Doctor Glas

by Hjalmar Söderberg

  Finally he left, and I went on my way. I entered Old Town, walking up past the Great Church and into the alleys. Dense twilight in the narrow slits between the buildings and odd shadows along the walls, shadows unlike any in my neighborhood.

  —Mrs. Gregorius. What a strange visit she paid me the other day. She came during office hours; I saw exactly when she appeared and noted she’d allowed plenty of time, but she let later arrivals go ahead of her and waited until they’d left. Then finally she came in. She blushed and stammered and eventually blurted out something about having a sore throat, though it was better now anyway . . . “I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said, “I’m in such a hurry now.”

  As yet she hasn’t returned.

  I emerged from the alleys down at the quay. The moon was shining above Ship’s Isle, lemon yellow against the blue, but my calm, carefree mood was completely gone; the meeting with the pastor had spoiled it. That people like him should exist! Who could forget the old problem so often debated when a few poor wretches gather around the table at a café: if you could kill a Chinese mandarin merely by pressing a button on the wall, or through an act of sheer will, and then inherit his riches—would you do it? It’s not a question I’ve ever bothered answering, perhaps because I’ve never truly felt the harsh, bitter misery of poverty. But I think if I could kill that pastor by pushing a button on the wall, I’d do it.

  When I walked home in the unnaturally pale twilight, the heat once again felt just as oppressive as during the day, as if heavy with anguish. The red clouds of dust that had accumulated beyond the smokestacks of the factories on Kungsholmen had darkened and seemed threatening in their repose. I walked hurriedly down past St. Klara’s toward home, hat in hand, the sweat pouring from my brow. Not even under the large trees in the churchyard did the heat let up, but on nearly every bench couples sat whispering, and some were wrapped around each other, kissing with feverish eyes.

  *

  Now I’m sitting at my open window writing this—for whom? Not for a friend or a woman, scarcely even for myself, since I don’t read today what I wrote yesterday and won’t read this tomorrow. I’m writing to keep my hand moving—my thoughts move of their own accord. I’m writing to kill a sleepless hour. Why can’t I sleep? After all, I’ve committed no crime.

  *

  What I’m setting down on these pieces of paper isn’t a confession; to whom would I confess? I don’t tell everything about myself. I tell only what it pleases me to tell, but nothing I say is untrue. No amount of lying could hide the wretchedness of my soul, if it is wretched.

  *

  Out there the enormous, blue night is suspended above the trees of the churchyard. The city is quiet now, so quiet that sighs and whispers from the shadows down below make their way up to me, and once a bold laugh cuts through. At this moment I feel that no one in the world could be more alone than I. I, doctor Tyko Gabriel Glas, who sometimes helps others but have never been able to help myself, and who at thirty-three years of age have never been near a woman.

  JUNE 14

  WHAT A PROFESSION! How did it come to pass that of all possible ways of earning a living, I chose the one that suits me least? A doctor must either care deeply about people or be ambitious. —Well, true, in those days, I thought both characteristics applied.

  Today, once again, a woman was here, weeping, begging and pleading with me to help her. I’ve known her for quite some time. Married to a minor official, four thousand a year or so, and three children who arrived pell-mell the first three years. Then for five or six years she was spared; she’s regained some of her health, strength, and youth, and their household had partly recovered from the strain. They’re poor, of course, but they seem to have managed. And then suddenly misfortune is upon them again.

  She was sobbing so hard she could scarcely talk.

  Of course I answered with the usual prepared speech I always recite on occasions like this: my duty as a doctor, my regard for human life, even the frailest.

  I was solemn and implacable. Eventually she had to leave, ashamed, confused, helpless.

  I made a note of the incident; it was the eighteenth in my practice, and I’m not a gynecologist.

  I’ll never forget the first one. It was a girl of twenty-two or so, a dark-haired, buxom, slightly vulgar young beauty. It was quite clear that she was the kind who must have peopled the earth in Luther’s day if he was right when he wrote that it’s just as impossible for a woman to live without a man as to bite off one’s own nose. Conventional, bourgeois background, the father a wealthy wholesaler. I was the family doctor, so she’d come to me. She was frantic, beside herself, but not a bit shy.

  “Save me!” she pleaded, “save me!” I responded with duty, etc., but this was apparently beyond her comprehension. I explained to her that the law was no joking matter in cases like this.

  “The law?” She merely looked puzzled. I advised her to talk to her mother, who would talk to her father, and then there’d be a wedding.

  “Oh, no, my fiancé has nothing, and Father would never forgive me!”

  They weren’t engaged; she said “fiancé” for lack of a better word, since “lover” appears only in novels and sounds indecent when spoken aloud.

  “Save me! Have you no pity? I don’t know what I’ll do—I’ll throw myself into the Stream!”

  I became somewhat impatient. She didn’t inspire much sympathy, either; matters like this can always be settled when there’s a little money. It’s only pride that suffers a bit. She sobbed and blew her nose and carried on, and finally she threw herself down on the floor, kicking and screaming.

  Of course the outcome was just as I’d expected: her father, an ill-mannered brute, slapped her once or twice and then married her off in the bat of an eye to her partner in crime and sent them away on a honeymoon.

  Cases like hers have never troubled me. But I felt sorry for the pale little woman who came today. So much misery and pain for such a small pleasure.

  Respect for human life—what are these words to me other than base hypocrisy, and what else can they be for anyone who occasionally occupies an idle hour with thought? There are human lives all around us, and no one, with the possible exception of a few extraordinarily foolish philanthropists, has ever paid the slightest attention to strangers, to unknown, unseen human beings. Our actions reveal this; so does every government and parliament in the world.

  And Duty—what a splendid smoke screen to hide behind to avoid doing what ought to be done.

  But of course it would be foolish to risk everything—position, reputation, the future—to help strangers to whom one is indifferent. Counting on their silence would be naive. A friend finds herself in the same predicament, hears a whisper about where help may be found, and soon the word is out. No, better stick to duty, even if it is a painted screen, like Potemkin’s villages. I’m just afraid I’ll recite my duty speech so often that I’ll end up believing it myself. Potemkin deceived only his empress. How much more contemptible to deceive oneself.

  *

  Position, reputation, the future. As if I wouldn’t be ready, any day or any hour, to stash this baggage aboard the first ship that came loaded with action.

  Meaningful action.

  JUNE 15

  ONCE AGAIN I’M SITTING at the window. Outside in the wakeful blue night I can hear whispering and rustling under the trees.

  This evening on my after-dinner walk I saw a married couple. I recognized her right away. Not so many years ago I danced with her at balls, and I haven’t forgotten that each time I saw her she gave me a sleepless night. But she knew nothing about this. She wasn’t a woman then, she was an innocent girl. She embodied a dream, a man’s dream of womanhood.

  Now she was plodding down the street on her husband’s arm. More expensively dressed than before, but more commonplace, more bourgeois; something empty and burned-out in her gaze and at the same time the expression of a contented wife, as if she were carrying her belly in front of her on a silver
-plated platter.

  No, I don’t understand it. Why is it like this, why will it always be like this? Why is love fool’s gold that turns into withered leaves on the second day, or into filth or dissipation? The longing for love has inspired all human culture that rises above the level of basic survival. Our sense of beauty has no other wellspring. All art, all literature, all music has drunk from it. The most crude historical painting as well as Raphael’s madonnas and Steinlen’s little Parisian working girls, Wallin’s psalm “The Angel of Death” as well as the Song of Songs and Heine’s Buch der Lieder, the chorale and the Viennese waltz, yes, every plaster of Paris ornament on the wretched building where I live, every figure in the wallpaper, the shape of the porcelain vase over there and the pattern of my scarf, everything intended to be decorative or beautiful, whether or not it succeeds, comes from this, though sometimes in a roundabout way. And this is no nocturnal flight of fancy of mine; it’s been proven a hundred times over.

  But that wellspring isn’t love. Instead it’s the dream of love.

  And on the other hand, everything connected with the fulfillment of the dream, the satisfaction of the impulse, and what comes afterward: this our deepest instinct finds ugly and indecent. That can’t be proven, it’s merely a feeling: my own, and I suspect everyone’s. People always treat each other’s love affairs as something base or comical and don’t even make an exception for their own. And the consequences . . . A pregnant woman is frightful. A newborn child is disgusting. A deathbed seldom makes as horrible an impression as childbirth, that dreadful cacophony of screams and filth and blood.

  But first and last, the act itself. I’ll never forget how, as a child standing under one of the enormous chestnut trees in the schoolyard, I first heard the explanation of “what people do.” I didn’t want to believe it; even after several other boys came over and confirmed the report, laughing at my stupidity, I was still incredulous and ran away, beside myself with outrage. Had mother and father really done that? And would I myself do it when I grew up? Was there no escape?

  I’d always felt great contempt for the nasty boys who wrote dirty words on walls and fences. But at that moment it was as if God himself had written something filthy in the blue spring sky, and I think it was then that I first began to wonder whether there really was a God.

  Even now I haven’t completely recovered from the shock. Why is our species preserved and our longing stilled by the same organ we use several times a day as a drain to remove impurities? Why couldn’t this be an act that encompassed dignity and beauty as well as intense sensuality? An act that could be performed in church, in front of everyone, as well as in solitary darkness, or in a temple of roses in the full sunlight to a chanting choir and the dancing of the wedding party?

  *

  I don’t know how long I’ve been pacing back and forth across the room.

  It’s growing light outside. The weathercock on the church steeple shines in the east, and the hungry sparrows are chirping loudly.

  Strange how the air always trembles just before sunrise.

  JUNE 18

  IT WAS A BIT COOLER TODAY. I went riding for the first time in more than a month.

  What a morning! I’d gone to bed early the night before and had slept straight through. I never sleep without dreaming, but last night’s dreams were airy and blue. I rode out to Haga Park, around the Echo Temple and past the Copper Tents. Dew and cobwebs on all the bushes and thickets, the wind blowing through the trees. Deva was in a lively mood; the ground danced under us, young and fresh as on the first Sunday of creation. I came to a little inn I knew from having stopped there often while out riding last spring. I dismounted, emptied a bottle of beer in a single gulp, and then grabbed the brown-eyed serving girl by the waist and swung her once around, kissed her hair, and rode off.

  As the song goes.

  JUNE 19

  I SEE, MRS. GREGORIUS. So that was it. A bit unusual, true.

  She came late this time; office hours were over and she was the last one left in the waiting room.

  She stepped in, very pale, greeted me, and stopped in the middle of the room. I gestured toward a chair, but she remained standing.

  “I misled you the other day,” she said. “I’m not sick. I’m completely healthy. I wanted to talk to you about something entirely different, doctor, but I just couldn’t get it out.”

  A brewery cart rattled past on the street below. I went over and closed the window, and in the sudden silence I could hear her say, quickly and clearly, but with a slight tremor in her voice, as if she were on the verge of tears:

  “I’ve started feeling such a dreadful aversion to my husband.” Standing with my back to the tile stove, I gave a little nod to indicate I was following.

  “Not as a human being,” she went on. “He’s always good to me, kind. He’s never spoken a harsh word to me. But I respond to him with such intense disgust.”

  She took a deep breath.

  “I don’t know how to put it,” she said. “What I wanted to ask of you is rather strange, and it may be completely against your principles. I have no way of knowing how you feel about matters like this. But there’s something about you that inspires trust, and I don’t know anyone else to confide in, no one else in the world who could help me. Doctor, couldn’t you talk to my husband? Tell him I’m suffering from some illness, something gynecological, and that he has to give up his rights, at least for a while?”

  Rights. My hand went to my forehead. I see red when I hear the word in that context. Good God, what goes through people’s minds when they turn this into a question of rights and duties!

  It was immediately clear to me that I had to help her if I could. But I didn’t find anything to say at first—I wanted her to go on talking, and it’s also possible that my sympathy was mixed with a dose of plain ordinary curiosity.

  “Excuse me, Mrs. Gregorius, how long have you been married?”

  “Six years.”

  “And have what you refer to as your husband’s ‘rights’ always seemed as difficult for you as they do now?”

  She blushed a little.

  “It’s always been difficult,” she said. “But recently it’s become unbearable. I can’t stand it any longer—I don’t know what will become of me if this goes on.”

  “But,” I interrupted, “the pastor isn’t young any longer. It surprises me that at his age he can cause you so much . . . distress. How old is he, anyway?”

  “Fifty-six, I think. No, perhaps he’s fifty-seven. Though he looks older, of course.”

  “But tell me, Mrs. Gregorius, haven’t you spoken to him about this yourself? Told him how much it torments you and asked him very sweetly to spare you?”

  “Yes, once I did ask him, but he answered by admonishing me. He said we couldn’t be sure whether or not God wanted us to have a baby, even though it hadn’t happened yet, and so it would be a very great sin to stop doing what God wants us to do in order to produce a baby . . . And perhaps he’s right. But it’s so hard for me.”

  I couldn’t repress a smile. What an inveterate old fraud!

  She saw my smile, and I think she misunderstood it. She was quiet a minute, as if reconsidering, and then she started talking again in a soft, quavering voice while the blush deepened and rose higher.

  “No, I have to tell you everything,” she said. “You may already have guessed—you see right through me. I’m asking you to lie for my sake, so the least I can do is be honest with you. Judge me as you like: I’m an unfaithful wife. I belong to another man, and that’s why this is so terribly difficult for me now.”

  She avoided meeting my eyes while she spoke. As for me, only now did I truly see her. Only now did I see that there was a woman in my room whose heart was overflowing with misery and desire, a young flower of a woman who radiated love all around her, blushing shyly because love’s fragrance was so heady and strong.

  I could feel myself turn pale.

  Finally she looked up and met my eyes.
I don’t know what she read into my gaze, but she collapsed and sank onto a chair, shaking with sobs. Perhaps she thought I regarded the entire matter frivolously, or perhaps she found me indifferent and unmoved and regretted having bared her soul to a stranger, to no avail.

  I went up to her and took her hand, patting it softly:

  “Now, now, don’t cry any more. I want to help you; I promise I will.”

  “Thank you, thank you . . .”

  She kissed my hand until it grew damp. Just one more violent sob, and then a smile lit up her face through the tears.

  I had to smile.

  “But it was foolish of you to tell me the last part,” I said. “Not that you need be afraid I’ll abuse your trust, but matters like that should remain a secret. Always, without exception, for as long as you can. And of course I would have helped you anyway.”

  She answered, “I wanted to tell you. I wanted someone I look up to and respect to know about it and still not treat me with contempt.”

  Then came a long story. Once, about a year ago, she’d overheard a conversation between her husband and me—he was ill and I was paying a call. We happened to be talking about prostitution. She remembered everything I’d said and repeated it to me. It was quite straightforward and ordinary: these poor girls are human beings, too, and should be treated accordingly, etc. But she’d never heard anything like it before. Ever since then she’d looked up to me, and that was why she’d mustered up the courage to confide in me.

  I had no memory whatsoever of any of this . . . The past comes back to haunt us.

  I promised to talk to her husband that same day, and she left, but she forgot her gloves and parasol and came back to fetch them before disappearing again. She was beaming, radiant, dizzily happy, like a child who’s gotten her way and is looking forward to something wonderful.