“I’ve got to go over to the paper.”
“Who was it?”
“The lobster shift.”
“Oh, you don’t have to run over there on their account.”
“Yes, they’ve found a letter in the old man’s office and I have to see it. I have to. It might be very important.” He stepped into the doorway, and suddenly his voice took on a tone of grievous complaint. “One can never feel sure of himself with that paper. I feel as if something is always going on behind my back, as if someone is always lurking behind me with a dagger. It’s enough to curdle your spine. No, I have to go over and find out what this letter is all about.”
She looked up at him.
“It’s only some practical joke they’re playing on you.” But then, when she saw how upset he was, she added with a sigh: “Well, then, you’d better go.” She got up from the table. “But see that you come home soon—not like the last few nights, right? You need a good night’s sleep. Why, you’re so nervous you’re trembling. So come home soon.”
She had tears in her eyes.
Jastrau grabbed his hat and overcoat, promised to get back quickly, and left.
Getting out into the street always put life in him. The cool night air and the traffic acted as stimuli. But his heart was still beating violently. Now he would have to sit staring into Vuldum’s face—that inscrutable white mask. But the traffic gave him momentary relief. A line of people, trooping like a flock of geese, made their way along Istedgade over to the railroad station, following the same path as always. That meant that one of the midnight trains was about to leave. In Reventlowsgade, the long thin ribbon of electric lights from the Bræddehytte Tavern gleamed as from an illuminated garden. He half ran, half walked, with the ridiculous gait of a harassed schoolmaster who is late for a class. Vuldum! Now he would have to have it out with Vuldum. Throw the blame for it all right in his face. What kind of a filthy trick was it he had pulled on him anyway? Again, Vesterbro served to take his mind off his troubles. Theater-goers hurrying into taxis. Glimpses of people in evening dress, bare necks with furs and flashing gems, white shirt fronts, high hats near the entrance to the Wivel. It must be nearly midnight. People in a hurry. Several young men shouting. A poor wretch out at the edge of the sidewalk, cowering and miserable. Women who walked slowly through the crowd, taking a zigzag course and discreetly blocking the passage of an occasional man. A lingering appraising glance. Silk-clad legs in sleek profile against the dark building fronts.
Yes, this time he would have it out with him. He would look Vuldum straight in the eye. But it would take a strong heart. All right—he had it. Coolness? The air was cold. Forcefulness? The streetcar tracks were so coated with gasoline that they glistened like lacquer when the beams of the automobile headlights swept over them. Yes, all this served as a stimulant. The red Scala sign was glowing. The blue lights of the Stadil shone discreetly. And high against the midnight sky squinted the veiled yellow eyes of the Town Hall clock.
Vesterbrogade at night always had the same effect on Jastrau as a refreshing shower bath. But as he cut diagonally across the square, his courage and energy dwindled. He was rushing toward an encounter with an invincible force. There stood Dagbladet’s corner building, with its electric news bulletin flashing by like a band of fire just below the roof line. And the illuminated advertising billboard on the same building but above the dark side street, where there was also a moving-picture theater that could easily escape notice. And right on the corner, Dagbladet’s name in red, roman letters, as rational as the spirit of the newspaper when it expressed itself with the greatest clarity. Vuldum called this building his home.
As Jastrau entered the vestibule he saw the three men on the lobster shift sitting at the green table with Arne Vuldum. The green felt on the table and the yellow walls gave them an official look, as if they were judges, despite their newspapermen’s sturdy but shabby clothing, worn threadbare by legwork. Baggy jacket pockets sprung from being stuffed with manuscripts. Ink spots from leaky fountain pens. In short, a kind of uniform. Only Vuldum was smartly dressed. But then, he frequented the lobster shift only for fun. The other three were engaged in deadly serious work on behalf of the institution.
Otherwise the editorial department was empty. To be sure, a light was burning in the copy editor’s office, but he was up in the composing room and would not be back until the paper had gone to press. The light was extinguished in the editor-in-chief’s office. Editor Iversen had left. Only from the sports department came a sound of coughing and an unintelligible muttering.
“It’s Eriksen—as usual,” Vuldum said.
“Drunk?”
Vuldum nodded and said tartly, “You were out with him yesterday. Lundbom told me he had to throw you out.”
“We didn’t do any damage, did we?” Jastrau asked. Already he had been put on the defensive. There would be no showdown.
“No, it didn’t amount to anything—a few glasses broken, that’s all,” Vuldum reassured him in a superior tone.
Jastrau looked at him apprehensively.
“But this business of the letter,” interrupted Gundersen, he of the slim hands. He wore black tortoiseshell glasses and had a black mustache and purplish Negroid lips. “You should be able to make it out, since you’re mentioned in it.”
He carefully moved some fragments of a torn-up letter across the green felt toward Jastrau. The pieces had been assembled, but not all of the letter was there.
“It was stupid of you not to find the whole letter,” remarked Rostrup, who had hair like moldy straw and half resembled a devil because there was always a boil protruding like a horn from his forehead. Every night at about twelve o’clock, after Editor Iversen had left, it was Rostrup’s job as one of the graveyard shift to rummage through the drawers of Iversen’s desk and read whatever he found.
“It wasn’t there,” the third man apologized. It was Høysgaard, a gray-haired individual who was only twenty-seven. Since he was an energetic soul, he had been given as his domain not only the editor’s desk, but also whatever littered the top of it, which was no negligible quantity of material. There were letters from old and new colleagues, letters from the paper’s subscribers and friends, containing criticism and complaints, praise and indiscriminate abuse. All letters were read aloud for the benefit of the entire shift. “I helped him look for it,” Høysgaard added.
“You might just as well have spared yourself the trouble,” Vuldum said cynically. “Finding things in the wastebasket takes ingenuity—and long, slim fingers like Gundersen’s.”
Gundersen felt flattered. Like all the younger men on the staff, he admired Vuldum’s delightfully spiteful way of expressing himself.
Meanwhile, Jastrau bent over the scraps of the letter and read:
ar Stefani:
thank you for your excel
enings. It’s profound observa
greatly, and I don’t know how
lly; but critics I do unders
But there is another th
son I really didn’t know. It
no more poems. I myself was
y ugly, and will not stand
rau, my literary edit
right that he is quite young
wspaper’s policy of letting
I intend to
The editorial room was very quiet. The lobster shift and Vuldum stared at Jastrau in suspense and exchanged glances. Back in the sports department, Eriksen coughed and growled like an animal.
“Can you make it out?” asked Vuldum.
Jastrau raised his head, but did not have the fortitude to look at any of them. They looked like magistrates, or worse still, a board of inquisitors, as they sat at the green table and watched him undergoing torment.
“We can’t figure it out,” said Gundersen. His tone had a false ring to it.
“No?” Jastrau said, trying to look him in the eye, despite the fact that everything in front of him was dancing and shimmering. “Well, it says that the old man li
kes Stefani’s book, that we won’t print any more of his son’s poems, and that I’ll soon be through as a critic on this damned paper.”
“Bravo—a good job of reading!” exclaimed Vuldum. “But your last conclusion—isn’t that putting a rather drastic interpretation on it? All it says is that you’re too young.”
Jastrau stood up. It was the easiest way to avoid the pat on the shoulder that he knew was coming.
“Excuse me a minute,” he said, going toward the back of the room toward the toilet.
Then, however, he suddenly decided to go on. He cautiously opened a door and hurried down the back stairway to the street.
There was no other way for him to hide his defeat. He had to flee. When he inserted the key in the door to his apartment, Johanne opened it from the inside.
“So you did come home after all,” she said tenderly.
“Yes, of course.”
She shut her eyes and let him kiss her.
PART TWO
Behold the Man
1
IT WAS May, a year later.
Ole Jastrau was walking toward the Town Hall Square through the blustery spring sunshine.
Under his arm was a small package, carelessly wrapped in crumpled tissue paper.
The Parisian-boulevard trees of Vesterbrogade tossed in the wind, their gold-green foliage whipping this way and that in long graceful swells. The breeze lashed at the women’s short dresses so that now they billowed out like balloons, now hugged the body closely to reveal the outlines of legs and hips.
Outside the Paraply, with its rustling ivy and laurel, he met the lanky Arne Vuldum, who was strutting along like an elegant contemplative ghost, his face white and bony beneath the stiff and proper St. Peter’s dome.
“Are you on your way up to the paper, Jastrau?” he asked, raising the derby in an ironic gesture of politeness.
“Yes, I’m pulling myself together for it.”
“Well then, while you’re pulling yourself together, it wouldn’t be amiss if you bought me a beer.”
Vuldum nodded toward the Paraply’s sidewalk café. And they went in behind the rustling ivy hedge and sat down at a table with a flapping tablecloth.
“I was just on my way out to see Father Garhammer,” said Vuldum. He laid a book fastidiously on top of the tablecloth to keep the wind from getting under it.
“Why do you go out so often to see those Catholics?”
“To keep my sense of eternity in good working order. When you live in a boardinghouse, as I do, you need that. A bit of intellectual exercise.”
“One wouldn’t think you lacked that.”
“No?” Vuldum looked up sarcastically. “Would you mind telling me where else I’d find it? At the library? No, there we’re overcome by pedantry. Frankly, the only thing that arouses any excitement up there is a really good detective story. You should have seen us when The Singing Bruiser was published. The old-timers couldn’t remember such a fuss having been made over anything since Ibsen’s plays. And over at the paper? I don’t know whether you call what goes on there intellectual exercise. Since Kryger went over to Danmark, there’s almost nobody you can talk with. Of course, there’s you. But otherwise—” Vuldum added magnanimously.
“Kryger? I’ve really only talked with him once,” Jastrau replied with a smile.
“Ah, yes, when he was sounding you out. That was interesting. Going around trying to find out how many Conservatives there were among us whom he might get to join him.”
“The only ones he could find were Høysgaard and little Michael—”
“Yes—and me,” Vuldum interrupted. “But I stayed.”
Two huge glasses of beer were placed before them. The breeze ruffled the foam so that a little of it sprayed Vuldum in the face.
“We’d better get this shower under control,” he said, taking a good grip on his glass. It took strong fingers to lift it.
“Incidentally, we’ll see him Thursday,” he went on, wiping the suds from his lips.
“Who?”
“Kryger.”
“On Thursday?”
“Yes. Aren’t you going out to Eyvind Krog’s? He said you were.”
Jastrau looked at him in surprise.
“Yes, but—”
“Oh yes, both Kryger and I are going. And now, I’ll have an opportunity to see your charming wife—finally.”
“I hope you won’t be disappointed. She’s on a car tour with her brother, and it might last quite a while. I’m a widower these days.”
“It seems to me you play that role quite often,” Vuldum said pointedly.
Jastrau raised the glass to his lips. It was large enough so that he could hide his face behind it. And when he set down the glass, he replied, “There you’re mistaken. It happens very seldom.”
“Oh, you married men!” Vuldum took out a cigarette, tapped the end of it on the tablecloth, and lighted it. The sparks flew.
“Won’t you have one?”
Jastrau shook his head.
“There’s only one trouble with cigarettes—they turn your forefinger brown,” Vuldum remarked, inspecting his finger.
“By the way, what’s that book lying there?” Jastrau asked.
“Oh, it’s only a gift for Father Garhammer. Some of Poul Helgesen’s writings. I picked it up in a secondhand shop. What have you got there?”
Jastrau smiled awkwardly. “Nothing but a picture, but I don’t mind if you have a look at it.” He removed the tissue paper carefully.
It was a picture of a very young woman with an abundance of dark hair. A striped blouse, very simple, pinned with a brooch, was all one saw of her costume, and the effect was almost of impoverishment. But the large dark eyes and the broad bridge of the nose gave a singular force to her expression, and a trace of bitterness was visible around the young mouth.
Vuldum compressed his lips, squinted, and regarded the picture with the air of a connoisseur.
“It’s a relative of yours,” he said in a tone of disappointment.
“Yes, it’s my mother. I’ve just been out at my half-brother’s to reclaim it.”
Vuldum laid the picture back on the table carefully. “It’s a fine picture,” he said with the quiet air of an expert. His voice assumed an almost indiscernible tone of warmth. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“Yes. Many years ago.”
“Do you remember her?”
“Only vaguely. I was only three when she died.”
For a long time Vuldum said nothing. He had a way of sitting and thinking with his features immobile, a habit that made him look like a Florentine.
“That’s not good,” he said after a long pause.
“What’s not good?” asked Jastrau, who had wrapped up the picture again. He did not want it lying unprotected next to beer glasses on a café table.
Vuldum looked at him. There was a note of sympathetic irony in his smile.
“Well, it’s better to have one’s mother live a long life, so that you can discover that she’s only a woman. Otherwise, you have a difficult time of it throughout your life.”
“I don’t get your point.”
Vuldum laughed. “I can imagine that you’re a reverent lover. Aren’t you really, Ole?”
“Oh, come now!” Jastrau exclaimed in protest.
“A Madonna worshiper, a knight of the Order of Perpetual Adoration. But here comes your friend, the Bolshevik. He’s no Madonna worshiper, not by a damned sight. You can tell that by the dame with him.”
Jastrau looked up and caught sight of Stefan Steffensen’s tall bony figure. As usual, he walked with his hands in his pockets, and his jacket and pants were flapping about him in the breeze. The tops of his shoes were scuffed and had not seen polish for a long time. He saw nobody.
Behind him came a woman. How like him it was to be dragging her along after him without saying a word to her.
Jastrau could not get a clear view of her face because the wind had whipped some wisps of hair over it. S
he tossed her head, brushed the hair back from her forehead with her hand, and tried in vain to tuck it up under her hat. It resembled black horsehair, he thought.
But he could detect her figure as the wind lashed her brown dress and rather shabby coat. It was a short chubby figure which one moment stood still and helpless as it was buffeted by a sudden blast and the next resolutely thrust a sturdy leg forward.
Vuldum stared at her through narrowed eyes.
“Can you conceive of any young girl wanting to have anything to do with him?” he said.
But Jastrau only smiled as he watched her. Her coat had a belt that hung far down over her hips, so that seen from the back she looked ridiculously broad in the beam.
“Oh well, she’s no great beauty,” he said indulgently. “A heavy-set girl, but her legs aren’t bad at all.”
Jastrau shrugged his shoulders as Steffensen and his woman disappeared into the café.
“It’ll be a coffee and a slice of white bread for her and a bottle of beer for him,” Vuldum philosophized. “What do you say we have another one ourselves? I have a krone in cash that I’ll contribute to the cause.”
Jastrau nodded, preoccupied. He had not seen Steffensen since he had thrown him out of his apartment, and now suddenly he clearly recalled those days that had been the prelude to a period of such great uncertainty. He was still the chief literary critic for Dagbladet. But for how long? He had never been involved in so many polemics with aggrieved poets as during the preceding fall. It was as if they had sensed that his position was insecure. The lobster shift had fished letters out of the wastebasket, letters from older eminent poets who gently upbraided Editor Iversen for letting so young a man do the literary reviewing. Yes, those were the days that had seen the beginning of it all.
Jastrau slowly turned his back to the wind. That always lent him strength. And Vuldum was facing into the wind.
“Listen, Vuldum,” he said quietly but intently, “why did you play that trick on me when I was reviewing Stefani’s book? It’s done me a lot of harm.”
Vuldum looked surprised. But of course he had the wind in his face. A grimace swept over it.
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