Captain Mansana & Mother's Hands

"I had often heard people described as being possessed by some force of nature, but I had never seen it. Least of all at the Court, where marked personality is rare. I was at last face to face with one. The man who stood there was obliged to speak—in the same way, probably, as at a generous table he was obliged to drink. I knew that he managed his two farms, and worked on them himself when he had time, and I imagined that I could see the giant finding relaxation in the work; but I saw clearly that his mind would work on as actively all the same, and that head and hands would vie with each other which should weary first.

"It was of work that he spoke. He led off by a reference to the Queen.

"'Who is she?' he asked; then he answered with some kindly feeling words about her. Then he asked again: 'Who is she?' He replied with another inquiry: 'Does she earn her own bread?'

"This he held was the first obligation of all grown-up human beings who had the power to do it. That was the first standard we should apply to one another.

"'Does she earn her own bread? Do those who are in her suite earn theirs?'

"'No,' he answered, 'they don't earn it. They live on that which others have earned, and are earning.

"'What do they do? Brain work? No, they live by the brain work of others. How do they spend their days then?

"'In enjoyment, mental and bodily enjoyment of that which others have done and are doing. In luxury, in idleness, in social formalities, in king-worship, in travelling, in repose do they live.' At this point he kept on substituting one word for another, but made no pause.

"Their greatest exertion, he said, was to try to enjoy an additional party or an extra levee, their greatest danger was a cold or an overtaxed digestion.

"And in order that the fruit of other people's labour should not be taken from them, what did they do?

"They opposed everything which threatened them with a new order of things. They opposed all needful changes. They opposed emancipation for those who had nothing in the world. They behaved as though society had from eternity been ordained for them, as though they could say 'Thus far and no farther.'

"You will understand that I have learnt all these ideas from my intercourse with him. I could after my own fashion make all his speeches, and that more fluently; but I believe that this exchanging one word for another, and his perpetually halting over it, made the words that he finally did choose more significant. For my part, I have written down everything that happened in our short life together."

"Everything?"

"I mean everything that mattered at all. Everything, everything. He never wrote a line, he said he had no time, he despised it. And when death took him from me and from us all, what had I better to do? No—don't interrupt me—let me go on telling you! He repeated the same thought from the religious point of view. It was his way to look at the same idea from every side. He said that to-day he had been to see an old woman who said that she couldn't go to church because she had no shoes. There was no end of trouble to get her some, for the two shoe-shops wouldn't sell any on Sunday, but she got them. He saw her afterwards go to church, just at the same time as the Queen and her suite.

"And he thought, there are so many who sit in church with wretched shoes on, and so many at home, who dare not venture to church because of their miserable shoes, or the rest of their miserable garments. Who are they who have such wretched shoes and clothing? They who have worked most, worked until they are broken with toil.

"But those who have not worked have ten pairs of shoes, they could have a thousand; and clothes too, in the greatest superfluity. He had not been to church, he said, but he knew that there they held forth as though it were the most natural thing in the world that those who had shoes should give them to those who had none. You would gather from the preaching that Jesus Himself had taught it, Jesus had come to make all men happy, and this was the best way! For it is written, 'He went about doing good.'

"But they all went home from church just as they came; and no exchange of shoes took place, nor exchange of clothing either. One went back to his superfluity of leisure, the other to his poverty and want, and those who had not been able to go at all, because they were too poor, remained after the service as they had been before it.

"Such, you see, is our Christianity, he said. And he had a right to speak, I can tell you, because he shared his 'superfluity' with others."

"But still you live in a certain comfort?"

"Yes, in his opinion every one had a right to do so. The man who recognised that he was called on to sacrifice his comfort also should do it; but for most educated people comfort was the indispensable condition of work and help the foundation of happiness. And there was a charm of beauty about it, too, which is a rare incentive.

"No, what he demanded was that all those who could should support themselves—hear that, my daughter!—and that those who had superfluity should employ it in work which should be fruitful for others. He called that Church cowardly and shameless which did not make that demand without respect of persons."

"Like Tolstoï, then?"

"No, they were very different. Tolstoï is a Slav by birth, Ivan the Terrible and Tolstoï both of them; for these contradictions pre-suppose each other. The one did everything by force, the other resists nothing. The one had to crush all wills under his own in order to make room for himself, the other will willingly yield, knowing that a desire, once satisfied, dies. The Slav impulse towards tyranny, the Slav impulse towards martyrdom, the same passionate excess in both. Born of the same people, and under the same conditions.

"All the freedom we in Western Europe enjoy we have attained by keeping bounds, not for ourselves alone but for others. And also by resisting. It is weakness that knows no limits: strength ordains limits and observes them."

"But yet the Bible teaches–"

"Yes, yes, but the Bible is from the East too; the Westerns act in opposition to the Bible. What I am saying comes from your father."

"Did he know Tolstoï?"

"No, but what I have been saying is older than either the Bible or Tolstoï."

"Then he was a great orator?"

"That I could hardly venture to call him; he could not be reckoned among the prophets, but among the seers.

"Now don't interrupt me. He believed that in another hundred years to live in idleness and superfluity would be looked upon by most people as now we look upon a life of fraud and crime."

"Oh, mother, how did you feel about it?"

"His voice seemed to surge and vibrate in my ears both day and night. A storm-cloud seemed to surround me. Not as though he thundered or commanded. No, it was his personality, and something in the voice itself. It was deep and restrained, as though from a cavern; it came fitfully, but without cessation. I believe he spoke for over two hours. Whomever he happened to look at looked at him, and if he looked away the other continued to gaze—he couldn't help it, you understand. His eyes blazed with inward fire, he stood bending forward like a tree on a hillside. The image of the forest rose in my mind. Later, when I was nearer to him, the breath of the forest seemed to hang round him. And his skin was so clear! For instance, that part of his throat which was not sunburnt, because he stooped. When he lifted his head, you can't imagine how pure and fair it was.

"Ah, how have I drifted into this train of thought? But never mind, I have drifted into it—and I will follow it out—it takes me to your father's side again! O Magne, how I loved him! how I shall always love him!" She burst into tears—the girl's heart beat against hers. The softened colours of wood and plain in the uncertain light, the strenuous roar of the river seemed to sunder them from each other; the surroundings were at war with their mood; but the more closely did they cling together, each supporting the other.

"Magne, you mustn't ask me to put what I have to say to you in any sort of order. I only know the point I am aiming at.

"Yes, he was like the nature that surrounded him, fashioned on a generous scale and rich with hidden treasures: so much I dimly grasped. Everything I saw was new to me, the face of nature as well as the rest. I had travelled, but not in Norway.

"It is said of us women that we are not able to analyse those whom we love, but only worship them in the abstract. But he had a friend, his best friend; he could analyse him; the poet. He was present at Karl Mander's last meeting, and he came to me from it when your father was dead. We talked together of everything as much as I then could. He wrote about him the most beautiful things that have ever been written. I know them by heart; I know everything by heart that has been worthily written about your father."

"Do you know what it was he wrote?"

"'If the landscape I see around me could speak like a human being; if the dark lofty ridge could find speech to answer the river, and those two began to talk across the underwood, then you would know the impression made when Karl Mander had spoken so long that the vibration of his deep voice and the thoughts it uttered had melted into one.

"'Halting and with difficulty, as though from inward depths clumsily fumbling for words, he always arrived at the same goal. The thought was at last as clear and lucid as a birch leaf held against the sunlight.'"

"Was it then–"

"No, don't interrupt me! 'Karl Mander often seemed to me as unlike all other people as though he belonged to a different order of things. He was not like an individual, he represented a race. He swept by like a mighty river: at the mercy of chance and natural obstacles, perhaps, but ever rolling on. So was he, both in life and in speech. Neither was his voice merely individual, it had in it the reverberation of a torrent—a melancholy, captivating harmony, but monotonous, unceasing.'"

"That surely is what the sea sounds like, mother?"

The mother was as much carried away by her memories as animated in her movements, as eager in her glance as a young girl. Now she stopped.

"Like the sea, do you say? No, no, no, not like the sea. The sea is only an eye. No, dear, not like the sea; there were warm depths and hiding-places in his nature such as the sea has not. One had a sense of intimate security and comfort with him. He was capable of the most self-forgetting devotion. Listen further. 'Karl Mander was chosen,' he wrote, 'chosen as a forerunner before the people's own time should come—chosen because he was good and blameless; his message to futurity was not soiled in his soul.'"

"That is beautiful."

"Child, can you imagine how I was carried away? I had had a vague feeling that the surroundings of my life were unreal; here was something that was real.

"And he himself! We women do not love that which is lofty merely because it is lofty; no, there must be a certain weakness too—something that appeals to our help; we must feel a mission. And you cannot conceive how powerful and yet powerless he was."

"How powerless, mother?"

"Well, when he came—in that condition–"

"Yes, of course."

"And his way of expressing himself. He never found the right words first, he stopped and changed them even as they poured out. And, in the meantime, if he caught something up in his hand he stood there with it. If it were the tumbler—and it generally was—he grasped it tightly, and so, because of it, would keep his hand still for a quarter of an hour at a time. His personality was so pathetically simple, or how shall I express it? He was a seer, not a prophet—yes, I told you that before. But seers are quite different, they don't know themselves so well, they have absolutely no vanity. Heavens, how I longed to go and take off his cuffs! One could see that he was not accustomed to wear them: some one must have told him that it would not do to make a speech from a platform without cuffs on. He had crumpled and tumbled them; they had come unfastened, or perhaps never had been fastened; they got in the way and slipped over his hands. He struggled with them. There was something wrong about the waistcoat too; it was buttoned wrong, I believe, and puckered up at one side, so that it showed one of his braces—to me at any rate, where I sat looking at him sideways and with the light full upon him. Ah, that mighty creature with the stooping head! The tears rose in my eyes. Who would not have been willing to follow him?

"I felt as deeply as it could be felt that he must be helped. I did not know that I was to help him; I only knew that he must be helped and sustained."

A rush of memory so overpowered her that she could not go on, she turned away.

PART III

The daughter saw her mother in a new light. Surely this was not she who ordered and managed her house, who sent wise letters to her, with earnest, well-weighed words! How her passion had transfigured and beautified her!

"But how did you feel, dearest mother?"

"I was not conscious of what I felt. We went away from there the day after, and our next halting-place was close to his two farms. I had my wits so far about me, however, that when some of us had to be quartered out, I chose the house which was nearest his. And when the tempest within me was no longer to be resisted I wrote to him, without signing my name. I asked him for an interview. He was to meet me on the road that went through his wood, between his house and ours. I dropped the letter into his own letter-box on the road. You can imagine what a state I was in when I tell you that I had appointed ten o'clock in the evening, as I thought that then it would be dark! I had not noticed that it was still light at that time, so far north had we come. The result was that I did not dare to go out until eleven, and then I was sure there would be no one to meet. But there he was! Mighty and stooping, his hat pressed together in his hand, he came forward, hesitatingly, shyly, and awkwardly, glad. 'I knew it was you,' he said."

"Oh, mother! what did you do?"

"All at once I began to wonder where I had got the courage from! I did not even know what I wanted with him! When I saw him I could have turned and fled. But his wonderful gait, those long firm strides, his hat in hand, his shaggy head.... I felt I must see it all. And the wonderful thing he said: 'I knew it was you.' How could he have known it? I don't remember whether I asked him, or if he saw my surprise, but he explained that he had seen me as we came away from the lecture; he had heard who I was. It was wonderful to hear the deep voice, which for me meant something so absolutely exceptional, as though resounding from the far future, making embarrassed excuses for having said anything that might have wounded me. Before he succeeded in getting out 'wounded you,' he stammered—'wounded the Queen—wounded the Queen and her ladies—wounded you!' He had so many other subjects he might have touched upon, and so many other themes he might have chosen. He could have said so much that was good of the Queen, much that he knew to be true; but he had forgotten it. So he went on, his eyes looking into mine—trusting, but commanding eyes, whose attraction I felt. There seemed to be an echo in the silent wood of his unfathomable honesty. And his eyes went on repeating, 'Don't you believe it, too?' No one can imagine how unconscious he was of the effect they produced. He spoke, and I listened, and we drew nearer and nearer to each other. But the joy I felt, and which could not find words—what should I have said? At last it became uncontrollable—it burst all bounds. I suddenly heard myself laugh! And you should have seen how, all of a sudden, he laughed with me! Laughed, so that the woods re-echoed! The fishermen were just rowing past to be at their post when the sun should rise. They rested on their oars and listened. They all knew the sound of his laughter. I recognised its sound from the time when I saw him coming between his two satellites. There was a faun in him—a northern faun, of course, a wild man of the woods, unrestrained, but innocent, leading two bears, one under each arm! Yes, something of that kind. Not a troll, you understand, for they are stupid and malignant."

"You say 'innocent,' mother? How do you mean that he was innocent, since he was so wild?"

"Because nothing harmed him. Whatever he might have known or experienced, he remained a great child all the same. Yes, I tell you, refined and as aloof from evil. He had such a power of refinement in himself that what did not appeal to his nature was annihilated by it. It no longer existed for him."

"Oh, mother, how was it all? Oh, why have you been given this experience, and not I!" She had hardly spoken the words when she turned and ran swiftly away. The mother let her alone; she sat on a stone and waited her return. It was good to rest with her thoughts. She sat a long time alone, and would willingly have sat longer; but the clouds began to gather. Then Magne came back with a nosegay of the most beautiful wild flowers and delicate grasses arranged about a fir branch covered with cones, grey-green young cones.

"Mother, he was like this nosegay, wasn't he? What, dear mother, are you crying?"

"I am crying for joy, my child; for joy and regret both together. One day you will come to understand that those are the most comforting tears in the world."

But Magne had thrown herself down on the ground by her side. "Mother, you don't know how happy you have made me to-day!"

"I see I have, dear child; I was right to wait; it was a struggle, but I did right."

"Mother, dear mother, let us go back to the forest at home, to the road through our forest! Let me hear more! It was there it happened, then! Mother, tell me! What came next, sweetest mother! Ah, how lovely you are! There is always something fresh to discover in you."

The mother stroked her hair in silence, soothingly.

"Mother, I know that woodland road on summer nights. Laura walked there with me when she was engaged, and told me how it all happened, and the fishers rode past that time too, just as we came to an opening. We hid ourselves behind a great boulder; and the thrush began to sing, and many other birds, but the thing that affected me most was the scented air."

"Yes, doesn't it? And that is why I have always thought since that the woodland scent hung around Karl. Ah, I must tell you how curiously unconscious he was—what other word can I use? We stood still and looked over the lake. 'Oh, what a longing that gives,' said I. 'Yes, a longing to bathe, doesn't it?' said he."

Magne broke into hearty laughter; the mother smiled. "Now it no longer seems so strange to me. The water was more to him than it is to us—he used to plunge into a bath at the most unexpected times: when he was not to be found in his farms or at his office, that was always where he was. It was his strongest natural craving; he loved the cold embrace of the elements, he said.

"And how he laughed to himself when he saw how I was laughing! We laughed in unison."

"Then, mother, what happened? I can really wait no longer."

"I came home just as other people were getting up. And the next night was like that one, and the next after that, and the next after that again. One night it rained, and we both walked along under the same umbrella, and that was what brought things to a climax."

"To a climax?—how?"

"After once being obliged to walk arm-in-arm, we always went arm-in-arm afterwards."

"But other people, mother? Weren't you afraid of what they would say?"

"No; other people didn't exist for me. I can't remember how it all went on—it happened that one night we had sat down."

"Ah! now we are coming to it!"

"I asked to be allowed to sit down; I felt I could walk no longer. The night was glorious—silence and we two! He went on talking with his eyes looking into mine; he didn't know himself how they shone with happiness. I couldn't speak—I could hardly breathe—I was obliged to rest. And a few minutes after I sat on his knee."

"Was it he who–"

"I cannot quite remember. I only remember the first time my arms were about his neck and my face against his hair and beard. It was rapture, something absolutely new—it was bliss. The feeling of those giant arms round me transported me far, far away. But we were there on the boulder all the same."

"Were you as though beside yourself–?"

"Yes, that is just it! that is what it is called—but it really means being in possession of oneself, raised up to higher things. By his side I was myself twice over. That is love; nothing else deserves the name."

"Mother, mother! it was you, then, who sprang into his arms! It was you!"

"Yes, I am afraid it was I. I suppose he was too modest, too shy to begin that sort of thing. Yes, I know in my heart it was I. For life must be preserved. It was a question of nothing less. To be able to help him, to follow him, and worship him, and give myself up to him, that or nothing. I believe, too, that that was what I said to him, if I did say a single word."

"Oh, you know that you said it!"

"I believe I did; but in looking back upon such moments as those one does not know whether one was feeling or speaking." She looked out into the long valley. She stood like one who is about to sing, with lifted head and open mouth, listening for the music before it sounds. But it was not so: it was the sound of bygone music that she heard.

A little while afterwards she said quite softly—the daughter was obliged to draw nearer to her, for the sound of the river swallowed up some of the words:

"Now you shall hear something, Magne; you have never heard it from me, and others are not likely to have told you."

"What is it, mother? You almost frighten me."

"At the time I met your father I was already engaged."

"What do you say? You, mother?"

"Yes, I was engaged, and was to be married; and it was my last month with the Queen. The engagement had taken place, and was to be carried out with the highest sanction."

"But to whom?"

"Ah, that is it! Didn't I tell you before, that at the time I met your father I was in absolute despair?"

"You, mother? No."

"I did not believe that life had anything to offer, or that I had anything to wait for. Most girls who arrive at the age of twenty-eight without anything having happened to them, anything that is worth rousing themselves for, believe that nothing is worth caring about. The age, or about that age, is the most perilous."

"How do you mean?"

"That is when most girls come to despair."

She took her daughter's arm, which she pressed, and so they walked on together.

"I must confess it all to you"—but there she stopped.

"Who was it, mother?" She said it so softly that her mother didn't hear, but she knew what it was.

"It was some one for whom you have but small respect, my child. And you are right."

"My uncle?"

"How did that occur to you?"

"I don't know. But was it he?"

"Yes, it was. Yes, I see you don't understand it. I never understood it myself, either. Think of your father, and of him! And just about the same time, too. What do you think of me? But, oh! take care of yourself, my child."

"Mother?"

"Well, well—you have a mother, and I had none. And I was at Court, and, as I told you, at the perilous age when nothing seems worth caring about any longer. Of course I, too, had been playing the same game that I have been looking on at to-day, but not with your aptitude. Yes, you may turn away your face. I had come to feel a certain disgust with life—for myself among the rest—and so I went on refusing people till it was too late in the day."

"But—with my uncle!" Magne broke out again.

"We looked upon him differently at that time. But I don't want to go into all that again now. I will only admit that it was horrible. So you may think what you like about it—I mean as to how it came about."

The daughter took her arm away and looked at her mother.

"Yes, Magne, we don't always do as we mean to do, and I have told you I was at the perilous age. And so you can understand how I felt when I saw your father—there was something more than pettiness and frivolity in me after all."

"But the others, mother! How could you put it in the proper light to the others, to the Court, to our relations, to my uncle, and all his people? Surely there must have been a fuss and a scandal that you had to hold up your head against?"