Mother's Hands, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson [hardest books to read .TXT] 📗

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 Tolstoi, then?"

"No, they were very different. Tolstoi is a Slav by birth, Ivan the Terrible and Tolstoi 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 Tolstoi?"

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

"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