Doctor Glas

by Hjalmar Söderberg

  And now, as I sit at my open window writing this by the fluttering candlelight—for I dislike handling kerosene lamps, and my housekeeper is sleeping so soundly, after the funeral followed by coffee and cakes, that I don’t have the heart to wake her—now, when the flame of the candle flickers in the draft and my shadow on the green wallpaper flutters and trembles like the flame, trying to come to life—now I think of Hans Christian Andersen and his tale of the shadow, and it seems to me that I myself am the shadow who wished to become a man.

  JULY 6, MORNING

  I MUST WRITE down the dream I had last night.

  I was standing by the bed of Pastor Gregorius; he was ill. His upper body was bare, and I was listening to his heart. The bed was in his study. A cabinet organ stood in the corner, and someone was playing it. Not a chorale, barely a melody, just indistinct fugue-like tones, around and around. A door was open; this made me uneasy, but I couldn’t rouse myself to close it.

  “Is it serious?” asked the pastor.

  “No,” I answered, “not serious, but dangerous.”

  I meant that what I was thinking about was dangerous for me. And it seemed to me in the dream that the words were profound and well-chosen.

  “But just to be sure,” I added, “we’ll send to the pharmacy for some communion capsules.”

  “Will you operate?” asked the pastor.

  I nodded.

  “There’s no choice. Your heart is bad; it’s too old. We’ll have to remove it. The operation is completely safe, by the way; it can be performed with an ordinary paper knife.”

  This seemed like a quite elementary scientific truth, and I happened to be holding a paper knife.

  “Let’s just put a handkerchief over your face.”

  The pastor groaned aloud under the handkerchief. But instead of operating, I quickly pressed a button on the wall.

  I removed the handkerchief. He was dead. I felt his hand; it was icy cold. I looked at my watch.

  “He’s been dead at least two hours,” I said to myself.

  Mrs. Gregorius got up from playing the organ and came over to me. Her expression seemed worried and sorrowful, and she handed me a bouquet of dark flowers. Only then did I see that she was smiling provocatively and that she was naked.

  I reached out my arms toward her and wanted to pull her toward me, but she slipped away, and all of a sudden Klas Recke was standing in the open door.

  “Dr. Glas,” he said, “in my capacity as acting assistant chancellery secretary, I declare you under arrest!”

  “It’s too late now,” I replied. “Can’t you see?”

  I pointed at the window. A red flame lit up both windows of the room; it was suddenly bright as day, and a woman’s voice that seemed to come from another room whimpered and wailed, “The world is burning, the world is burning!”

  And I woke up.

  The morning sun was pouring into the room; I hadn’t pulled the curtain the night before when I came home.

  Strange. I haven’t given a thought to the ugly pastor and his beautiful wife for the past few days. Haven’t wanted to think about them. And Gregorius has gone to Porla.

  *

  I don’t write down all my thoughts here.

  I rarely write down a thought the first time it occurs to me. I wait to see if it returns.

  JULY 7

  IT’S RAINING, and I’m sitting thinking about unpleasant matters.

  Why did I say no that time last autumn when Hans Fahlén came to me asking to borrow fifty crowns? It’s true I scarcely knew him, but a week later he slit his throat.

  And why didn’t I learn Greek when I was in school? It annoys me to distraction. I studied it for four years, after all. Could it be that I decided not to learn anything because my father forced me to take Greek instead of English? How can someone be so monumentally stupid? I learned everything else, even the nonsense called logic. But I studied Greek for four years, and I don’t know any.

  It can hardly be my teacher’s fault, since he later became a government minister.

  I feel like unearthing my schoolbooks again to see if I can learn something now—perhaps it’s not yet too late.

  *

  I wonder what it must feel like to have a crime on one’s conscience.

  *

  I wonder whether Kristin won’t have dinner ready soon . . .

  *

  The wind is shaking the trees in the churchyard and the rain gushes down the drainpipe. A poor wretch with a bottle in his pocket has taken refuge under the church roof in a corner near a buttress. He’s leaning against the red church wall, and his gaze wanders back and forth among the scuttling clouds. Rain drips down from the two sparse trees by Bellman’s grave. Across the churchyard, by the opposite corner, is a house of ill repute; a girl in her chemise pads over to a window and lets down the curtain.

  But down among the graves the minister of the congregation treads cautiously through the dirt with umbrella and galoshes, and now he slips inside through the little door to the sacristy.

  Which prompts me to wonder why a minister always enters the church through a back door.

  JULY 9

  IT’S STILL RAINING. Days like this seem to bring out all the secret poison in my soul.

  Just now, as I was on my way home from my sick calls, I exchanged a quick greeting on a street corner with a man I don’t like meeting. He once insulted me—deeply, in a refined manner, and under such circumstances that I can see no way to return the insult.

  I don’t like this sort of thing. It affects my health.

  *

  I’m sitting at the secretary pulling out one drawer after another and looking at old papers and odds and ends. I happen to run across a yellowed newspaper clipping.

  Is There Life after Death? By H. Cremer, Doctor of Divinity. Price: 50 öre.

  John Bunyan’s Revelations. A Presentation of the Hereafter, the Glories of Heaven and Terrors of Hell. Price: 75 öre.

  THE POWERS WITHIN. The Correct Path to Fame and Fortune, by S. Smiles. Price: 3:50 cr., eleg. bound in gilded leather, 4:25 cr.

  Why have I saved this old advertisement? I remember cutting it out when I was fourteen, the same year my father’s fortune went up in smoke. I saved part of my modest allowance and eventually bought Mr. Smiles’s book, though not with the gilded binding. Once I’d read it I immediately sold it to a used bookstore; it was excessively stupid.

  But I’ve saved the advertisement, which is actually more valuable.

  And here’s an old photograph: the country house we had for a few years. It was called Marie’s Place, for my mother.

  The photo has faded and turned yellow; it’s as if there were a haze over the white house and the pine forest behind it. Well, that’s what it looked like on gray, rainy days.

  I never really enjoyed myself there. In the summers my father beat me so often. During periods when I wasn’t busy with homework and school I was considered a difficult child.

  Once I was beaten without cause. This is practically one of my brightest childhood memories. It hurt physically, of course, but it did my soul good. I went down to the sea afterward; it was blowing up a storm and the foam splashed in my face. I don’t know if I’ve ever, later in life, experienced such a pleasurable flood of noble feelings. I forgave my father; he had such a short temper, and he’d been worried about business matters as well.

  It was harder to forgive him all the times he beat me with cause; I don’t know if I really have even yet. For instance the time when, despite the strictest orders, I’d bitten my nails again. How he beat me! And for hours afterward I wandered around the pine forest in the pouring rain, cursing and weeping.

  My father never really seemed at peace. He was rarely happy, and since he wasn’t happy himself he couldn’t stand it when others were. But he liked parties; he was one of the cheerless spendthrifts. He started rich and died poor. I’m not sure his dealings were completely above-board; after all, he cut a wide swath. How often I wondered as a child
about a joking comment I once heard him make to a business acquaintance: “Yes, my dear Gustav, it isn’t easy to be honest when one earns as much money as we do . . .” But he was strict and implacable and had absolutely clear and firm notions about duty when it came to others. For oneself there are always special circumstances that justify an exception.

  But the worst of it was that I always felt such a strong physical repulsion for him. How I suffered as a little boy when I had to go bathing with him and he wanted to teach me to swim! I slithered out of his hands like an eel; time after time I thought I was drowning, and I was almost as terrified of death as of contact with his naked body. He probably didn’t suspect how this purely physical repulsion intensified my suffering when he beat me. And later on it was agony when travel or some temporary arrangement forced me to sleep in the same room with him.

  But I did love him, mostly, perhaps, because he was so proud of my sharp mind, and also because he was always so elegantly dressed. For a while I hated him, too, because he wasn’t kind to my mother. But when she became ill and died I noticed that he mourned her more than I myself could manage at age fifteen, and then I couldn’t hate him any longer.

  Now they’re both gone. All of them are gone—all the people who were part of my childhood home. Well, not all, but the ones I cared about. My brother Ernst, who was so strong and so stupid and so kind, my supporter and protector in all the difficulties a schoolboy encounters—gone. He went to Australia, and no one knows if he’s dead or alive. And my beautiful cousin Alice, who stood so pale and erect at the piano and sang with the eyes of a sleepwalker and with a voice that shimmered and burned, sang so I got the shivers when I sat curled up in a corner of the large glass veranda, sang as I’ll never again hear anyone sing—what happened to her? Married to poverty, to a small-town teacher, already old, ill, and worn. I suddenly got all choked up when I met her last Christmas at her mother’s; my emotion affected her, and we both wept . . . And her sister Anna with the hot cheeks, who was just as carried away by dancing as her sister was by music—she left her scoundrel of a husband for another scoundrel and was abandoned. Now people say she walks the streets in Chicago. And their father, my kind, handsome, witty Uncle Ulrik, whom they all said I resembled, though in an ugly way—he was sucked into the same crash that brought down my father and like him died in genteel poverty . . . What plague was it that tore them all away in just a few years, to the grave or to a shadow life in misery, everyone, everyone, who once filled our rooms in the days of high living?

  God knows what it was. But they’re gone, all of them.

  And Marie’s Place is now called Sophie’s Grove.

  JULY 10

  AT THE SECRETARY.

  On an impulse, I pressed the spring that opens the tiny secret compartment. I already know what’s there: just a small round box with some pills. I don’t want them in my medicine cabinet; confusion might arise, and that would not be good. I made them myself a few years ago; they contain potassium cyanide. I wasn’t feeling suicidal at the time, but I felt that a wise man is always prepared.

  A little potassium cyanide in a glass of wine or the like causes immediate death; the glass falls to the floor, and it’s clear to any observer that this is a suicide. That isn’t always desirable. However, a glass of water after one of my pills causes a delay of a minute or so before the pill dissolves and takes effect. There’s plenty of time to put the glass back on the tray and settle into a comfortable armchair by the fire, light a cigar, and open the Evening News. Suddenly you collapse. The doctor diagnoses a stroke or heart attack. If there’s an autopsy, naturally the poison is discovered, but if the circumstances aren’t suspicious or of any particular medical interest, there is no autopsy. And there’s nothing very remarkable about a stroke while smoking a cigar and reading the Evening News.

  There is still something comforting about knowing that these small, coated capsules that look like buckshot are lying there waiting for the day they might be needed. In them resides a power, evil and despicable in itself, since time immemorial the prime enemy of human beings and all living creatures, that one releases only when it is the sole possible deliverance, passionately desired, from a worse evil.

  What did I really have in mind when I made myself these black pills? I’ve never been able to imagine suicide because of unrequited love. More likely because of poverty. Poverty is dreadful. Of all kinds of so-called external misfortune no doubt this has the deepest inner effect. But it doesn’t seem to be threatening me; I consider myself relatively well off, and statistically I’m among the rich. What I probably was thinking of was illness. Long, incurable, hideous illness. I’ve seen so much . . . Cancer, disfigurement, blindness, paralysis . . . How many unfortunates haven’t I seen to whom I would have given one of these pills without the slightest hesitation, if only I, like other good people, didn’t find self-interest and fear of the police more compelling than compassion. And instead, how many unfit, hopelessly damaged human lives haven’t I helped preserve in the practice of my profession, without even shying away from accepting payment.

  But such is the custom. It’s always wisest to follow custom, and in matters that don’t affect us deeply and personally, perhaps it’s also the ethical choice. And why should I martyr myself for the sake of a belief that sooner or later will be held by all civilized people, but which today is still a crime?

  The day shall and must come when the right to die is recognized as a far more important and inalienable human right than the right to vote. And when that time comes, everyone who is incurably ill—and all “criminals” as well—will have the right to a doctor’s assistance if they choose deliverance.

  There is something beautiful and great about the cup of poison the ancient Athenians let the doctor hand Socrates once they’d established to their own satisfaction that his life was a danger to the state. Today, assuming he were judged the same way, he’d have been dragged to a shabby executioner’s block and slaughtered with an ax.

  *

  Good night, you evil power. Sleep well in your small round box. Sleep until I need you; if it’s up to me I won’t awaken you unnecessarily. It’s raining today, but tomorrow perhaps the sun will shine. And only if the day comes when sunshine itself seems contaminated and diseased will I awaken you so that I myself may sleep.

  JULY 11

  AT THE SECRETARY on a gray day.

  In one of the smaller drawers I just found a scrap of paper on which there were a few words in my own handwriting of a few years ago—for our handwriting changes continually, a tiny bit each year, perhaps imperceptibly to ourselves, but just as surely and inevitably as our face, posture, movements, and soul.

  It read, “Nothing diminishes and degrades a human being more than the knowledge of being unloved.”

  When did I write that? Is it my own reflection, or is it a quotation I’ve copied?

  Don’t remember.

  *

  I understand people who are ambitious. All I have to do is sit in a corner at the Opera and listen to the Coronation March from Meyerbeer’s Le Profete to feel a burning, if temporary desire to rule over others and be crowned in an ancient cathedral.

  But it has to be while I’m alive; the rest can be silence, for all I care. I’ve never understood those who strive for immortal glory. Humanity’s memory is faulty and unjust, and our oldest and greatest benefactors have been forgotten. Who invented the cart? Pascal invented the wheelbarrow and Fulton the locomotive, but who invented the cart? Who invented the wheel? No one knows. Instead history has preserved the name of King Xerxes’ coachman: Patiramfes, son of Otanes. He drove the great king’s chariot. And the scoundrel who set fire to the Temple of Diana in Ephesus so that people would never forget his name got his wish and is now mentioned in Brockhaus.

  *

  People want to be loved; barring that, admired; barring that, feared; barring that, detested and despised. People want to elicit some sort of reaction. A vacuum makes the soul tremble—it wants contact, n
o matter what the price.

  JULY 13

  I HAVE GRAY DAYS and difficult moments. I’m unhappy. Still, there’s no one I’d like to change lives with; my heart shrivels up at the thought that I could be this person or that among my acquaintances. No, I don’t want to be anyone else.

  In my early youth I suffered a great deal because I wasn’t handsome, and in my burning desire to be handsome I thought I was a monster of ugliness. Now I know I look more or less like everyone else. That doesn’t make me happy, either.

  I don’t like myself very much, neither the shell nor the interior. But I wouldn’t want to be anyone else.

  JULY 14

  BLESSED SUN that manages to find its way down to us, all the way down to the graves under the trees.

  Well, that was a while ago; now it’s dark. I’ve returned from my after-dinner walk. The city was bathed in a pink light, and above the southern heights a rosy haze was suspended.

  I sat for a while by myself at a table along the sidewalk outside the Grand Hotel and drank a glass of lemonade; just then Miss Mertens came by. I stood up and greeted her, and to my surprise she stopped, gave me her hand and said a few words before continuing, something about her mother’s illness and the lovely evening. While she was speaking she blushed slightly, as if she felt her behavior was unusual and might be misconstrued.

  I, at least, didn’t misconstrue it. I’ve noticed many times how gentle and kind and untouched by formality her manner is toward almost everyone, and this has always appealed to me.

  But still—how she was beaming! Is she in love?

  Her family was among the many who suffered from my father’s fall. In recent years the old colonel’s wife has been sickly and often turns to me. I’ve never wanted to accept any payment, and they understand why.