a warrior, and did not trouble to devise useless explanations, but only thought: "This is the most devilish experience I have had in my whole terrible life."

Sixty seconds are a long time but they pass at last!

Whether it was the Norwegian's carefully groomed exterior and expensive suit, the wine and the best kind of cigarettes, or something quite different which had a mollifying effect, the angry man, who had certainly not had such a stylish customer before, bared his head, and only asked whether the gentleman had been attended to. The Norwegian, answering politely, noticed how the restaurant keeper stared at the morphia syringe, the powder box and the glass of water.

With the free-and-easy tone of a man of the world, the Norwegian explained the embarrassing situation: "I am a botanist, and was just about to make an experiment when you surprised me in a very suspicious position."

"Pray, doctor, do as though you were in your own house, and be quite at your ease," was the reply.

After exchanging some remarks about the weather, the restaurant keeper went indoors; he muttered something to the waitress which the Norwegian thought he overheard. It caused him to take his departure, but in a leisurely way. "He thought I was one of the lunatics," he said to himself. "That was my deliverance. I can't come here again, however."

Several hours passed, but the impression of the sixty seconds of humiliation and the lifted stick still remained. "That is not mischance; that is something else," was his conclusion, as usual.

The next morning he took his walk and meditated on his destiny. "Why haven't you shot yourself?" Let him say who can. One view was that, finally, all difficulties are disentangled and experience shows that the end is good. This used to be called "hope," and by means of it one warped one's ship half an ell farther, as with a kedge anchor. Others maintained that it was curiosity which supported people. They wanted to see the sequel, just as when one reads a novel, or sees a play.

The Norwegian, for his part, had never found an aim in life. Religion certainly said that one should be improved here below, but he had only seen himself forced into situations from which he emerged worse than before. One certainly became a little more tolerant towards one's brother-men, but this tolerance strongly resembled moral laxity. Those who smile indulgently at others' crimes are not far from being criminals themselves. When in conversation it was alleged that one should love one's fellow-men, he used to deliver himself of his final sentiment as follows: "I neither love them nor hate them; I put up with them as they put up with me."

The fact that he was never entirely crushed by a sorrow sprang from his having an indistinct suspicion that life had no complete reality, but was a dream stage, and that our actions, even the worst of them, were carried out under the influence of some strong suggestive power other than ourselves. He therefore felt himself to a certain extent irresponsible. He did not deny his badness, but knew also that in his innermost being there was an upward, striving spirit which suffered from the humiliation of being confined in a human body. It was this inner personality which possessed the sensitive conscience, which could sometimes, to his alarm, press forward and become sentimental, weeping over his or her wretchedness--which of the two, it was hard to say. Then his second self laughed at the foolishness of the first, and this "divine frivolity," as he called it, served him better than morbid brooding.

When he came home from his work, he found his door shut. Full of foreboding, he knocked and uttered his own name. When the door opened, his young, wild wife fell on his neck. It seemed to him quite natural and simple, as though he had left her two minutes before. She spoke not a word of reproach, inquiry, or explanation, but only this: "Have you much money or little?"

"Why do you ask that?"

"Because I have much, and want a good dinner in Copenhagen."

In this they were agreed, and such was their reunion. And why not? Two months of torture were forgotten and obliterated as though they had never been; the disgrace of a separation about which people had perhaps already gossiped, had vanished.

"If anyone asked me," he said, "about what we had quarrelled I would not be able to remember."

"Nor I, either. But, therefore, we will never, never part again. We must not separate for half a day, or everything goes crazy."

This was certainly the wisest plan, he thought, and so did she. And yet one recollection came into his mind of Dover and another of London, when they were not apart for a moment, and just for that very reason everything went quite crazy. But they must not be too particular.

"And how is the old father?" he asked.

"Ah, he was so fond of you that I became jealous."

"I have noticed that. How did he receive you?"

"Well, I won't talk about that. But it was for your sake, so I forgave him." Even at that she could smile, as indeed she could at everything.

Well then, we will feast to-day, and work to-morrow.

[Footnote 1: Intimate friends thus address each other in Swedish.]

[Footnote 2: _Vide_ Horace.]

VI

The autumn brought what the spring had promised, but not fulfilled. They lived in a good boarding-house, high up certainly, but with a view over the sea. Each of them kept up a slight intercourse with former friends so that they were not always _tête-à-tête_. The sun shone, money came in, and life was easy. This lasted for two unforgettable months without a cloud. There was boundless confidence on both sides, without a trace of jealousy. On one occasion, when she had tried mischievously to arouse his, he had said to her: "Don't play with madness! Be sure that with such play you only arouse my abhorrence and my hatred at the same time, when you introduce into my mental pictures of you the image of another man."

But she herself was jealous, even of his male friends, and drove Ilmarinen away. There were ladies at the table d'hôte, and each time that he addressed one of them, she became so indisposed that she had to get up and go. There was no occasion to mistrust his faithfulness to her, but her imperiousness was so boundless, that she could not endure his imparting his thoughts to another, man or woman. When she conducted some business transactions for him with publishers she exceeded her authority and acted rather as his guardian than as his helper. He had to warn her: "Remember what I said! If you misuse the power I have given you, I will overthrow you like a tyrant." He did not doubt her goodwill but her want of insight and exaggerated ideas of his capacities caused him inconvenience, and even loss of money. When he took away from her the authority to act for him, she behaved like a naughty child, brought everything into confusion and threw it away as worthless. Accordingly, the way was prepared for the inevitable result.

One Sunday morning they had a disagreement on an important subject, and at last he had shut the door between their two rooms. Then he went out. On his return, he found a letter from his wife saying she had gone to a family which they knew in the country, and would be back in the evening. In order to let her feel what solitude is like he made an engagement for the evening with some friends. The evening came. He went out, but about ten o'clock, thinking it cruel to remain longer, he returned home. When he tried to open his door, he found it shut from within.

"Aha!" he thought. "This is her plan to make me listen to a curtain-lecture in her room." He rang for the servant. "Is my wife at home?"

"No, she came home at nine, but went out again, in order to meet you, sir."

"Very well, open the door of my wife's room." That was done, but the door of his room remained locked, as he had locked it himself in the morning. Then he made his decision, closed the outer door of the flat, and took possession of his wife's room. After an hour she came and knocked. Her husband answered through the closed door: "You can take my room; I hope you can open it."

When she found she could not she began to form suspicions and thought he had shut himself in with someone. She naturally would not endure the scandal but sent for the police, on the pretext that a thief had been there, and perhaps was still in the room. The police came; the Norwegian dressed himself and admitted them, and they broke open the door between the two rooms. At the same time the door leading to the corridor was opened. A servantmaid said she thought she had heard steps inside the room. Before the open window stood a chair so placed as though someone had stood on it in order to climb on the roof. A thief then (or a woman) had clambered on the roof. The police went on it with lanterns, and some of the inmates of the boarding-house followed. A shadow moved by a chimney. A cry rose: "There he is!" The police declared that they could not climb the steep slate roof, and advised them to send for the fire brigade. "But that costs fifty crowns," objected the Norwegian. His wife signed a requisition for it, but her husband tore it in two. Meanwhile a crowd had collected in the street; the neighbouring roofs were also full of spectators. A cry was raised: "There he is!" They had seized a fellow who had joined the searchers with the good intention of catching the thief. A maid recollected that in the afternoon a traveller had arrived and was sleeping in a neighbouring attic from which he could have easily got into the room. The police made their way into the attic, searched through his papers and found nothing. All the attics were ransacked without result, and at midnight the police departed.

Then the young wife wished to begin with a whole series of explanations, but her husband was tired of the whole nonsense and could explain nothing. Therefore, since nothing more was to be done, he carried his wife into her room and shut the door between them for the second time that day!

This demoniacal adventure was never cleared up. The Norwegian did not believe there had been a thief, for nothing was missing from the rooms; he thought that his young wife, who had seen many plays, had stuck something in the lock, and that then devils had continued the performance of the comedy. He did not try to elicit what his wife thought, for then he would have been entangled in a web of necessary lies. He therefore made a stroke of erasure through the whole affair. The next morning they were again good friends, but not quite so good as before.

How disunion between a married pair arises has not yet been explained. They love one another, only flourish in each other's society, have not different opinions, and suffer when they are separated; their whole united self-interest enjoins them to keep the peace, because it is they especially who suffer when it is not kept. Nevertheless, a little cloud arises, one knows not whence; all merits are transformed into faults, beauty becomes ugliness and they confront each other like two hissing snakes; they wish each other miles away, although they know that if they are separated for a moment there begins the pain of longing, which is greater than any other pain in life.

Here physiology and psychology are non-plussed. Swedenborg in his "Conjugal Love" is the only one who has even approached the solution of the problem, and he has seen that for that purpose higher factors must be taken into consideration than come into the mental purview of most people.

This is why a married pair who love each other are obliged again and again to wonder why they hate one another, i.e. why they flee one another although they seek one another. Married people who are slightly acquainted with Ganot's "Physics" may note the resemblance of this phenomenon to that of the electricised elder-pith balls, but this will not make them either wiser or happier. Love indeed presents all the symptoms of lunacy, hallucination, or seeing beauty where none exists; profoundest melancholy, varying with extreme hilarity without any transition stage; unreasonable hate; distortions of each other's real opinions (so-called "misunderstandings"); persecution mania, when one believes the other is setting spies and laying snares; sometimes indeed attempts on each other's life, especially with poison. All this has reasons which lie below the surface. The question arises, whether through a married pair's living together, the evil thoughts of one, while still unripened, are not quite clearly apprehended and interpreted by the other, as though they had already entered into consciousness, with the express purpose of being carried into action. Nothing annoys a man more than to have his secret thoughts read, and that only a married pair can do to each other. They cannot conceal their dark secrets; one anticipates the other's intentions, and therefore they easily form the idea that they spy on each other, as indeed they actually do. Therefore they fear no one's look so much as each other's, and are so defenceless against one another. Each is accompanied by a judge who condemns the evil desire while yet in the germ, although no one is answerable for his thoughts to the civic law.

Accordingly, in marrying, one enters into a relation which stands a grade higher than ordinary life, makes severer demands, more exacting claims, and operates with more finely developed spiritual resources. Therefore the Christian Church made marriage a sacrament, and regarded it rather as a purgatory than a pleasure. Swedenborg in his explanation of it, also inclines this way.

A married pair are ostensibly one, but cannot be really so. As a punishment they are condemned to feel thorns when they wish to gather roses. According to the proverb: "Omnia vincit amor" the power of love is so boundless, that if it were allowed uncontrolled sway, the order of the universe would be endangered. It is a crime to be happy, and therefore happiness must be chastised.

Our frivolous friends must have felt something of this, for when they had had a tiff, they reconciled themselves without explanations and without alleging reasons, as though it was not they who were to blame for the discord but a third unknown person who had brought about all the confusion.

They did so on this occasion also, but the peace did not last long. Some days afterwards an indisputable fact was apparent, which in ordinary marriages is accepted with mixed feelings, but in this one met with decided disapproval. The wife was beside herself: "Now you have ruined my career; I shall sink down to the level of a nurse and how shall we support ourselves?"

There awoke in her a personal grudge against her husband which degenerated into hatred. She was an example of the "independent" woman who protests against the supposed injustice of Nature in assigning all the discomfort to her. She forgets that this brief period of pain is followed by an extreme and long-lasting joy which is quite unknown to men.

Here reasonable considerations were naturally of no avail, and when there were no more smiles, the situation became serious. The scenes between them assumed a tragic character, and just at this crisis an action was brought against him for his last-published book, which was confiscated at the same time. Autumn passed, and one felt that the sun had gone. The cheerful top-floor room changed into a never-tidied sick-room--became narrow.

Her hatred increased continually; she could not go into society, nor to theatres, and hardly on the street. What most annoyed her was the fact that the doctor who had been summoned to declare that she had a dangerous disease, hitherto unknown, only smiled, saying that all the symptoms were normal, and ordered soda-water. Instead of an intelligent friend, the Norwegian found a malicious, spoilt, unreasonable child at his side, and longed to be out of all this wretchedness. All conversation ceased, and they only carried on communications by writing. But there is a kind of malice bordering on the disgraceful and infamous, which is hard to define but easy to recognise. That is the original sin in human nature, the positive wish to injure without cause, and without being justified in taking vengeance or exacting retribution. This kind of malice is hardly forgivable.

One day he received a scrap of paper on which something was written which prevented him going to her room again. Then came her ultimatum; she resolved to go to her relations the next day.

"I wish you a happy journey," he answered. In the dusk of the early morning a white form stood by his bedside stretching out its arms pleadingly for forgiveness. He did not move but let it stand there. Then she fell to the ground, and he let her lie, like an overthrown statue.

Whence the soft-hearted man, who was always ready to forgive, derived this firmness, this inhuman hardness, he could not understand, but it seemed to him to be imposed on him from without like a duty, or a fiery ordeal which he must go through. He went to sleep again. Then he awoke and dressed. He entered the empty room and was conscious of the void. Everything was irrevocably at an end!

A severe agitation was needed to bring his ego uppermost, and he resolved to drain a draught which was unsurpassed for bitterness. He went back to his native land, from which he had been banished.

When he got on the steamer for Christiania, he wrote a farewell letter to the captain, went on deck with his revolver, and thought of finding his grave in the Kattegat. Why did he not carry out this intention? Let him say who can! At last he found himself in a small provincial hotel. But why had it to be precisely the one in which Lais's friends and relations lived and dominated the social circle in which he must move? He could only regard that as a mean stroke on the part of Destiny, for on this occasion he was not to blame at all.

Meanwhile he sat as on an ant-heap in an alien and hostile environment. For three days long he asked himself: "What have I got to do here?" And he answered: "What indeed have you to do anywhere?" So he remained. For three days he asked himself: "What have you to do in life?" and questioned of the where, whence and whither. As an answer, the revolver lay on the table.

Hamburg, London, and Rügen began to shine like pleasant memories in comparison with this place of exile. It was so dreadful that he was astonished at the inventiveness of Destiny in devising new tortures which ever increased in severity. His room in the hotel was a suicide's room, i.e. a combination of discomfort and uncanniness. He was again haunted by the old idea he used to have: "I shall not get alive out of this room; here I must end my days." His capacity for hoping was exhausted. He seemed to be dropping downwards towards the empty void which began to close round him like the last darkness.

On the fourth day he received a letter from his sister-in-law in which she told him that his little wife was going on well. At the same time she proposed that he and his wife should spend the winter in a little town in Alster, so that her relations could now and then visit his wife who, in her present condition, needed help and advice.

It was, then, not at an end! And these pains of death had been endured in vain; he had not needed them in order to be taught to miss his wife. It was not over yet, and he began to live again.

As a proof that he had completely come to the end of himself it may be mentioned that the papers in those days contained a notice of his death. He wrote to contradict this in a vein of gloomy irony. He was tormented for three days more by having to run about to collect the journey money.

When the train at last stopped at the little station, he saw first of all his wife's pale face. It looked certainly somewhat exhausted by suffering, but beamed at the same time with some of that glorifying radiance which motherhood bestows. When her eyes discovered him, her face lit up.

"She loves me," he said to himself. And he began to live again literally not figuratively.

"Are you well?" he asked almost shyly.

"Yes I am," she whispered, burying like a child her face in his great cloak and kissing the edge of it.

"What are you doing? What are you doing?"

And she hid her face in his mantle in order not to show the emotion, of which she was always ashamed.

They had engaged two very inferior rooms; one was dark and the other uncomfortable, looking out on a factory. His wife worked in the kitchen and resigned herself to her fate, for her maternal feelings were aroused, though not yet completely. He suffered when he saw her toiling the whole day at the kitchen-range and in the scullery, and sometimes felt a twinge of conscience.

When he wished to help her to carry something heavy, she refused to be helped, for she insisted strongly that he should not be seen engaged in any feminine occupation, nor would she allow him to wait on her or to do her any small service. All storms were over now; a quiet stillness prevailed; the days passed one after the other in unvaried monotony. They lived alone together and had no social intercourse nor distractions.

But poverty came. The trial about his book had frightened the publishers and theatres. But the worst of all was that he could not write.

And what he could write, he did not wish to, for the plot of the story affected a family to whom he owed a debt of gratitude. Now when he would soon have two families to provide for, he trembled before the future with its increased duties, for a growing dislike to exercise his calling as an author had finally culminated in disgust.

What an occupation--to flay his fellow-creatures and offer their skins for sale. Like a hunter who, when pressed hard by hunger, cuts off his dog's tail, eats the flesh, and gives the bone--its own bone--to the dog. What an occupation to spy out people's secrets, expose the birth-marks of his best friend, dissect his wife like a rabbit for vivisection, and act like a Croat, cutting down, violating, burning, and selling. Fie!