FullReads

“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.'”