by Henrik Ibsen
PEER: This is different. I felt it as a web of crime,
not in act only, in desire and word.
I was a cunning, violent man abroad.
BUTTON MOULDER: It may be as you say; but, for the record?
PEER: I beg you for some further time of grace.
I shall seek out a priest and, to his face,
make my confession; return with my signed pass.
BUTTON MOULDER: Provided you do that, I think it’s clear
ordeal by casting-spoon will not occur.
But the general order is not yet annulled.
PEER: The paper that you wave about is old;
it must originate
in those things of an earlier date,
when I lived a life that was effete,
and played the prophet and believed in fate.
So, may I try to find the priest?
BUTTON MOULDER: But I …
PEER: You are not all that burdened with your duty.
This district has an enviable atmosphere.
The people live long lives who live round here.
Remember him, the priest of Jostedal:71
‘Death’s an infrequent visitor to our vale’?
BUTTON MOULDER: To the next crossroads; but then grace expires.
PEER: A priest I shall have, if I have to seize him with pliers!
He departs hurriedly.
SCENE 10
A hillside clad in heather. The road winds, following the contours of the land.
PEER: That may come in handy for something,
as the man said who picked up the magpie’s wing.
Who would have thought that volunteering your sins
might buy you time on your last evening?
Even so, it’s touch-and-go,
it’s jumping out of the ash into the fire.
‘So long as there’s life there’s no call to despair’:
a decent old saying; it’s so, I trust.
A THIN MAN wearing a priest’s cassock hitched up high and with a bird-catcher’s net over his shoulder runs across the slope of the hill.
PEER: As if on cue, who is it that runs
into the picture? Yes, a priest,
a priest with a bird net over his shoulder.
Ha! Fortune’s favourite, aren’t I, though?
Good evening, Herr Pfarrer, the path is rough.
THIN MAN: One does not grudge it; there’s a soul at call.
PEER: You’re seeing someone off on the road to heaven?
THIN MAN: I pray that he’s safely on the road to hell.
PEER: Herr Pfarrer, may I bring you on your way?
THIN MAN: I shall be grateful for the company.
PEER: There’s something on my mind.
THIN MAN: So, shoot.
PEER: You see in me a decent man who’s lost
his way; not seriously; but
needs to get back on track before he’s older.
Laws of the state he honestly has striven
to keep in line with; has never occupied
a prison cell. Sometimes a foot has slid
where it should not have gone.
THIN MAN: I’ve often said
‘happens to the best people all the time’.
PEER: These peccadilloes, in no sense a crime …
THIN MAN: Peccadilloes? Is that all?
PEER: Why, yes,
absolutely nothing gross.
THIN MAN: Then, my dear fellow, let me be.
I’m not the one you took me for.
You’re looking at my hands. What is it you find there?
PEER: Quite extraordinary, your fingernails.
THIN MAN: My feet, too. Curiosity prevails.
You’d better speak of what it is you see.
PEER [pointing]:
Is that hoof natural?
THIN MAN: It certainly feels so to me.
PEER [raising his hat]:
Well, well, well! I could have sworn
you were a priest; but now, instead,
I have the pleasure, honour indeed …
If the hall door stands open, don’t fret for a latch-key.
If the king will see you, don’t stop for the lackey.
THIN MAN: So good to find
you keep an open mind.
How may I be of service? I should warn
you, nonetheless, that there are certain
matters I cannot deal with: money, power.
My sources have dried up and I’m quite poor.
You’ll scarcely credit how slack business is
at the present time; our turnover is down.
Souls are in short supply. Just now and then
a suitable one shows up.
PEER: So, would you say
the human race
is in a state of grace
for things to have shifted so disastrously?
THIN MAN: Quite the contrary. There is a vast amount
of petty wickedness, but what I might term the saint
of evil, the consummate sinner, has had his demise.
It’s the casting-ladle not the burning lake
for the vast majority of Christian folk.
PEER: The casting-ladle, now you mention it,
has been on my mind lately, just a bit.
It is, to be frank, the reason that I’m here.
THIN MAN: Speak freely.
PEER: If it’s not presumptuous
to ask, I should be grateful for the use …
THIN MAN: Of a spare room in which you can lie low?
PEER: You guessed my request, even before I made it.
If, as you say, business is slow,
then maybe you’d be willing to provide it.
THIN MAN: But, my dear man …
PEER: You wouldn’t know I’m there.
My needs are modest and I don’t require
financial support. Just the companionship.
THIN MAN: And a warm room?
PEER: Not too warm. And prior consent
to take my leave of you without restraint,
‘free and saved’, to speak it like the folk,
when things start picking up.
THIN MAN: What I have to say will come as a shock.
My desk is buried under applications
from thousands such as yourself, soon to shake
off, as you also must shake it off, this earthly yoke.
PEER: When I survey the scroll of my late conduct
I am impressed by my high qualifications.
THIN MAN: But as you said yourself, the merest trifles.
PEER: There was some pettiness, I grant you, but
I profited from the slave trade quite a bit.
THIN MAN: Some applicants have dealt exclusively
with minds and wills,
all at the highest levels –
I speak, you must understand, allusively –
but their logistics were shaky: we’re not talking here
of a blocked sin-duct.
Well, they were turned down.
PEER: I plied a lucrative slave trade. I shipped to China
thousands of shoddy copies of some figurine, a
travesty of Buddha, as I recall.
THIN MAN: Profiteering in mock piety, not a big deal!
There are those who profit from much nastier habits,
sermons, belles-lettres, objets d’art, exhibits
of dubious kinds. And they haven’t got in.
PEER: I’ve kept the worst till last. Listen to this:
I played at being a prophet …
THIN MAN: But overseas:
that’s just as we expect.
The ‘blue yonder’ excites ‘ins Blaue hinein’,72
faith’s mystery tour.
All candidates for the ladle; nothing more.
If this is what your evidence amounts to,
I have to tell y
ou frankly, it discounts you.
PEER: No, wait – ‘peril at sea’! I almost forgot:
I was sitting astride the keel of a capsized boat
and, as it is written, was grasping at a straw,
and, as it says also, was being ‘intensely myself’ –
well, I was half-
responsible for ridding a cook of his life.
THIN MAN: If you’d half brought a kitchen wench to grief
I’d be equally unimpressed.
What a species of half-gabble, now, is this?
What reason is there to light the furnaces,
turn up the heat, burning expensive fuel,
for such a bunch of mediocrities.
Please don’t be angry: at the worst or best
your sins attract a sneering condescension.
Take my advice, abandon thoughts of hell,
become inured to thoughts of reinfusion
into the base metals of the ladle.
If I gave board and lodging what would you gain?
Think about it; you’re a reasonable man.
True, you would keep your memory, some old saw
might be applicable; but passing in review
your lifelong mediocrity would not
be, in that Swedish phrase, ‘a lot of fun’.
You’ve nothing over which to laugh or howl;
nothing to make you either cold or hot;
no joy and no despair squat cheek by jowl.
Your limbo would begin to irritate
and aeon upon aeon
would pass in a mild form of chagrin.
Read Revelation, three, sixteen.
PEER: ‘The reasons why a pair of shoes
is agony, only the wearer knows.’
THIN MAN: More from the Good Book? And of course it’s true.
Praise be to Him of No Name,
it was my luck to come
into the world requiring only one shoe.
And that reminds me, I must hie abroad
to pick up the steak I’ve ordered, running red.
I can’t waste further time in idle chatter.
PEER: And what, may I ask, did that steak feed on
to turn him out so juicy, a raw-red ’un?
THIN MAN: He fed on himself entirely, days and nights,
and, in the end, that set him in my sights.
PEER: Selbstgrundlage, that’s what gives you entry
to hell’s pantry?
THIN MAN: Well, yes and no; you could say the door is ajar.
You can be Urselbst in either of two ways
as you might wear
a coat
rightside – or inside out.
Or here’s an analogy that might work better.
You’ll know that, in Paris, they recently hit upon
ways to make portraits with the aid of the sun.
You can do either a positive or a negative one,
the latter having its light and dark parts reversed,
which makes it appear weird to normal eyes.
But nonetheless the likeness is inherent
and what they have to do is to draw it forth.
If it so happens that a soul from birth
has photographed itself, its acts recurrent,
but only in a negative likeness, its nature
is not the cause of the plate’s being refused.
It is sent on to me, by me immersed
and steamed and soaked and scorched and rinsed –
sulphur and mercury (some might say ‘censed’) –
until the original likeness is sealed and held;
the positive, as it is rightly to be called.
But with a case such as yours, already mauled,
then neither sulphur, mercury, nor potash can
revive the sodden image of a man.
PEER: So one can’t come, or be brought, here as a black raven
and issue forth as white as a winter ptarmigan.
Then may I inquire, reverend, whose name now stands
on that negative image which, in your hands,
will attain a positive value?
THIN MAN: Name’s Peter Gynt.
PEER: Peter Gynt. Does this Herr Gynt affirm
that he’s himself, beyond all argument?
THIN MAN: He does so affirm.
PEER: You can accept his claim.
THIN MAN: Your tone suggests that you’re acquainted with him.
PEER: Slightly, yes. One meets so many people.
THIN MAN: Time passes. Where did you see him last?
PEER: It was down at the Cape.
THIN MAN: Di buona speranza?73
PEER: Yes,
but he leaves there shortly; gives no new address.
THIN MAN: Then I must start immediately, travel fast,
and trust to arrive in time.
That Cape Province has always spelled trouble.
Stavanger missionaries74 are there; they’re a bad lot.
He sets off towards the south.
PEER: So, off he goes at a bound and a trot,
and with his tongue hanging out.
Well, he’ll find he’s been had!
I enjoyed cheating the idiot.
And him so jargon-proud.
All that fuss
pretending he’s the boss.
He’ll be out of business;
he’ll fall off his perch with the whole caboodle.
Though I’m not all that secure in the saddle,
come to think of it.
The self-possessed gentry, of course, would say I don’t fit.
[A shooting star can be seen; he nods amicably towards it.]
Greetings from Bror Gynt, brother shooting star!
To shine, to be put out, to be simply not there …
[Hugs himself as if suddenly chilled with fear. He walks deeper into the misty landscape. After a moment of silence he cries out.]
Is there none out there to respond? No one at all?
No one in the abyss? Nor under the heavens’ shell?
[Re-emerges from the mists at a point farther along the path; he throws his hat on to the road and, as so often in the past, tugs and tears at his hair. Gradually his mood becomes calmer; finally he is still.]
So unutterably poor a soul can return
to pristine nothingness in the dense grey.
Ah, dearest earth, do not be angry
that I have ravaged you so. Nor you, dear sun,
who gifted your radiance to a locked empty room
because he who owned it was always away.
Inviolable sun and you, dear, violated earth,
was it wise to bear and shed light on her who gave me birth?
The spirit is such a miser, nature so prodigal.
Life’s held to ransom by what began it all.
If I could I would climb Glittertinden
to watch the sunrise as if for the last time,
gazing at what was promised and forbidden,
to have an avalanche drown me in its cry.
‘Here lies no one’ would serve to bury me.
Inconsolably the soul gathers where it is from.
CHURCHGOERS [singing along the forest path]:
O sacred morning light
when each appointing flame
raced from most holy Sion:
let us, our words made right,
re-gift the gifted Name
to whence it came, redeeming pain and sin.
PEER [cowering, well-nigh prostrate with terror]:
For you, now, Grace is the last wilderness.
Don’t seek there some ease from your distress.
I’m so afraid I was dead long before I died.
He tries to creep in among the bushes but finds that he has stumbled upon a crossroads.
BUTTON MOULDER: Greetings, Peer Gynt. So where’s that grand confession?
PEER: D’you think I haven’t chased it hither
and yon?
BUTTON MOULDER: Run across anybody on your trek?
PEER: A travelling photographer with his trade on his back.
BUTTON MOULDER: Your period of grace has now expired.
PEER: So’s everything. The owl, that wise old bird,
can smell the slow-burning fuse. I heard,
just now, its call.
BUTTON MOULDER: That was the matins bell.
PEER [pointing]:
Whatever is it that can so transmit
such radiance?
BUTTON MOULDER: A lamp inside a hut.
PEER: That sound I hear so vibrant on the air?
BUTTON MOULDER: A woman’s song as strong as any choir.
PEER: As well I know. She is my sins’ recorder.
BUTTON MOULDER [taking hold of him]:
Go to her then. Set your own house in order.
They have come out from among the trees and are standing in front of the ‘reindeer’ cabin. Dawn is breaking.
PEER: My house in order, you say. Well, here it is. Be off, man!
I tell you, if your ladle were as big as a coffin
it would still be too small for me and my sins to grieve in.
BUTTON MOULDER: Until the third crossroads, we agreed; but then …
He moves away.
PEER [approaching the cabin]:
Forwards, back,
same length of trek.
Both out and in
you scrape your skin.
[Stops.]
But what I hear is a wild ceaseless lament
for hearth and home, and dreadfully lost content.
[Walks a few steps; stops again.]
‘Go around’, said the Boyg.
[Hears singing from within the cabin.]
No, this time arrow-straight
however narrow the gate!
He runs towards the cabin. At that moment SOLVEIG appears in the doorway, dressed for church and carrying a psalter wrapped in a cloth. She has a staff in her hand. She stands erect and benign.
PEER [throws himself down on the threshold]:
If you’ve passed judgement upon me, speak it now!
SOLVEIG: He is here, he is here, I know.
She fumbles for him; it is now evident that she is almost blind.
PEER: Put it on record how grievous have been the wrongs!
SOLVEIG: You have not wronged me in any way,
my dearest boy.
Fumbles again and finds him.
BUTTON MOULDER’S VOICE [behind the cabin]:
Your sins are numbered.
PEER: Ay, numbered in wild throngs.
SOLVEIG [sitting down beside him]:
You have made my life a sequence of love’s songs.
Blessed it is that, at the last, you are home
and that ‘the day of Pentecost is fully come’.
PEER: Oh, Solveig, I am lost.
SOLVEIG: But surely to be found
