A key turned in the front-door lock, and he heard Oluf’s voice and Johanne’s boots shuffling in the corridor. There they were again.
Sanders straightened up and listened with a smug smile. Steffensen only shook his head as if he had been disturbed, then went on writing.
But Johanne did not come in. She went from the corridor directly through the bedroom into the kitchen, taking the boy with her. She was scolding him.
“Now we’ll soon have something to eat,” said Jastrau.
“Oh, we’re putting you to too much trouble,” Sanders remarked.
A quick, puffing sound issued from the kitchen. The gas had been turned on.
“Oh well, it’s very seldom that we see each other these days,” Jastrau replied. Sanders laughed loudly. “That’s the truth,” he said. Again their scorn! Jastrau had to get up out of his chair. He found this small talk intolerable. Nervously he began to wander back and forth in the room. He said nothing. It was ridiculous to take their lack of manners so much to heart. Sanders read on, unconcerned. Steffensen wrote. They felt at home, but he, he—
He ran his hand disconsolately through his hair, made believe he was thinking, and paced back and forth, back and forth.
Finally Johanne came bustling in, a housewife now, nothing but a housewife, but perfect for the type—authoritative and handsome, complete master of the situation.
“You can come to the table now. The food is ready.”
She was like a force that Jastrau could not oppose. She’ll very likely get plump like her mother, he thought.
“Please sit down. I only hope you’ll find the food to your liking, for quite frankly we weren’t expecting company today.”
How properly she said it. How alive and radiant she became here in this commonplace dining room furnished with the imitation light oak set she had brought with her from home. In the subdued afternoon light her body, her pale face, and her golden hair became suffused with a radiance as soft yet lustrous as that of a waning April day. It must be possible for her to find happiness again. And while his thoughts ran on in this fashion, Jastrau stood absentmindedly in the doorway, blocking his guests’ access to the dining room. His big hulk of a body was always in the way—always one body too many.
Sanders and Steffensen entered, Sanders with an analytical look around. At least the sight of the phonograph, which stood alongside the buffet, evoked an appreciative smile. And then they sat down, Jastrau at the end of the table, Steffensen with his back to the window, and Sanders opposite Fru Johanne and the boy.
Sanders immediately moved the Pilsner away from his plate with a gentle movement.
“I’m not drinking,” he said with an awkward smile. Then they began to eat.
At first there was an oppressive silence that had its effect even on the boy. He kept turning his blond, curly head restlessly from one side to the other, all the while wanting to say something. But he had the feeling that this was a day when it was simply impossible to avoid doing something wrong, and he kept still. Yet his mouth moved, forming mute syllables.
At last Sanders broke the silence.
“You really don’t think, frue, that because the police are looking for us we’re a couple of out-and-out criminals, do you?”
His somber voice drove the silence away before it.
“No, but I think you’re a couple of regular street urchins,” replied Johanne with a self-conscious toss of her head. Then she stared sternly across at Sanders and nodded to reinforce her statement.
“My wife takes a more rigid view of things than we do over at the paper,” Jastrau remarked, laughing.
“Such juvenile pranks!” Johanne went on indignantly. “You just can’t go pasting posters like that up on the wall of Dagbladet’s building—posters with nasty expressions like ‘a newspaper full of lies,’ ‘a member of the kept press,’ and I don’t know what else was on them. You simply can’t do that.”
“But when it is, as a matter of fact, a lying newspaper, just like all the rest of them—”
“No! The only right thing to do was to call the police. It was downright hooliganism—that’s what it was. And perhaps you can tell me what these lies are that the paper prints?”
Her face was deeply flushed. Jastrau, on the other hand, leaned back relaxed in his chair, drank his beer, and saw across the table from him the shadowy figure of Steffensen outlined in the waning daylight. He sat leaning forward with his elbows on the table and stared at Johanne.
“Well, frue, it would take quite a while to explain it in detail,” replied Sanders, gesticulating with his fork. “But by and large it’s a question of that damned bank failure, and who was punished and who wasn’t. It’s all a matter of politics, frue, and that’s something neither you nor your husband understands.”
He smiled maliciously in an attempt to look as diabolical as possible.
“My husband isn’t interested in politics,” Johanne said pertly.
At this, Steffensen’s shadowy figure began to rock back and forth, as in a singsong tone he began to recite from “The Proletarian Woman”:
“But there will come a day when violence erupts.
Do you know how to handle a rifle?”
“Oh, that nonsense!” Johanne said impatiently.
“Oh, Mother, isn’t that funny?” Oluf burst out laughing and bounced gleefully up and down in his chair.
“You must keep quiet! Do you hear?”
Sanders poised his knife over his plate. “You see, frue, when it came to passing judgment on the ones who were responsible, they sentenced as few as possible. Instead of cutting the meat here, they cut off only the very edge of it.” He demonstrated by slicing off a tiny fragment of the beef on his plate. “They sacrificed only those who were already compromised, and everybody—the entire country—said not a word. Everybody, that is, except us. The only paper that had anything to say was The Hammer.”
He laid down the knife and sat up straight, as if expecting a round of applause.
“They want a revolution, you see,” Jastrau said to Johanne with a trace of irony.
“I’ve known that all along,” she said, cutting him short.
“Because when you catch a band of thieves you should catch the whole pack of them, including the receivers of stolen goods. You must have what’s called a purge. But was there any purge in this instance?”
Sanders’s indignation gave him a certain grandeur. When carried away in such fashion, he knew how to seize the collar of his Russian blouse as if he were about to rip it off.
“The principles of capitalism are a breach of Danish law,” he proclaimed, raising his voice. Oluf’s eyebrows went up in alarm. “This is a fact—a fact that events have shown to be true. And therefore the laws must either be changed, or—or . . .” He banged his fist against the table as if to kill.
“Oh well, that’s getting to be an old story,” said Jastrau with a shrug of his shoulders.
“Yes. Now the journalist is talking,” replied Sanders so vehemently that little Oluf again raised his eyebrows in terror. “There is nothing so unethical to a journalist as an old story. The truth bores you. The idealist is a cantankerous cuss—but one has to be cantankerous in this country. Isn’t that true, frue?”
Jastrau laughed. But Johanne, who had been staring at Sanders with ever-widening eyes, nodded as if hypnotized. What force, euphony, somber passion, agitational appeal there was in this man’s outbursts. It made her hair stand on end. Then she came to, surprised at herself, and cast off the spell.
“So, is that what you’re fighting for?” she asked.
She uttered the word “fighting” with a somewhat rapturous lilt, so that Jastrau looked at her in astonishment. Now, once again, she seemed a stranger to him. What kind of a song was this that rose from her heart? He had never heard it before.
Sanders smiled complacently and nodded.
“Yes, that—among other things. It was when the bank collapsed that we started The Hammer. And how we were badg
ered! Well, I don’t suppose we could have expected anything else.”
He smiled again—a bitter, experienced smile tinged with a noble weariness. Oluf smiled too—bitterness and experience incongruously reflected in a boyish face—then again opened his moist, childish lips and held them in readiness to mimic more of the expressive contortions of Sanders’s mouth.
After a momentary pause to enjoy his bitterness, Sanders went on in his well-modulated narrative style.
“No newspaper dealer would handle our sheet. If one of them got out of line he was boycotted by his distributor. A neat trick, wasn’t it? Then he no longer got any copies of Aftenbladet, and that’s what he made most of his money from. As a result, we had to go out on the streets and sell The Hammer ourselves. And then we were arrested—for violating the street-peddling ordinance. We were fined, but we refused to pay as a matter of principle. We served our terms in jail. But why were we fined in the first place? Because members of the students’ rifle club and the fascist youngsters crowded around us as we went through the streets hawking The Hammer. They screamed and yelled and tried to provoke a fight with us—but of course, they were not arrested.”
While Sanders was speaking, Steffensen slowly reached out for his friend’s untouched bottle of beer and without saying a word emptied it into his glass. Jastrau could not suppress a laugh. But Johanne, who had not seen Steffensen’s silent maneuver, misunderstood the reason for her husband’s laughter. Throughout the conversation she had felt in need of help, and now she experienced a sense of relief.
“Well, it was basically just a boyish prank,” she said with an indulgent smile.
“But we went to jail for it,” replied Sanders with an air of dignity.
“Yes, but only in lieu of paying a fine,” said Jastrau. “And hell, that’s a form of martyrdom that you share with those who are locked up down at Stockyard Square because they don’t pay for the support of their illegitimate children, and other such ne’er-do-wells.”
Sanders got red in the face.
“When the grown-ups won’t do anything,” he said caustically, drawing a deep breath, “then it’s up to the boys. I can’t see any better way out of it. And they can call me a boy as often as they want to, or a youth”—here he spoke slowly and with a biting sarcasm—“one of those sincere but over-enthusiastic young people that Dagbladet so affectionately refers to.”
He turned and regarded Jastrau with an ironic look.
“Oh, come now. One of these days you’ll both be working on the newspaper with us,” Jastrau said patronizingly.
“No!” Sanders snapped back.
“I’ll bet you will,” muttered Steffensen.
“But you’re completely forgetting to eat,” exclaimed Johanne. She was much more animated than usual. Jastrau could see by the way she wrinkled her brow that disturbing thoughts were passing through her mind.
“No,” repeated Sanders, shaking his head with a superior smile. Who was it he was imitating with that constant smile? For it was an imitation of somebody.
For a while they ate in complete silence.
“Yes, you will indeed,” said Jastrau suddenly with a weary gentleness indicative of both resignation and disillusion. “I believe it was no longer ago than December that Editor Iversen spoke to me about you two.”
“Ah—in December. But that was before we raised a rumpus out in front of Dagbladet’s building,” Sanders said contemptuously.
“Oh, that! That goes to show that you don’t know us very well, Sanders,” Jastrau replied with a smile. He drew back his lips and showed his teeth when he smiled. “That makes no difference at all—not a bit. As I was saying, one day I went into the old boy’s office—it must have been between Christmas and New Year—and he was sitting there absorbed in speculation as to what the new year might bring, or asleep, or perhaps both. He’s getting to be pretty old now, you know—an old rhinoceros who sits coughing and spitting and grunting in his corner room, so that you can’t make out anything he says any more. ‘Listen, Jastrau,’ he said—”
Jastrau drew his hand over his smooth-shaven upper lip, as if stroking a large, overhanging mustache, and went on speaking in a listless manner and with a pronunciation that might have been called plebeian if it had not had the mark of his own cultivated personality. Sanders laughed.
“It’s a strange thing about you fellows over there at Dagbladet,” interjected Sanders. “You can’t talk about Iversen without hunching up your backs, talking as if you were in a torpor, stroking a make-believe mustache, spitting in the wastebasket, and saying, ‘Is that so?’ or ‘Bong!’ ” The latter expression was the editor’s way of rendering the French bon. “You all do it.”
Johanne laughed and nodded approvingly.
“It’s our way of worshipping him,” replied Jastrau, also laughing.
“I must say it’s a fine God you worship,” said Sanders scornfully. “He’s Denmark’s most dangerous man—and the one who does the most harm.”
“That’s easy enough to say when you don’t know him,” Jastrau replied, showing his irritation. “But anyway, the old man said to me, very likely because he was in a New Year’s mood, ‘Look here, tell me, is there really anyone among these younger fellows who can write?’ He asks everybody that, and when he does he looks at you with a tired, questioning look. ‘Yes,’ he went on, ‘there are of course those who write for The Anvil, or whatever it’s called. Hee hee! They’re so sore at us.’ And then he gets this crafty look. ‘But folks like that, who are sore—phfty’—into the wastebasket—‘you must read them very, very carefully, because often I’ve found that it’s precisely these people who are angry who can write. Take Georg Brandes and Johannes V. Jensen, for example. Hee hee! But The Anvil—I took an issue of it home with me the other day, and do you know what? I was badly disappointed. There aren’t any of the young people who can write, at least not readably or about anything of importance.’ ”
Sanders’s and Steffensen’s laughter was so raucous and derisive that Oluf gave a start. He scowled at them and moved closer to his mother as if seeking protection. Jastrau sat hunched up as if he had a shawl over his shoulders, just the way Editor Iversen sat. Then he spat into an invisible wastebasket, and went on:
“ ‘Otherwise we might have opened our columns to one—or perhaps two—of them. Pfty!’ ”
“Mother! Papa is spitting on the floor,” shrieked Oluf. “Is he allowed to do that?” He had suddenly regained his courage.
“Hush! You must keep quiet,” his mother rebuked him as she shook his arm.
But the others laughed, until Sanders’s expression suddenly became serious.
“Yes, we laugh. But isn’t it dreadful? All opinions are unimportant. They slip into Dagbladet and create a ripple on the surface. Everything is utterly without importance so long as the stuff is brilliantly written. Writing—style—phooey!”
Jastrau had now assumed his nebulous smile. It gave a touch of ironic melancholy to his pudgy, Mongoloid features. He thought it a smile that was becoming to him.
“We coddle the youngsters over at our paper,” he said gently, with slow, voluptuous cruelty. “We give them cushions to sit on. We give them authority—apparently, that is—before they’re grown up, and then we take it away from them before it’s had a chance to develop fully. Then they become mild and tractable, without any hard and fast ideas and without any character. Either that or they become chronic grumblers with a touch of insanity, and then they need no longer be taken seriously.”
He wanted to continue, but then suddenly he no longer seemed to think it worthwhile. He made a weary gesture with his hand, smiled faintly, and bent over to get a bottle of Carlsberg that stood near the leg of his chair. He poured a glassful and drank it in one draught.
Sanders extended one hand like a platform speaker and directed his somber gaze at Johanne, whose lips had gone slack at seeing her husband’s sudden defection. She had suspected it all along, and now she knew it. What difference did i
t make whether or not what he had said about the paper—of which he was the literary editor—was true? Who knew what was true and what was not? But a journalist who could not defend his paper, or a man who could not defend his wife, were one and the same thing. And now this dark, handsome, ardent Sanders would strike out hard. She knew it, and was fearful. Such a dark, impassioned man—and handsome, too.
“But don’t you see, frue, that that is subjecting yourself to perdition?” he began dramatically. “If that’s what’s meant by growing up and becoming mature, then God deliver me from ever reaching maturity. I may be mistaken. I may be wrong in thinking that society is in such a state that some of us must sacrifice ourselves—that those of us who can see must sacrifice ourselves—but I don’t think so. A society that is not afraid does not have to coddle its youth with silken pillows. But even if I were wrong, and the Conservatives and Fascists were right, then I would nevertheless rather be what I am and be an outcast than—than live the life you do, Ole. Because in any case you are wrong, however cockeyed my own views may be.”
He thrust his head and shoulders abruptly toward Johanne, who flinched. It was darkness against light. “Am I not right, frue?”
“Are they lies that I’m telling you?” bellowed Steffensen from the end of the table.
He had raised his hands to his mouth like a megaphone and was wildly parodying Curly Charles, the eccentric who stood in front of the Hotel d’Angleterre, shouting his foul-mouthed truths at the fashionable clientele of the hotel’s sidewalk café.
“Are they lies that I’m telling you?” Steffensen roared again.
Sanders turned and looked furiously at his friend. Jastrau wanted to laugh, but Steffensen’s voice was so gruff that he gave a start and winced. Johanne compressed her lips and screwed up her eyes, shocked at the revolutionary beast who sat sprawling at the end of the table.
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