Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [45]
“There is one thing which makes me extremely happy,” the doctor said, his eyes quite moist, “namely, that Gladstone is still alive. Fill your glasses, gentlemen, and we’ll drink a toast to Gladstone, yes, to Gladstone, that great and pure democrat, a man of the present and the future.”
“Wait a moment, let us too be in on it!” cried his wife. And she filled the women’s glasses with wine, filled them to overflowing in her eagerness, and passed the tray around with trembling hands.
Then they all drank the toast.
“Well, isn’t he a real man, though!” the doctor went on, smacking his tongue. “Poor fellow, he has had a cold for a while, but hopefully it will pass. There’s no living politician I would be so reluctant to lose as Gladstone. Goodness, when I think of him he appears like a lighthouse in front of me, sending its beams all over the world! ... You look so preoccupied, Mr. Nagel, don’t you agree?”
“Beg your pardon? Of course, I completely agree with you.”
“Of course. Well, there are many things about Bismarck too that impress me,9 but Gladstone!”
The doctor was still not being contradicted,10 everybody knew about his blessed chatter. In the end the conversation so flagged that the doctor proposed a game of cards to pass the time. Who would like to play? But at that point Mrs. Stenersen called from the other end of the room, “Well, I never! Do you know what Mr. Ølien has just been telling me? Mr. Nagel, you haven’t always thought as highly of Gladstone as this evening, have you? Mr. Øien once heard you in Kristiania—was it in the Workers’ Association?—where you thoroughly reviled Gladstone. A fine one you are! Is this really true? Oh, just you dare, just you dare!”
Mrs. Stenersen said this in good faith, smiling and holding her finger up in jest. She repeated that he had to say whether it was true or not.
Taken aback, Nagel replied, “That must be a mistake.”
“I wouldn’t say that you reviled him,” Øien said. “You protested vehemently. For example, I recall your saying that Gladstone was a bigot.”
“A bigot! Gladstone a bigot!” the doctor yelled. “Were you drunk, man?”
Nagel laughed. “I don’t think so. Well, perhaps I was, I don’t know. It does sound like it.”
“It certainly does!” the doctor said, appeased.
Nagel refused to explain himself and wanted to drop the subject, but Dagny Kielland again asked Mrs. Stenersen to keep at it. “Get him to explain what he meant. It would be such fun.”
“Well, what did you really mean?” the hostess asked. “Since you protested, you must have meant something by it. So, let’s hear! Besides, you will be doing us a favor, because if you men start playing cards, we’ll all be so bored.”11
“If it will amuse you all, that’s quite another matter,” Nagel answers.
Did he intend, by this remark, to sneer at himself and the part he was playing? His lips curled slightly.
He started by saying he couldn’t recall the occasion Mr. Øien was talking about.... “Have any of you seen Gladstone or heard him speak? What is most impressive about him when he speaks is the man’s candid behavior, his great sense of justice. It’s as though any suggestion other than his having a clear conscience was out of the question. How could that man ever do this great wickedness and sin against God! And he himself is so deeply saturated with this idea of a clear conscience that he presupposes the same among his listeners, truly presupposes that his listeners too have a clear conscience—”
“But that’s one of his nice traits, isn’t it? It shows his integrity and his humane thinking,” the doctor cut in. “How absurd!”
“I’m of the same opinion; I simply mention it as part of his profile, a nice feature of his portrait, heh-heh-heh. Let me cite an incident that I just recalled; well, maybe I don’t need to relate the whole incident, I’ll just mention the name