by Paul Binding
But though Mrs. Wangel comes very near to leaving with Johnston on the imminently departing ship, she does not in fact do so. She decides, once and for all, not to go with him, deeply moved as she is by the demonstration of love her husband has at last given her—prepared to see her go off (and with such a man, a proven murderer!) rather than keep her a prisoner of his benevolence in his house. Her satisfaction with the outcome is profound, for never has she ceased loving the good doctor in the deepest regions of her heart, and by the time the curtains are ready to fall, she has come to a sort of evolutionary conclusion about her situation. Every Lady from the Sea must be tempted to go back to the ultimate origins of humankind, but every Lady too has the ability to adapt.
Can adapt? Is that what I have done these last years following Hans’s departure to Bergen?
ELLIDA: When you have once again become a land-creature you can no longer find your way back again to the sea, nor to the sea-life either.
True? True of her, true of me? I wonder. And Hans Lyngstrand? He would shortly leave this little Norwegian fjord-town to make the long journey south that he has always wanted, and, from the point of view of health, long needed, to undertake—as in reality he did. But no personal farewell is said to him, no tribute paid to his own trust in the imagination in general, and in his own in particular.
That is a pity. When the curtains are brought down, I cannot prevent a wave of sadness breaking drenchingly over me. I dread the post-mortem in the public house now to come.
The two of us now ensconced in a tavern of his choice, Will looks up from his rapid scribbling on our tabletop with a smile of near-roguish contentment, the schoolboy who’s learned a new conjuring trick he’s sure will fool you or who’s whipped out of his desk a naughty photograph to show you under the teacher’s very gaze.
“When you think about it,” he says, “no, when I think about it, the play we’ve just seen is as much a damned farce as it’s anything else. All that talk about chucking two rings into the sea in a pagan wedding ceremony, and then the bridegroom in question, the Stranger popping up from nowhere after all those years and demanding his wife back—well, I ask you!” He throws back his head in mirth at the very idea of such things, and reaches afresh for the port he ordered, to pour himself (but not, I notice, me) some more. This “potable,” in this shadowy corner in which we’re now seated, has for me the look of thick blood stored in a glass container for some alchemical purpose, emphasizing that being here at such a time is quite wrong for an afternoon of such delicious late spring weather, just such spring weather in which my friendship with Hans Lyngstrand blossomed.
The play we have seen together spoke of the freedom of the elements and the freedom of the spirit. So it doesn’t seem quite right to be indoors in a fug listening to Will’s urbane mockery; I want already to be at nearby Charing Cross Station, taking the train from that handsome, crowded structure, back home to Dengate, where, at the end of my journey, the sea will await me with its hundred tints of blue, green and silver, and with white gulls crisscrossing each others’ flights overhead.
“All those coincidences, old bean—yes, farcical is the word.”
I can’t have this. “I don’t see The Lady from the Sea like that at all. And are its strange coincidences any stranger than those in absolutely everybody’s life?” I say this, for me, almost defiantly. “I’m sure I haven’t understood it all probably yet—I mean, I haven’t understood even what actually happened on stage, let alone the real meanings of all that’s said and done, or the symbols.” I produce the last word self-consciously.
Will guffaws: “The meanings or symbols are the easy part, my friend!” I keep my dignity by not making a riposte to this deliberate misunderstanding. “Pretty bally easy, I’ll grant you. Kids’ stuff. Facile.”
“Well, if you say so!” I sip at my own port, which leaves a deposit, a light sediment on the tongue.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” says Will, looking at me with one of his well-known quizzical expressions. “I mean I thought it curious just from squinting at you during the performance, that a fellow who never sets foot in a theatre from one year’s end to another should be so rapt by this play. But now you’ve become a positive Counsel for the Defense. I see we really do have an Ibsenite in the making. Perhaps old Dan Havers was right, and we critics should be looking to you as a new rival.”
I don’t want any more talk of Ibsenites in which I can get caught out, shown up, and so on. I say, “I just found this play—well, very moving.”
Will doesn’t even smile. It’s as if (think I) I’ve just described London as a provincial village or myself as one of the most important newspapermen in the country; he’s flummoxed.
“And many of the fellows in the audience were moved, too,” he says, “to laughter, not to say giggles.”
“Well, I was moved—almost to the other thing.” That—in a conversation with Will Postgate, my long-standing guide into sophistication—counts as boldness.
“Can’t for the life of me think why. That namesake of your old friend was a fair old muff, was he not? Hans Lyngstrand. Couldn’t see the point of him myself.”
While he speaks, I fear he has seen through me, that he does in truth know the reason (or the principal one) why I have been, so “curiously” in his view, moved: I’ve been witnessing the history of a once dear person unfolding before my eyes, a person he himself couldn’t “see the point of” in actual life, but who brought out something deep and new in me. But then I realize this is not the case, Will hasn’t a clue, not the foggiest notion. He would never have called him “that namesake of your old friend,” if he had.
I can’t hold back—no, not from making a proper confession—impossible! But yet: “There’s very much a point to Lyngstrand. Shall I explain?”
“Well, as I’m responsible for getting you into this intellectual pose”— I try not to bridle at this deliberately uncomplimentary word—“I have a duty to hear you out, I suppose.”
Well, let me hope some of it sticks. But I must be careful not to give myself away.
“Lyngstrand may look and sound foolish, bumbling, naïve, young for his years—though also like an old man in some other respects because he’s always got to go carefully on account of his severe illness. But, if you sit back and think about it”—I try to appear as if I’m doing exactly that, though in truth I am feeling as tense as though screws have been tightened at my temples—“he sees more deeply and accurately than anybody else does, and nothing—absolutely nothing in the drama—would have happened without him.”
Will is too much of a “seasoned” journalist not to be roused to attention by these words of mine, and, besides, as he’s reviewing this damned play (and his piece will be syndicated), he doesn’t want to have missed something that might be important.
So I go on:
“It was he who back on that ship three years before realized he was witnessing something very significant when closeted in the cabin in rough weather with the bo’sun, Johnston: when that man cried out when looking through the Norwegian newspaper because he’d read something that distressed him, and then ripped its pages into shreds. And vowed he’d come back for the woman who, he’d just read, had married another man, and fetch her—whether he was alive or dead.”
“Something like that’s always easier to do if it you’re alive,” Will cuts in, “gives a fellow no end of an advantage.”
I ignore this. “This, you see, was the artist already at work in Lyngstrand. I’m talking about his ability to understand that what he’d witnessed was something telling you an important truth about how humans can and do behave, how strongly they can have an effect on the lives of others—he didn’t just see it as an extraordinary incident that had happened once and couldn’t be repeated. That’s what artists do, I believe—see an action as more, as greater than how it appears at the time.”
Will says: “I’d no idea I’d been friends with such an expert on the arts all these years.” He takes an
other generous swilling mouthful of port.
“I’m not an expert on the arts, and couldn’t begin to think myself one,” I say with an attempt at a little laugh. “I’ve just been watching the play you were kind enough to take me to with the concentration it surely deserves.” That damps him down a bit; Will wouldn’t like to think he doesn’t concentrate, though, to be honest, for all his indisputable industry and capacity for hard work, I’m coming more and more to the conclusion that he’s quick rather than deep, brilliant rather than thorough, sharp-eyed rather than serious or analytical. “But Lyngstrand’s insights don’t end there. You see, Will, it’s what he does with what he saw and heard that’s so interesting and important. And I’m not talking about his sculpture here—that’s all still in his head, or principally so; we don’t even know whether he’s made any of the rough sketches for it like sculptors usually do. Some inner voice tells him that the episode of three years ago and the work of art he intends to make out of it have bearing on the life of the Lady from the Sea herself, not only her past life but her present and her future. And she sees that too, otherwise why should she extract from him that account of what his sculpture will represent. So don’t you follow me, Will?” No, I just can’t keep out of my voice—or my gestures, or my eyes, more likely than not—the excitement I feel rising up in me, like a dolphin leaping up above the level of the waves. “Nothing, literally nothing, would have developed the way it did if it hadn’t been for Lyngstrand. It’s his story that makes Ellida realize what has been happening to her—that the onset of her illness, her terrible condition, coincided exactly with what he’d witnessed during the bad weather on the voyage. She actually tells her husband”—I find, to both my relief and my distress, that the sentences in question have already lodged themselves in my head—“‘He learnt on board that I had married another while he was away. And so that very hour this came over me.’ She’s speaking of the malady that also ruined her poor child’s life.”
This is all news to Will Postgate I can see. Without my own motives for what he’s called my “raptness,” probably I wouldn’t have noticed all the complications, the almost diabolical twists and turns of history behind the happenings enacted on Terry’s boards. Will furrows his brow, as if in dissenting thought.
“You mean, if Ellida—ridiculous name, that, but I shall have to get it right for my review—if Ellida hadn’t heard, through Hans Lyngstrand, all that stuff, she wouldn’t have confided all she does in her poor old blockhead of a husband, and therefore couldn’t confront the Stranger as she eventually manages to?”
He sounds as if he’s conceding to me, so I give him my most amiable smile and say: “Exactly, Will, exactly.”
“But he doesn’t make a damned difference to the outcome, does he, your chum?” I start at this last word, before appreciating it’s only a facetious turn-of-phrase, as per usual (to use another one Will favors).
“No, but as you have just said, by giving her his confidences, she doesn’t deal with him as a sick, unhappy provincial doctor’s wife, but as a woman already in possession of important aspects of her own life. And anyway, he does try to give her a warning about the Stranger’s reappearance, though he still hasn’t seen just how direct the connection between the bo’sun and Ellida is. He says he is ‘sure he’s come to revenge himself upon his faithless sailor-wife,’ and in a sense, I suppose that’s what he has come to do.”
Will’s look tells me he can’t really see why I’m taking Ibsen’s play so seriously, but is prepared—at any rate for some minutes and some more mouthfuls of port—to indulge me in this.
“I must say, if I were that doctor chap, I wouldn’t be prepared to take back a woman who very nearly walked out on me to go with that rough old tar, who’d already killed another fellow, we were told.”
The whole question of Johnston the bo’sun is something I want to apply myself to even less after this afternoon’s play. I am not sure I don’t agree with Will here, but knowing what I do about his own behavior to the opposite sex, I can’t forebear saying: “You expect complete constancy in any woman of your choice then, Will? In the past as well as in the present?”
“Pretty much!” Will, obviously enjoying our talk now, stretches out his legs under the table making the “blood” in the decanter move against the glass sides. Then I see from a sudden darkening of his eyes that the implication of what he has so unthinkingly just said breaks on him. He is after all talking to me, Lucinda’s husband, and if he knows nothing about his child, he must know everything about what led to his making, what brought Eddie into the world, however overlaid in his memory it now is by his many other amorous episodes—and betrayals. “I wouldn’t write that in stone though.”
“Some of us don’t write such a sentiment in anything at all—if we love the woman in question,” I say.
And here in this smokiness, in such contrast to what we could discover by just a minute of walking out of this establishment, the communication has at last been made between us—that Will paid amorous attentions to Lucinda and then abandoned her, and that I married her in full knowledge of this.
A silence falls on our little nook, and I almost envy the other corners their chatter, their hoarse laughs. Perhaps it was risky even to say as much as I just did.
Then—“No, some of us probably don’t,” says Will in a low soft voice, “and there are others of us who are jolly grateful to them for that.” And I know that’s the best he will ever do in this matter, the best also I’m prepared to hear without going over things too painful and embarrassing to be spoken aloud.
He returns in manner to the jocose. “But this ’ere play, are we done with it? Are we to assume poor Lyngstrand won’t finish that sculpture of the stranger returning to his faithless wife? He’s going south, he says, for health reasons and to make his fortune as an artist. Italy, I presumed. That’s the country they favor, the consumptives, isn’t it?”
“I presumed that, too.”
“But he won’t get better?”
“Dr. Wangel doesn’t seem to think so, does he? Nor his elder daughter, Bolette. And his younger, Hilde the pretty and fiendish one . . .”
“Yes, she did seem both pretty and fiendish, didn’t she?”
“. . . imagines herself wearing black because he has—” I do not want to finish this sentence, nor do I need to.
“Poor chap! Not able to finish the chef d’oeuvre he has carried about in his head so long.”
“Yes, poor chap!”
Will is suddenly seized by a notion, a recollection. He bangs his hand against his forehead. “I just remembered—your Norwegian fellow, the one in Ma Fuller’s house—he was pretty ill, wasn’t he? Some lung trouble or other. And hadn’t he been in some shipping accident in the Channel.”
How could you have ever forgotten all that? I silently wonder. But Will, as nobody has better reason to know than myself, lives so very much in the present.
“You don’t think, do you . . . that old Mr. Ibsen knows your fellow?”
I am glad he uses the present tense. It makes evasion so much easier for me.
“Who can say?” I answer, aware that he won’t go on wrestling with the question for very long. After a decent pause, I say: “Well, I hope I’ve managed to make you see how carefully Mr. Ibsen weighs the merits of each of his characters.”
“More or less. I have to say, if it won’t insult you, Martin, you’ve surprised me a good deal by your grasp of a play on just one afternoon’s performance. Mr. Clement Scott, the critic I esteem the most, had better watch out, I’m thinking. There’s a certain Editor’s Manager down in Dengate who might well take his place.”
“Small chance of that. Anyway have I persuaded you to change your opinion of the work?” I point to the sheet of scribble.
Will grins. “Well, maybe just a bit, but honestly I think I will stand by what I composed as we were walking to this pot-house, and have now written down. I don’t usually go back on a composition, you know.” I do indeed. “I’
ve trained myself not to over these many years.”
“Well, am I to be honored with a hearing of it?”
“But of course.” Putting his glass down and lifting up his pad, he says: “Here goes then:
“The chief impression made by the performance of Mr. Ibsen’s play, The Lady from the Sea yesterday afternoon, was that Mr. W. S. Gilbert will have to look to his laurels. And not only Mr. Gilbert, but all our most successful writers of farcical comedy would have to tax their powers to the utmost to produce a more diverting piece than the five acts of unmitigated rubbish which were presented to a scanty audience on the first bright summer’s afternoon of the season. Those who came to listen attentively remained to scoff, the ripple of laughter almost continuous during the fourth and fifth acts . . .”
Well, what more could I say than what I had already said? And a fat lot of effect that had had! I suppress a feeling of sadness.
Aloud I ask, “You said you had something else to discuss with me?”
“Yes, if things work out as they seem to be doing, my taking over the editorship—yes, THE EDITORSHIP!—of that favorite news-rag of yours and mine is pretty well in the bag. A fait accompli. Should become reality by August. And of course, I shall want a proper trustworthy Deputy Editor, and there’s nobody in the present team with quite the nous for that, not in my very experienced view. But I do know just the man.” He pointed across the table directly at my heart. “I’ll move heaven and earth—or at any rate a goodly portion of ’em—to get him that job.”
Tears well up in my eyes. What with this offer, and what with all the memories Terry’s has brought up of poor old Hans, two years dead, I have a sudden inclination, you might say a temptation, to put my head in my hands, and break down into sobs. But I don’t give way to it, naturally. What Englishman could? “Will,” I said, “it’s no end good of you. But I belong to Dengate now.”
