Three Dramas. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson
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his end will cause among a few individuals cannot be called posthumous fame. (HARALD begins to speak, but checks himself.) Can you hope to make a better fight of it? You think you are stronger? Very well; perhaps you may have the strength to endure it until other times come and other opinions with them. But there will be one by your side who will not have the strength to endure it. Gertrud is not strong—she could never stand it; indeed now—already—. (Is stopped by his emotion.)
Mrs. Evje. She hides it from you, but she cannot hide it from us. Besides, a friend of ours—our dear doctor—said only yesterday—. (Breaks off in tears.)
Evje. We never told you, but he warned us some time ago; we had no idea it was so serious, or that it had anything to do with this. But yesterday he frightened us; he said she—. Well, you can ask him yourself. He will be here directly. (HARALD fills a glass of water and raises it to his lips, but sets it down again untasted.)
Mrs. Evje (going to him). I am so sorry for you, Harald! To have this come on you just now—when your splendid brother is at the point of death, and you yourself are being persecuted! (A ring is heard at the bell.)
Evje. But it should be a warning to you! Sometimes a single movement will change the course of a whole life.
Mrs. Evje. And do have a little confidence in us! (A ring is heard again.)
Evje. What on earth has become of John to-day? That is the second time the bell has rung.
Mrs. Evje. One of the maids is opening the door, I can hear.
Evje. I expect it is the doctor.
Mrs. Evje. Yes, it is he—I know his ring. (A knock is heard at the door.)
Evje. Come in! (The DOCTOR comes in.)
The Doctor. Good morning! (Lays down his hat and stick.) Well, so I hear John has been up to his pranks again? The rascal is in bed.
Evje and Mrs. Evje. In bed?
The Doctor. Came home at four o'clock in the morning, drunk. Ill to-day, naturally. Ingeborg asked me to go in and see him.
Evje. Well!—I am determined to put an end to it!
Mrs. Evje. Yes, I have never been able to understand why you were so lenient with John.
Evje. He has been with us five years; and, besides, it makes people talk so, if you have to send your servants away.
Mrs. Evje. But surely this sort of thing makes them talk much worse!
Evje. Well—he shall leave this very day.
The Doctor (to HARALD). How are you, Rejn?—Oho! I understand. I have come at an inopportune moment with my complaints of John? You have all got something more serious on your minds?
Mrs. Evje. Yes, we have had it out, as we agreed yesterday.
The Doctor. You must forgive me, my dear Rejn, for having told my old friends the whole truth yesterday. She (pointing to MRS. EVJE) was an old playfellow of mine, and her husband and I have been friends from boyhood; so we have no secrets from each other. And Gertrud's condition makes me very uneasy.
Harald. Why have you never told me that before?
The Doctor. Goodness knows I have often enough given her parents hints that she was not well; but they have only made up their minds that her happiness in her engagement would quite cure her. They are a considerate couple, these two dear people, you know; they didn't want to seem interfering.
Harald. Their consideration—which I appreciate and have lately had constant reason to be grateful for—has all at once become a more powerful weapon than open opposition. It makes a duty of what I should otherwise have felt to be unfair coercion. But now the situation is such that I can neither go forward nor back. After what I have gone through, you must see that I cannot withdraw on the very eve of the election—and after the election it will be too late. On the other hand—(with emotion)—I cannot, I dare not, go on with it if it is to cost me—. (Breaks off.)
Evje (standing in front of the fire). There, there! Take time to think it over, my dear boy; talk it over with her and with your brother.
The Doctor (who has sat down on a chair to the left, a little away from the others). I have just been to see your brother. A remarkable man! But do you know what occurred to me as I sat there? He is dying because he is a man. The only people that are fit for political life nowadays are those whose hearts have been turned to stone. (Picks up something from the table and gets up.) Ah, just look here! Here is a fine specimen of petrifaction. It is a fragment of palm leaf of some kind, found impressed in a bit of rock from Spitzbergen. I sent it you myself, so I know it. That is what you have to be like to withstand arctic storms!—it will take to harm. But your brother—well, his life had been like that of the original palm tree, with the air sighing through its branches; the change of climate was too sudden for him. (Goes up to HARALD.) You have still to try it. Shall you be able to kill all the humanity that is in you? If you can make yourself as insensate a thing as this stone, I daresay you will be able to stand the life. But are you willing to venture upon political life at such a price? If you are—so be it; but remember that in that case you must also kill all humanity in Gertrud—in these two—in every one that is dear to you. Otherwise no one will understand you or follow you. If you cannot do that, you will never be more than a dabbler in politics—a quarter, an eighth part, of a politician—and all your efforts, in what you consider your vocation, will be pitiable!
Mrs. Evje (who has been occupied at the back of the room, but now sits down by the fare). That is quite true! I know cases of petrifaction like that—and God preserve anyone that I love from it!
Evje (coming forward towards HARALD). I don't want to say anything to hurt your feelings—least of all just now. But I just want to add my warning, because I believe I have discovered that there is a danger that persecution may make you hard.
Harald. Yes!—but do you suppose it is only politics that offer that dangerous prospect?
The Doctor. You are quite right! It is all the cry nowadays, "Harden yourself!" It isn't only military men and doctors that have to be hardened; commercial men have to be hardened, civil servants have to be hardened, or dried up; and everybody else has to be hardened for life, apparently. But what does it all mean? It means that we are to drive out all warmth from our hearts, all desire from our imaginations. There is a child's heart at the bottom of every one of our hearts-ever young, full of laughter and tears; and that is what we shall have killed before we are "fitted for the battle of life," as they put it. No, no—that is what we ought to preserve; we were given it for that! (HARALD hides his face in his hands, and sits so for some time.)
Mrs. Evje. Any mother or any wife knows that.
Evje (standing with his back to the fire). You want to bring back the age of romance, doctor!
The Doctor (with a laugh). Not its errors—because in those days unclean minds brought to birth a great deal that was unclean. (Seriously.) But what is it, when all is said and done, but a violent protest on the part of the Teutonic people against the Romanesque spirit and school—a remarkable school, but not ours. To us it seems a barren, merely intellectual school—a mere mass of formulas which led to a precocious development of the mind. And that was the spirit it bred—critical and barren. But these schools of thought are now all we have, and both of them are bad for us! They have no use for the heart or the imagination; they do not breed faith or a longing for high achievement. Look at our life! Is our life really our own?
Mrs. Evje. No. You have only to think of our language, our tastes, our society, our—
The Doctor (interrupting her). Those are the externals of our life, merely the externals! No, look within—look at such a view of life as we were talking about, clamouring for "hardening"—is that ours? Can we, for all our diligence, make as much way in it as, for instance, a born Parisian journalist?—become like a bar of steel with a point at each end, a pen-point and a sword-point? We can't do that; the Teutonic temperament is not fitted for it.
Evje.