The Stranger from the Sea

by Paul Binding

  Now, fortified by lunch and looking every inch the half-casual, halfsmart professional writer, Will has got his writing-pad out and is resting it on his knees to jot notes about the show. But at this early point he’s reluctant to let the point about names drop.

  “It certainly seems a coincidence to me,” Will says, “and I’m surprised you’re not more surprised. Imagine going to a theatre in Christiania and seeing in the program there’s a character called Bridges or Postgate.”

  Once again, I can’t disagree. But at that moment the lights begin to dim, and, as always at some cultural occasion, I feel a sort of agitation—neither pleasing nor altogether displeasing—in the stomach, stronger than the proverbial “butterflies,” but less strong than the sensation that you have before the dentist decides you need chloroform for that particular bit of tooth-work. Besides—perhaps because I’ve been to plays comparatively seldom—I have never quite lost the sense that the theatre is not just illusion, but another reality, established by an invisible power and progressing toward an end which must therefore be inevitable but may upset, and even horrify one. Sometimes I fear I might suddenly act as small children are supposed to do and shout out that this should not happen or that that simply must. The deep brownish-pink, apple-green, and gold of the curtain as it lifts up is swallowed by the darkness that descends from the ceiling and walls, and then by the blaze of light from the stage.

  And on this stage I see—or am transported to—a garden, framed on one side by a veranda and on the other by a hedge with a small gate, and containing a flagstaff and an arbor. Beyond the garden runs a tree-lined road and between the trees you can glimpse a great stretch of water (the fjord, obviously); beyond that soar mountain-peaks. I am in Norway at last!

  In the garden a middle-aged man in an old velvet jacket (rather like one of Edmund’s) and a wide-awake hat attends to the flagstaff ropes, the flag itself sprawling on the ground beside him. Some feet away from him stand an easel holding a canvas and also a camp-stool on which lie brushes and paints ready for use. A pleasant-looking young woman—well, young-ish; she’s probably my own age, and I’m a husband, father, and a newspaper’s “daily manager”—comes into this garden from a room on the interior side of the veranda, carrying a large vase of flowers. I almost always have difficulty picking up the real drift of the opening lines of any play, mostly (I suppose) because I am anxious I won’t grasp it, and so not properly follow what’s to come. I also notice that actors usually shout at the beginning of a play and exaggerate everything, whether solemn or amusing, dramatic or trivial (or do they, in truth, do this all the way through, and one simply gets used to it?). At any rate I have to fight between my awareness of being taken into a real place at a real time, and my resistance to such artificialities of voice and gesture.

  This first exchange isn’t very interesting. Not to me anyhow. A visitor who hasn’t been back in the town for some years is due, here at the Wangels’ house, this very morning, and this painter-fellow, Ballested, who seems also to be a kind of odd-jobs man, must get the flag hoisted before he arrives. The pleasant woman of the same age as myself then goes out, Ballested reapplies himself to the flag-ropes, but then, walking along behind the hedge and stopping near its gate appears a youth, clearly intrigued by the easel and the painting equipment. He is very thin, his face well-scrubbed, his clothes neat and nicely ironed and pressed, but oh so shabby, so indomitably shabby. Ballested, after a few false starts, gets the flag up as required, and then turns to greet the newcomer, who says in an amiable innocent sort of voice that he knows he must be addressing a painter. Ballested is pleased by his saying this, and so, when the youth asks if he could come into the garden for a moment, invites him to take a peek at his canvas. This turns out to be a picture of a mermaid dying in the brackish water of the fjord, unable to get out into the open sea again. The youth is no end impressed; he opines it’s going to be a very fine work when finished. In his place I wouldn’t have been so confident, but then Hans was always so much kinder, so much more generous in his responses than I. But then Hans, did I just say? Is this third member of the Dramatis Personae my Hans Lyngstrand?

  Well, who else? A lean, poor, artistic young man, friendly and polite almost to a fault! I lean forward in my iron-framed chair, not caring how this sudden rush of attentiveness strikes Will. Ballested now observes of the visitor, that, from his appreciative observations, he must surely be “in the profession” himself—i.e. a painter. And the reply?

  “No, I’m not that; but I’m going to be a sculptor. My name is Hans Lyngstrand.”

  This is exactly, but exactly, how Hans would introduce himself, at once eager and bumbling, sure of his judgment but touchingly, comically naïve. I squint at the program and see that the young man’s name is in fact Mr. Herbert Sparling, but I know this to be a disguise. Here is the Hans Lyngstrand I knew. In person. With whom I shared what I had never to that date shared with anybody else. Will’s—or his paper’s—gift of a 10/6 seat in a theatre off the Strand has united me with my friend again, at a period of his life three years later than when I last saw him, when he was moved to write me a letter to which I didn’t deign to reply, any more than I had to its predecessors. How could I after what Bo’sun Johnston had told me?

  Concentration on Ibsen’s play ceases to be an effort now. I am drawn right into the action, would find it impossible to extricate myself.

  BALLESTED: So you’re to be a sculptor? Yes, yes; the art of sculpture is a nice, pretty art in its way. I fancy I’ve seen you in the street once or twice. Have you been staying here long?

  LYNGSTRAND: No; I’ve only been here a fortnight. But I shall try to stop till the end of the summer.

  BALLESTED: For the bathing?

  LYNGSTRAND: Yes; I wanted to see if I could get a little stronger.

  BALLESTED: Not delicate, surely?

  LYNGSTRAND: Yes, perhaps I am a little delicate; but it’s nothing dangerous. Just a little tightness on the chest.

  Readers, imagine my feelings on hearing this, especially that last poignant sentence. I who know, none better, exactly how dangerous that “little tightness” is—or rather was. Alone (I imagine) of all the members of this audience I know what the end of this would-be-sculptor will be, how soon in stark fact it would come. For Hans Lyngstrand died in the spring of 1889, just short of his twenty-fourth birthday. I give a quick glance to my right at Will, who had already flashed me a quick grin on hearing Lyngstrand utter his own name. And “Right age, too!” he murmurs. But I don’t think I have anything else to fear from him; if Will had suspicions about our friendship, Hans’s and mine, they never went beyond a kind of office-mate’s light lubriciousness of fancy, never penetrated to any reality of mutual feelings, and almost certainly by now he had probably forgotten he ever entertained them.

  It is myself, Martin Bridges, who should be fearful of what lies ahead—and what will befall Hans—on these boards which represent the Norway of three summers ago. (The play, I see from my program, was written in 1888.)

  And the explanation of this strange, never-anticipated situation? Well, is it so difficult to find? Norwegian Mr. Henrik Ibsen could easily have visited Molde at the same time as Hans, and shamelessly used him and those he came into contact with. Used them for his own purposes, without bothering so much as to change the names. (In the case of somebody as obscure as Hans, he probably told himself there was no need to worry—no possible libel trouble of the kind I had come up to London to discuss.) That shows, I’m afraid, what so many writers really are like, even the “big men,” the famous like Mr. Ibsen: bloodsuckers, carrion, living off the feelings, experiences, and sufferings of others. Newspaper-men have a cleaner trade, I think, because they never pretend that they are dealing with people of their own invention.

  But back to the play, and concentrate, Bridges, concentrate! For even if I did not have the special reason for absorption in it that I do, I would find keeping hold of the threads of its story far from easy. Ibsen relies such a
devilish lot on hints and implications to tell you important stuff—sometimes the most important stuff—and they’re even less easy to recognize, let alone seize on, in a theatre than in the social encounters and gatherings of normal life—and there they can be pretty damned difficult, as any honest man will tell you. Also such a lot has happened to Mr. Ibsen’s people before we actually meet them, you have to be something of a human archaeologist accustomed to excavating under many layers of deposits, to do them proper justice. But for the story of what happened to Hans Lyngstrand before he appears in the Wangels’ garden I am, I hardly need say, in an unusually, maybe uniquely advantaged position. Come to think of it, I am a part of Hans’s past myself.

  Of course I am riveted by other people than Hans, by Ellida, the Lady from the Sea herself, (played by Rose Meller as lovely as the eponymous Lady is meant to be); by Dr. Wangel, her husband, bluff, kindly, but a mite too easy-going, who loves her, his second wife, and is baffled by her long—on the face of it inexplicable—estrangement from him; by his two daughters, Bolette, who runs the household and is in danger of becoming “an old maid” and Hilde, young, beautiful, almost demonically capricious; by Arnholm who once loved Ellida when she lived out at her father’s lighthouse in Skjoldviken, but who now is drawn to Bolette whom he once tutored. But my real engagement—how can it not be?—is with the young sculptor, who embarrasses me sometimes with his blunders, his gaucherie, his invalid’s clumsiness, but other times wins me over (arouses something in me?)—just as, at best, he did back in Dengate.

  And the dark figure in Hans’s story—who is also, as it transpires, the dark figure in Ellida’s—is the bo’sun, the American, Johnston (also once known as Friman, as I knew), the Stranger (as the Dramatis Personae has it). What will I think of him when eventually, after such nervous anticipation, he appears? I begin to sit in dread of this . . . Sometimes at night, Lucinda tells me, after I’ve been over-working, I have bad dreams in which I call out that Ukko is coming for me.

  “Ukko? Who is he?” asks my wife. “A figment of my young imagination,” I reply, half-believing myself . . .

  Hans tells Ellida and Arnholm, shortly after the latter’s arrival, that paradoxically he is grateful for the grim events at home (mother’s death, father’s cold-hearted rejection) that sent him, under his guardian’s aegis, to sea, and equally for the disaster in the English Channel, for all the casualties and suffering it entailed.

  LYNGSTRAND: It was in the shipwreck that I got this little weakness of the chest. I was so long in the ice-cold water before they picked me up; and so I had to give up the sea. Yes, that was very fortunate.

  ARNHOLM: Indeed! Do you think so?

  LYNGSTRAND: Yes, for the weakness isn’t dangerous; and now I can be a sculptor, as I dearly want to be. Just think—to model in that delicious clay, that yields so caressingly to your fingers!

  ELLIDA: And what are you going to model? Is it to be mermen and mermaids? Or is to be old Vikings?

  LYNGSTRAND: No, not that. As soon as I can set about it, I am going to try if I can produce a great work—a group, as they call it.

  ELLIDA: Yes, but what’s that group to be?

  LYNGSTRAND: Oh! Something I’ve experienced myself.

  ARNHOLM: Yes, yes; always stick to that.

  ELLIDA: But what’s it to be?

  LYNGSTRAND: Well, I thought it should be the young wife of a sailor, who lies sleeping in strange unrest, and she is dreaming. I fancy I shall do it so that you will see she is dreaming.

  ARNHOLM: Is there anything else?

  LYNGSTRAND: Yes, there’s to be another figure—a sort of apparition as they say. It’s her husband, to whom she has been faithless while he was away, and he is drowned at sea.

  ARNHOLM: What?

  ELLIDA: Drowned?

  LYNGSTRAND: Yes, he was drowned on a sea voyage. But that’s the wonderful part of it—he comes home all the same. It is nighttime. And he is standing by her bed looking at her. He is to stand there dripping wet, like one drawn from the sea.

  Well, Hans had not decided precisely on that tableau even when I knew him, but it was already latent in him, already an inhabitant of his mind. (And I know something else too—as do, without being aware of it, many strollers in the Royal Gardens, Dengate, today—that the subject underwent metamorphosis, the result being a work which I was completely unable to include in my own house.) Ellida is fascinated, transfixed by this description of a sculpture which in truth the artist has as yet come nowhere near actually to making; it exists only in plans and hopes—and talk.

  Arnholm, the Wangels’ visitor, plainly hasn’t taken to Hans at all, just as Will hadn’t back in Dengate, thinks him a ninny not capable of much besides coyly and ingratiatingly presenting older women like Ellida with outsize bunches of flowers (the sort of thing, I have to agree, that the Dengate Hans might easily have done to Beatrice Fuller). So, somewhat censoriously, very much like the schoolmaster he is, he rounds on him with: “I thought you said it was to be something you had experienced.”

  But of course (and who knows this better than myself?) Hans is able to defend himself here perfectly: “Yes, I did experience that,” he protests, “that is to say, to a certain extent . . .”

  And then out it comes, the very story he told me as the interviewer from The Channel Ports Advertiser in the blossom-filled garden at Castelaniene on just such a May afternoon as this one (for outside the theatre London is today, for all its dirt and hectic bustle, a huge, warm, surprisingly fragrant, sunny miracle of blooms and leafing trees): the engagement of a new bo’sun at Halifax; the rough weather in the Atlantic, Johnston spraining his foot, and Hans feeling ill, and the two of them cooped up in the same cabin; Johnston reading of the Norwegian paper, “uttering a sort of yell” and then crushing, crumpling, and tearing up the offending publication “into a thousand shreds.” Followed by the exclamations: “Married—to another man. While I was away!” and “But she is mine, and mine she shall remain. And she shall follow me, if I should come home and fetch her, as a drowned man from the dark sea.” Said, apparently, in perfect Norwegian. And I, English Martin Bridges, can to this day (when I try!) remember them in that language.

  This story of his truly galvanizes Ellida. We all now can see—well, certainly I now can see (but does Will, with his notepad, still blank, against his knees, do so?)—that herein lies the key to her own haunted state of mind. And now I feel a terrible sadness sweeping through me as I recollect sentence by sentence all the plans Hans had for his work, and yet cannot but wonder, despite myself, whether a work-of-art that turns a situation into such rank melodrama—as his “great group” surely would have done—could ever really be at all a satisfying creation? Certainly, what now stands in the Royal Garden does not satisfy me, though it must have some power I suppose, otherwise I could not resent, and at times detest it, as I do. (And yet I cannot destroy it either—Lucinda sees that as well as I do!)

  And just as we have been given a real proof of the good qualities of Ellida—unwittingly brought about by Hans Lyngstrand’s maladroit gift of flowers—the curtains descend on the first act. But the lights do not come on afterwards, and I am very pleased to be granted a few minutes’ dark tranquility—even if it’s not literally this, not with all the reverberant thumps and bangs indicating a substantial change of scene being effected on the stage. But it gives me a break long enough to come to terms with my surely odd lack of further astonishment at what is being presented me, the unfolding of the hitherto hidden later history of someone briefly of immeasurable importance to me, whom I then determinedly spurned to the point of ignoring his every letter—but who is perhaps now reclaiming his rightful status in my life, as the human being who (I am apt to think) taught me most about my deepest nature . . .

  “Rum crew these people,” Will whispers to me. “Wouldn’t be my choice of folk for a summer’s day party.”

  That makes me think—it was at a summer’s day party of sorts (even if early summer, the present month) that
Will first met my Lucinda and wrought such a profound change in her. He doesn’t do either wisely or well, even unthinkingly, to remind me of such occasions, otherwise I shall be forced to admit that in my still self-confident, still companionable friend there’s more than a dash of the cad.

  The curtain lifts a second time, and certainly the scene-shifters have done wonders; we are now somewhere quite different. The program tells me that the setting is now the “View,” a shrub-covered hill high above the resort with, it soon transpires, magnificent views of fjord and mountain-peaks beyond—but of course it also reminds me of Dengate’s View when I (and the three cats) encountered Colonel Walton and first truly appreciated the uncomfortable ultimately unmanageable truth behind Mrs. Fuller’s life.

  This Norwegian View, like our Kentish one, is famous for what it offers toward the sunset hour, so late in the northern latitudes as to be but a prelude to sunrise, and toward it the townsfolk (of Molde?) including courting couples, and tourists, one little posse of these last being led by the many-talented jack-of-all-trades Ballested, are wending their way from a bandstand where musicians are playing (more Dengate associations here!—and I don’t suppose they’ll stop coming either), up a precipitous path, to enjoy the beautiful scenery on a perfect summer’s night. Dr. Wangel’s two daughters hove into view, the frightening beautiful Hilde in advance of her preferable sister, Bolette. Their exchange does not strike at all a pleasing note:

  BOLETTE: But, dear, why should we run away from Lyngstrand?

  HILDE: Because I can’t bear going uphill so slowly. Look—look at him crawling up!

  BOLETTE: Ah! But you know how delicate he is.

  HILDE: Do you think it’s very—dangerous?

  BOLETTE: I certainly do.