Mysteries (26 page)

And so the bacchanal began, a carouse and a priceless infernal hubbub that gave the little town something to talk about for several days to come....

As soon as Miniman entered the room, Nagel went up to him and apologized for having talked so much nonsense the last time they met. He took Miniman’s hand and shook it heartily; he also introduced him to Øien, the young student, who was the only one that didn’t know him. Miniman whispered a thank-you for the new trousers; now he was new from top to toe.
¹

“You still don’t have a vest, do you?”

“No, but that’s not necessary. I’m no lord, I assure you I don’t need a vest.”

Dr. Stenersen had broken his glasses and was now wearing a pince-nez without a cord, which was constantly slipping off.

“Say what you will,” he said, “we’re certainly living in a time of liberation. Just look at the election. And compare it to the previous election.”

Everyone was drinking steadily; the teacher was already speaking in monosyllables, and that was an unfailing sign. Hansen, the lawyer, who had doubtless had a few drinks before he came, began as usual to contradict the doctor and make a nuisance of himself.

For his part, Hansen was a socialist, rather advanced, if he might say so. He wasn’t very pleased with the election. What sort of liberation did it represent, could anyone tell him that? Oh, go to hell! A nice time of liberation they were having! Wasn’t even a man like Gladstone waging a wretched war against Parnell on moral grounds, on ridiculously beefy moral grounds? Oh, go to hell!

“How can you talk such damn nonsense?” the doctor yelled instantly. “Mustn’t there be morality in things?” If people heard there was no morality in things, how many would dare rise to the bait? You had to trick and fool people to make them progress, and you constantly had to honor morality. The doctor strongly supported Parnell, but if Gladstone found him to be impossible, it was only fair to assume that he knew what he was doing. Of course, he would make an exception of Mr. Nagel, his honorable host, who couldn’t even forgive Gladstone his clear conscience. “Ha-ha-ha, good Lord! ... By the way, Mr. Nagel, you aren’t very fond of Tolstoy either, are you? I was told by Miss Kielland that you also had some scruples about recognizing him.”

Nagel, who was talking to Øien, quickly turned and replied, “I don’t recall having spoken to Miss Kielland about Tolstoy. I recognize him as a great writer and as a philosophical fool....”
²
But after a moment he added, “We have to feel free to express ourselves rather broadly this evening, if it suits us, don’t you think? After all, there are only men present, and we are in a bachelor’s quarters. Shall we agree on that? The way I feel right now, I could show my teeth and growl.”

“Please yourself!”
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the doctor replied, offended. “Tolstoy a fool!”

“Yes, yes, let’s express our opinions,” the teacher shouted all of a sudden. He had just reached the critical stage of his inebriation and would henceforth stick at nothing. “Go the whole hog, Doctor, or we’ll throw you out. Everyone has his own opinion; Stocker, for instance, is a blessed villain. I shall prove it—prove it!”

Everyone laughed at this, and it was a little while before they could again talk about Tolstoy. He was a great writer and a great mind.

Nagel suddenly flushed. “A great mind he is not. His mind is, both in its kind and quality, as flatly common as it can possibly be, and
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his teaching isn’t a hairsbreadth deeper than the hallucinations of the Salvation Army. A Russian without his noble birth, without that old aristocratic name, without Tolstoy’s million rubles in ready cash, would hardly have become so famous by teaching a few peasants to patch a pair of boots.... But
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come, let’s rather be merry awhile. Skoal, Mr. Grøgaard!”

At brief intervals, Nagel took the opportunity of clinking glasses with Miniman; in effect, he paid great attention to him all evening. He again reverted to the nonsensical tales he had spun when they last saw each other and asked Miniman to forget about them.

“As for me, I won’t be astounded by anything coming from you,” the doctor said. He drew himself up.

“Occasionally I have an inclination to contradict,” Nagel continued, “and this evening I’m particularly bent on doing so. It’s partly due to a couple of unpleasant experiences that hit me rather hard the day before yesterday, partly to this dismal weather which I simply cannot stand. You, Dr. Stenersen, surely know something about that and will pardon me.
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... To speak about Tolstoy: I do not find his mind to be any deeper than, say, that of General Booth. They are both preachers, not thinkers but preachers. They sell existing products, popularize ready-made ideas, vulgarizing them for the masses at bargain prices and causing commotion in the world. But if you’re going to sell, you must do so at a profit. Tolstoy sells with staggering losses. Two friends once made a bet: one of them staked a shilling he would shoot a nut out of the other’s hand at twenty paces without hurting the hand. All right, he fired, missed badly, blew his whole hand to bits, and with flying colors. The other groaned and cried with his last strength, ‘You lost the bet, hand over the shilling!’ He got the money. Heh-heh, hand over the shilling, he said! ... God help me, how Tolstoy sweats over drying up people’s sources of life, of wild and joyful life, drying them up and making the world fat with love of God and everyman. It fills my heart with shame.
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It may sound impertinent to say that a count makes an agronomist feel deeply ashamed, but he does.... I would never have mentioned it if Tolstoy were a youth who had to overcome temptation, put up a fight, in order to preach virtue and live immaculately. But the man is old, after all, his fountains of life run dry, without a trace remaining of human affections. Well—you might say—that has no bearing on his teaching! Oh yes, it does have a bearing on his teaching! Only someone who has become slow and watertight with old age, satiated and hardened with pleasure, will go to a youth and say, Renounce! And the youth gives it a try; thinking it over, he recognizes it’s correct according to Scripture. And yet the youth renounces nothing, but sins royally for forty years. Such is the course of nature! But when the forty years are up and the young man has himself become old, he saddles his lily-white filly and rides off, holding the banner of the cross high in his bony hand and trumpeting youthful renunciation ad nauseam, while the world listens with grave attention. Heh-heh-heh-heh, it’s an ever-recurring comedy! I find Tolstoy amusing, I’m delighted that the old man can still do so much good; he will eventually enter into the joy of the Lord! The only trouble is that he’s merely repeating what so many old men have done before him and so many old men will do after him.
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Yes, that’s the trouble.”

“Let me just remind you—to say no more—that Tolstoy has shown himself a true friend of the needy and forsaken; shouldn’t that be considered at all? Show me a blue blood in this country who has looked after the humbler members of the community the way he has. It is a rather arrogant view, I think, to class Tolstoy’s teaching, simply because it’s not followed, with that of fools.”
⁹

“Bravo, Doctor!” the teacher roared again, his face scarlet. “Bravo! But say it more bitterly, say it gruffly. Everyone has his own opinion. An arrogant view, verily an arrogant view on your part! I shall prove it—”

“Skoal!” Nagel said. “Let’s not forget what we’re here for.
¹⁰
Do you really mean to say, Doctor, that giving away a ten-ruble note when one has a cool million left is worth admiring? I can’t understand the way you, and everybody else, regard this matter; I must be differently made. For the life of me, I cannot see how anybody—least of all a wealthy man—deserves to be admired for giving a bit of alms.”

“That’s good!” the lawyer remarked teasingly. “I’m a socialist, and that’s my position.”

But this annoyed the doctor and, turning to Nagel, he exclaimed, “If I may ask, do you really know that much about how many alms Tolstoy has handed out in the course of time, and how big they’ve been? There must be a limit to what one can say, even at a bachelor party.”

“And for Tolstoy,” Nagel replied, “the situation was this: there must be a certain limit to how much to give away! For which reason he let his wife take the blame for not giving away more! Heh-heh-heh, well, we’ll skip that.... But look: does one really give away a krone because one is kind, because one intends to do a kind and moral deed? How naive this view appears to me! There are some people who cannot help giving. Why? Because they experience a real psychological pleasure in doing so. They don’t do it with an eye to their own advantage, they do it on the quiet; they detest doing it openly because that would take away some of the satisfaction. They do it in secret, with quick trembling hands, their breast rocked by a spiritual well-being which they do not themselves understand. Suddenly they are overcome by an impulse to give something away; it manifests itself as a sensation in their breasts, a mysterious momentary desire that springs up in them and floods their eyes with tears. They don’t give out of kindness, but from an urge, for the sake of their personal well-being; some people are like that! One speaks of generous people with admiration; as I’ve said, I must be differently made from the rest of you: I don’t admire generous people. No, I don’t. Who the hell wouldn’t rather give than receive! May I ask if there exists a human being on earth who wouldn’t rather relieve destitution than be destitute? To use you as an example, Doctor: Not long ago you gave your oarsman five kroner. I overheard it by chance. Now then, why did you give away those five kroner? Surely not to perform a deed pleasing to God, which probably didn’t occur to you then; maybe the man didn’t even need the money very badly, but you gave it to him all the same. At that moment, I suspect, you simply yielded to a certain happy impulse to relinquish something and give pleasure to someone else.... To me, it seems unspeakably shabby to make a fuss over charity. You’re walking along the street one day, the weather is so and so and you see such and such people, all of which builds up a certain mood in you. Suddenly you catch sight of a face, a child’s face, a beggar’s face—let’s say a beggar’s face—which makes you tremble. A strange sensation vibrates through your soul, and you stamp your foot and come to a halt. This face has struck an exceptionally sensitive chord in you, and you lure the beggar into an entranceway and press a ten-krone bill into his hand. If you give me away by as much as a word, I’ll kill you! you whisper, and you fairly grind your teeth and shed tears of anger saying it. That’s how important it is to you to remain undiscovered. And this can happen repeatedly, day after day, so that often you end up in the worst kind of scrape yourself, without a penny in your pocket.... These traits are not my own, of course; but I do know a man, another man—well, for that matter, I know two men who are thus constituted.... No, you give because you have to give, and that’s that! However, I’ll make an exception as far as misers are concerned. Misers and blatantly stingy people make real sacrifices when they give something away, there can be no doubt about that. And so I say that such people are more worthy of respect, for the one øre they bring themselves to spare, than a man like you, or him or me, who squanders a krone for the pleasure of it. Tell Tolstoy from me that I don’t give a stiver for all his nauseating show of kindness—not until he gives away all he owns, and not even then.... By the way, I apologize if I have given offense to anybody. Have another cigar, Mr. Grøgaard. Skoal, Doctor!”

Pause.

“How many people do you think you’ll convert in your lifetime?” the doctor asked.

“Bravo!” the teacher cried, “a bravo from Master Holtan!”

“I?” Nagel asked. “None, none at all. If I were to live by converting people, I would starve pretty soon. It’s just that I can’t understand why everyone else doesn’t think the way I do. So I must be the one who is mostly in the wrong. But not completely, I can’t possibly be completely wrong.”

“But so far I haven’t heard you express approval of anything or anybody,” the doctor said. “It would be interesting to know if there is someone with whom you, too, can hit it off.”

“Let me explain myself a bit, a couple of words will do. What you meant to say, I suppose, was this: Look out, he admires no one, he is arrogance personified, he can’t hit it off with anybody! That’s not true. My brain doesn’t have a very wide compass, it doesn’t reach very far, but still I could enumerate hundreds upon hundreds of those ordinary, acknowledged great men who fill the world with their renown. My ears are crammed with their names. Yet, I would prefer to name the two or four, or six, greatest intellectual heroes, demi-gods, gigantic creators of values, and for the rest stick with a few sheer nonentities, fine singular geniuses who are never mentioned, whose lives were brief and who died young and unknown. In fact, I might want to include relatively many of those. But I’m certain of one thing: I would forget about Tolstoy.”

“Listen,” the doctor said brusquely, to have done with it—he even gave a distinct shrug—“do you really believe that someone could achieve the kind of world-wide fame Tolstoy enjoys without being a mind of high rank? It’s extremely amusing to listen to you, but what you’ve said is pure tommyrot. Your damn blather is enough to turn one’s stomach.”

“Bravo, Doctor!” Master Holtan roared. “Just don’t let our host turn your heads—your heads—”

“The teacher reminds me that
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I’m not being a very good host,” Nagel said, laughing. “But I’ll do better. Mr. 0ien, you don’t have anything in your glass, do you? Why on earth aren’t you drinking?”

The fact was that Øien had been sitting silent as death listening to the conversation all along; he had barely missed a word. His eyes were narrow and curious, and he veritably cocked his ears as he listened. The young man was intensely interested. It was rumored that—like other students—he was working on a novel during the holidays.