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“Was he drunk?”

“Yes, he was, and the others as well; and very drunk too, both the doctor and the lawyer; and the worst of it was, they were neither of them his friends or partisans. It was a trick they had played on him, for that was what people were in the habit of doing. They had undertaken to make him drunk; but they had become still more drunk themselves.”

“How horrible, mother!” She wanted to stop; but the mother went on.

“Yes. I had read all kinds of things about Karl Mander–but it was a different thing to see him.”

“Were you not afraid?”

“Yes. It was disgusting. But when they came near enough for me to distinguish their faces, and all the people in the crowd who could see them laughed aloud, I shook off my fear; and when they came quite close, Karl Mander appeared to me such a marvel that I absolutely delighted in him. I admit it.”

“How a marvel?”

“He was the embodiment of beaming joy! Picture a whole brigade of cavalry in the maddest gallop, you would not get such a sense of exuberant delight! The powerful figure with the mighty head held these two little men, one under each arm, as though he were dragging along two poachers. And as he did so he laughed and shouted like a boisterous child. He looked as kindly and gladsome as the longest day in the year up at the North Pole. As for the others who had set themselves to make him tipsy–for, as I have told you, it was the fashionable amusement at that time to make Karl Mander drunk–he brought them alongside in triumph. He was tremendously proud of it. He was tall and broad-shouldered, in his light checked woollen suit, which was very thin and fine; for he could not endure heat, he was foremost among the worshippers of cold water, and bathed in it, even when he had to break the ice. He held his hat, which was a soft one and could be folded up, in his left hand. That was how he was always seen; he never wore his hat at home, and out of doors he carried it in his hand.

“A great bushy head of hair, extraordinarily thick and brown; which at this moment was falling over the lofty brow–(yes, your brow is like his)–and then the beard! I have never seen so beautiful a beard. It was of a light colour and very thick, but the chief peculiarity of it was its delicate curliness. It was positively beautiful in itself–as a beard seldom is.

“And then those deep shining eyes–yours are something like them–and the clearly cut curve of the nose! He was a gentleman.”

“Was he?”

“Heaven! haven’t I managed to give you that impression?”

“Yes, yes–but others have—-” She was silent, and the mother paused.

“Magne! I have not been able, I have not wished, to shield you from all this. As long as you were a child, a young girl, I could not explain everything to you exactly as it was. It would also have led you to try to defend that which you had not yet the power to defend, and that would have done you harm. And there was something else besides.

“But now you shall know it. Since your childhood I have never given you any advice which did not come from your father. You never saw him, but all the same I can say that you have never seen nor heard anything but him. Through me, you understand!”

“How so, mother?”

“Well, we are coming to that. Now I must make you understand how I came to marry him.”

“Yes, dear!”

“He stood there on the platform and drank down water, glass after glass. He drank the entire contents of the water-bottle and called for more. The people laughed, and he laughed. He held the water-bottle and glass in a drunken grasp, and he looked up and round him, as though he was not properly conscious of himself or of us. And he laughed. But through it all I saw the godlike in him.