And so Jastrau sat down in the parlor. The calling-card bowl stood on the table, and beside it lay a Catholic catechism. There could be nothing impolite about opening it.
But he forgot it as soon as he saw the forbidding hatstand that stood in the corner—as in a pub—as in a doctor’s waiting room—an old-fashioned instrument of torture, a wheel set upon a stake, with his gray hat that he had hung on it resembling a martyred corpse.
Yes, there was always some sentence that hung over one—a sentence with a medieval, barbaric severity about it. Of what use, then, was modern humanism? None, none at all. Everywhere people sat at ugly tables and waited for a sentence or a revelation, with nothing except calling-card bowls or back numbers of the Family Journal to console the eye while they waited, waited.
And was a door opening now? Was a doctor in a white smock appearing? And was the sunlight streaming into the examination room behind him?
Then Father Garhammer walked in, small and slight, dignified yet constrained in his black Jesuit’s garb, and Jastrau stood up, breathing heavily. The trinity of evil. The three black figures in long black robes, but without arms. It was comforting to see the priest’s hands. He rubbed them together self-consciously. It was comforting to see the priest’s face. There was no movement of the lips, as if he were about to spit. Did a gob of spittle go flashing through the air? No, it was a glitter from something out in the street.
Jastrau looked uneasily at the priest and received a smile. There was no gleam of triumph in his expression, and if there was any wiliness it was mingled with the sympathetic look of a friendly aunt. Perhaps it was wrong for him to have come to obtain the compromising piece of paper, the bill for the broken glass, to be humble, or play a humble role, in order to get hold of it.
“It was nice of you to come to see me,” said Father Garhammer, sitting down at the table. “Please remain seated.”
Jastrau leaned forward over the table. He could not speak.
“How is our friend Vuldum?” asked the priest. He still wore the same smile. “He comes here very seldom and that makes me uneasy.” He placed the emphasis on the “un” so that the word bore some resemblance to the German equivalent, unruhig.
“Well, he’s phoned me several times.”
“Ah, so?” And Father Garhammer smiled as if thinking of a distant friend. “I believe he’s a very good and true friend of yours.”
“Well—” Jastrau sounded hesitant and a little skeptical.
But the priest nodded. “Yes, I’m sure of it. Der liebe Vuldum. Alas, he’s far too interested in reservatio mentalis. And that makes me uneasy on his behalf. Such an interest can be damaging to his soul.”
And the priest turned to face Jastrau.
“You find it difficult too, Herr Jastrau.”
Jastrau bent humbly forward.
“Yes—yes—yes,” he said, and then suddenly found the right words. “No moral system can be constructed from scientific premises,” he said gloomily.
Father Garhammer patted him on the hand.
“Do you know that, Herr Jastrau? I didn’t believe you realized it,” he said amiably.
“I’ve always known it,” Jastrau replied in a subdued tone, but with fervent conviction. “But now I feel it, and that’s worse.”
“Yes, that’s worse. But you try to do the right thing, that’s what I think, Herr Jastrau.”
Again Jastrau was conscious of tears forming in his eyes. It was the second time that day—a day of humiliation. But he exorcised them with a smile, and looked up into the priest’s face.
“You know that I came here one night and raised a commotion,” he said abruptly.
“Yes, I know,” Father Garhammer replied with a faint smile. “You were just a bit obstreperous, let’s say.”
“And I broke something.”
“Nothing that amounted to much, Herr Jastrau. So many things can happen when one is having a bad time of it.”
“I’d like to pay for it.” The words came with an almost crude note of insistence.
Father Garhammer fumbled in his cassock and drew forth a small sales slip. He was carrying it with him. And Jastrau spread the bit of paper out in front of him. Four kroner for a piece of glass, installed. A scrap of paper. And now the scrap of paper was floating back on the wave. He gazed at the glazier’s uncertain handwriting, done in pencil.
“Was it only four kroner?” he asked with a note of chagrin.
“Yes, you raised a very minor commotion,” the priest replied in a tone of irony that sounded both naive and quaint in his foreign accent.
Jastrau felt ashamed as he lay a five-krone note on the table, but the priest picked it up in a practical, matter-of-fact way.
“We don’t carry money about with us, but the janitor will be here right away with your change. It was good of you to come and see me. Please give my regards to Herr Vuldum. Now you must excuse me. I’m busy and have to go. But it was nice to talk with you, and it was good of you to want to pay for that bit of glass. You needn’t have done so. We understand.”
Jastrau rose and bowed filially.
“Until we meet again,” said the priest, and left the room.
And once more Jastrau sat alone in the parlor. He rubbed his eyes and looked around.
Then he went over to the hatstand and took his hat. He walked over to the window and looked calmly and pensively out into the street, as if he had just undergone a tooth extraction.
The glazier’s bill lay carefully tucked away in his wallet.
Soon there was knock on the door. The janitor came in, handed him a krone, and followed him out with a face devoid of expression.
Jastrau had nearly reached the Town Hall Square before he remembered to light up a pipeful of tobacco.
5
IT WAS late in the evening.
The back door at the Bar des Artistes that led to the dark courtyard stood open so that a faint breeze could penetrate into the stuffy bar-room. The phonograph droned on with a narcotizing monotony. The cash register rang incessantly. And Lundbom rattled the cocktail shaker with a sweeping, undulating motion that kept time with the jazz, while the sweat rolled down his round, red, satyr’s face. With a smile that was now saccharine, now sour, he presided over the bar.
Midway in the summer, the place was unexpectedly experiencing a big evening with a noisy crowd of guests.
Even the eternal Kjær; who presided at his round table, was animated. His blue eyes were dull and lusterless behind his pince-nez, but his flabby face was deeply flushed, and often he had to raise his hand in a paternal greeting.
Jastrau sat slouched back in a chair opposite him. Journalist Eriksen, who had reached the frenzied stage in which the wrinkles in his ravaged face were as tangled as those in a crumpled ball of paper, tugged now at Kjær’s jacket lapel, now at Jastrau’s, and confided to them alternately his outspoken opinion about everything.
“Life is the damnedest filthy mess I’ve ever come up against, and it’s amazing that Goethe never said so in one syllable,” he said.
“Yes, all the things that Goethe didn’t say are enough to drive you crazy,” growled Jastrau, who was lucid but in an irritable mood.
And the fourth person at the table, Copenhagen’s leading secondhand-book dealer, the gigantic Mogensen with his moon-like face, who was called Bogensen because he dealt in books and was from Funen,* laughed so that his cheeks shook.
“What are you laughing at?” asked the diminutive journalist, shoving his face forward. “You look like the devil himself.”
“Watch your manners, gentlemen,” warned the eternal Kjær, raising his hands in admonition. “Why use such foul language? Skål, gentlemen.”
But the secondhand-book dealer sputtered into his glass, and his huge body shook with laughter. All the buttons on his clothing remained quivering for a long time.
Meanwhile, farther down the room, an altercation between a lawyer and an advertising-space salesman had been smoldering. They were forever wrangl
ing. Therefore they invariably sought each other out like a pair of mad dogs.
“Are they at it again?” Journalist Eriksen asked, turning around in his chair. “Tear them limb from limb and throw them out, Lundbom.”
“Now, now, don’t be so rough, Herr Eriksen,” Lundbom said. He had come out from behind the bar and stood with his hand resting in a friendly manner on the little journalist’s shoulder, while he kept his eyes fixed on the center of disturbance.
Then they heard a chair scrape against the floor.
“Now they’re going to tear each other apart,” exclaimed Eriksen, twitching in his chair.
But suddenly the broad-shouldered, big-jawed waiter from over in the restaurant and the hotel’s uniformed hall porter stood beside the two unruly customers.
“Now, we don’t want any commotion here.”
“You’re disturbing the other guests.”
“Who do you think you are, you flunky?”
A breathless silence settled over the room, even at the round table. The square-jawed waiter and the porter had grabbed the obstreperous lawyer by the arms and with tenacious politeness had forced him out the door. For a moment all the guests were subdued.
Jastrau raised his whiskey glass to his lips with a feeling of relief.
And at that moment it occurred to Jastrau that he was not at all alone in doing so. Some impulse had seized all the customers in the bar at one and the same time—Kjær, Eriksen, Bogensen, everybody—a collective thought, an unconscious, simultaneous bending of elbows.
And with this emotion-charged display of fellow feeling the memory of an unpleasant incident was rinsed down. The droning of the phonograph was again heard, and Lundbom once more stood behind the bar and went through his pompous, rhythmical ceremony with the gleaming cocktail shaker.
A short-lived interval of silent felicity—for now the eternal Kjær began singing his own rhythm.
Jastrau found it more and more obtrusive.
“Peace reigns o’er town and countryside,” Kjær hummed, gently waving his hand without being thrown off beat by the rhythm of the phonograph’s frenetic jazz. He had no ear for syncopation.
The clash between the two rhythms had the same effect on Jastrau as seeing a cross-eyed man.
“Another round of whiskey here,” he ordered.
“Now I have it! Now I know what you look like,” Journalist Eriksen exclaimed with a triumphant shout as he pointed his finger right at Bogensen’s face. “Yes, that’s it exactly—you look like a pallid whale.” He slapped a hand against his thigh.
Kjær shook his head in despair. “Pallid whale? A pallid whale? Oh, a white whale,” he sniggered. Bogensen’s whole body quivered as if he had been harpooned. He was having a wonderful time.
But Jastrau’s lips curled in a disgruntled frown.
He sat there and nibbled at a stanza of verse. It had never amounted to anything but a few simple, fleeting lines. He lacked the power of concentration, and things were not as in his young days when the words flowed forth into long poems.
Though once I thought of sin
As a dark and muddy deep,
Now I know that it’s a plain
Filled with tedious things that creep.
They were still snickering, those three dissolute, bestial, faces, red and blotchy, damp with perspiration and alcohol, sagging with the summer heat. It was a sultry evening. And there was no mirror, so he could not see himself—the fourth bestial face.
“Yes, you’re all right,” said the colossal Bogensen, holding his whiskey glass out toward Eriksen, who sat writhing with mirth in his chair. “So are all of you—you boys from Dagbladet. You’re all so much fun to be with. I know Vuldum too.”
“Did you say Vuldum?” Eriksen bellowed indignantly. “Did you hear that, Jazz? He said Vuldum! Is he trying to insult me—this white whale from Funen, who’s straight out of Revelations?”
Bogensen shook with suppressed merriment, his eyes fastened admiringly on Eriksen.
“What’s the matter? Isn’t he a decent chap?”
“Decent! Oh—h, you naive, quivering old dodo.” Eriksen’s voice rose to a high pitch. “Buckwheat porridge.” A sheer falsetto. “Bogensen-wheat porridge.” But suddenly he wrinkled his brows and shook his fist in Bogensen’s face. “Believe me, you miserable, gigantic tub of lard, when I say there have been nights when I’ve gotten down on my knees and prayed, prayed—yes, I said prayed, although that’s not like me at all—prayed to God time after time to ask him if in His mercy He wouldn’t soon let a streetcar run over this damned Vuldum.”
The eternal Kjær laughed softly, but Jastrau screwed up his eyes understandingly and nodded his head.
“Yes, you know what I mean, Jazz. We two are in the same boat. The fact that you’ve jumped overboard won’t do you any good, Ole—in spite of that, you’re in the boat. But Lord, how I’ll miss you! I will. Because I like you one hell of a lot. You’re a splendid fellow. But you’re not good for anything.”
His triangular eyes were bloodshot, agitated, searching.
“Jazz, Jazz, Jazz. I could cry when I think of how much I’ll miss you. I miss you already. Yes, I do, damn it. I miss you like the very devil.”
Whereupon he squeezed Jastrau’s hand and assumed a woebegone expression.
“But this fellow Vuldum,” said Bogensen, interrupting the touching scene, “is he unreliable?”
“Unreliable! Ah ha!” Eriksen shouted, gesticulating dramatically. “That isn’t the word for it. Unreliable! What do you mean, you wind-bag? He’s—”
And he clenched his fist.
“Now, now, Eriksen,” Kjær admonished, directing his weary gaze at him. “Vuldum sat here at this table—at my table—this afternoon.” He raised his big, jowly head authoritatively. “And I won’t hear a harsh word about him.”
“A harsh word! What I have to say is the truth, damn it!” Eriksen bellowed.
“I don’t want to hear the truth at my table,” shouted the eternal Kjær. “It isn’t housebroken.”
Then he giggled.
“The truth is not housebroken, do you hear?” Kjær repeated.
“But at any rate he can be relied on, can’t he?” asked Bogensen. “At least I hope so.”
“Have you loaned him money, you sperm whale? Ah!” Eriksen laughed and gesticulated so vigorously that his fingers flapped against each other.
“No, I never loan anybody money. But I sold him a book on credit—the works of Poul Helgesen in Danish.”
Jastrau drew himself up in his chair.
“You’ll never see the money for it, you baleen whale,” howled Eriksen. “Never, never. He’s already sold it to one of your competitors.”
Eriksen was doubled up with laughter.
The eternal Kjær had haughtily turned aside and leaned his elbows on the table while he fixed his gaze on the life-size, insipid painting of the naked woman who had been dubbed Charles the Twelfth.
“Yes, but—but—” Bogensen sputtered, staring disconsolately into space.
“He—he’s—” Eriksen began with a mighty cough. But then he was interrupted, because the eternal Kjær had suddenly turned to face them again.
“Gentlemen,” he said in a deep, hoarse voice, “he sat here at this table, and if the truth must be spoken, he writes better than the three of you put together. And furthermore, he has sat at this table.”
He lapsed into a sulky silence and looked from one to the other with a dictatorial air.
“He has sat at this table and that should be enough. Would I rub elbows with just anyone who comes along? I, in bad company? It’s inconceivable.”
“Then I’m not going to sit here,” Eriksen exploded. “Because I’m bad company. You can bet your life I’m bad company. You have no idea how bad. Rotten to the core.”
Eriksen got up. “I want a taxi,” he said. His face was crumpled and his eyebrows hung down over his eyes. “Huh!” he grunted, and shook himself. “I’m bad company, Lundbom, and so are you,
you old Swedish poison-blender and corrupter of youth. A taxi, do you hear, you old devil?”
“Now, now, not so rough, Herr Eriksen,” Lundbom came out from behind the bar with a patronizing air and followed Eriksen to the door.
“Yes, he was getting rough,” Bogensen said with a grin, pulling a handkerchief the size of a bed sheet out of his pocket and mopping his face with it. “Don’t you think I’ll get the money for that book?”
“Hee,” said Kjær with a wave of his hand. “Hee hee.”
“I mean for the book that belonged to me—that I had in my shop.”
“Well, anyhow—skål,” Kjær replied, clinking glasses.
Jastrau had gone over to the bar to stretch his legs, and sat there munching on the salted almonds.
“Herr Eriksen can be very difficult,” sighed Lundbom, who had returned. “He drinks more than is good for him.” He inclined his red satyr’s head benevolently to one side.
“Y—es,” replied Jastrau, drinking another whiskey.
“But otherwise he’s a fine person,” Lundbom said, sighing again.
“Yes, God knows he is,” replied Jastrau. “Look, can’t we have a little music from the phonograph?”
Over at the round table, the eternal Kjær and Bogensen were talking to each other, and Jastrau sat and watched them. There was material for a poem. And there was material for another one about the collection of animals in the barroom. He must get it written. Their puffy, harried faces, ready to burst from elevated blood pressure. Whew, how sultry the evening was. Another cool whiskey. Then he would slip up to his room. But it was stuffy there too. The window toward the street stood open. All the night sounds came in. The streets were noisy at night. And then the ceiling—the reflection of the car headlights on it. The strange ceiling. When would he find a ceiling that he was not afraid of—a familiar ceiling that did not bring on heart palpitations when he looked at it? Oh, those ceilings. Ever since that apparition of the three black men, the trinity of evil. Every morning he sprang up from his bed feeling the pressure inside his chest. No, he would not go up to his room yet.
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