Mysteries - Knut Hamsun [46]
Carey. I don’t know whether all of you remember how Gladstone, in his time as prime minister, accepted denunciations from Carey, the traitor. Subsequently he helped him over to Africa, so he could escape the revenge of the Fenians. However, that’s not the question, that’s another story, I don’t give any weight to the sort of peccadilloes a prime minister may be forced to commit now and then. No, to get back to what we were talking about, the fact is that Gladstone as a speaker has the clearest conscience imaginable.... If you had seen or heard Gladstone speak, I would only have to call attention to his facial expressions during the speech. He’s so certain of his clear conscience that his certainty is mirrored in his eyes, his voice, his posture and his gestures. His speech is simple and easy to understand, slow and everlasting; oh, how everlasting it is, his barrel is never empty! You should see how he distributes his remarks around the hall—a few to the ironmonger over here, a few to that furrier over there—how he knows what he’s talking about to such a degree that he seems to appraise his words at a crown a piece. It’s quite a sight, truly entertaining! Gladstone, you see, is a knight of the indisputable right, and it’s the cause of that right he champions. It would never occur to him to make any sort of concession to error. That’s to say: if he knows he has the right on his side, he is ruthless in using it, displaying it, raising it to the skies, letting it flutter before the eyes of his listeners to put his opponents to shame. His morality is of the healthiest and most enduring kind: he’s working for Christianity, for humanism and for civilization. If someone offered that man so and so many thousand pounds to save an innocent woman from the scaffold, he would save the woman, refuse the money with contempt, and afterward take no credit for it. Not at all; he would take no credit for it, that’s the sort of man he is. He is a tireless fighter, perpetually on the go doing good on our planet, girding his loins every day for justice, truth and God. And what battles he wins! Two and two is four, truth has won the day, glory be to God! ... Oh well, Gladstone can go beyond two and two; I once heard him during a budgetary debate demonstrate that seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-one, and he won a huge, crushing victory. Once again he was right, and the rightness shone in his eyes, quivered in his voice, and elevated him to greatness. But then I really had to pause and look at the man. I understood that he had a clear conscience, and yet I paused. I stand there pondering the number he had arrived at, three hundred ninety-one, and find that it’s correct, and yet I turn it over in my mind and say to myself, No, wait a minute! Seventeen times twenty-three is three hundred ninety-seven! I know it is ninety-one, of course, but I still say, against my better judgment, it’s ninety-seven, to be on a different side than this man, this professional of rightness. There’s a voice inside me that demands, Rise up, rise up against this pedestrian rightness! And I rise up and say ninety-seven from a burning inner necessity, in order to prevent my consciousness of right from being trivialized and debased by this man, who stands so indisputably on the side of right—”
“I’ll be damned, but I never heard such nonsense in my whole life!” the doctor shouts. “Does it offend you that Gladstone is always right?”
Nagel smiled—whether from meekness or affectation was hard to say. “It does not offend me,” he continued, “rather, it demoralizes me.12 Well, I don’t really count on being understood in this, but that doesn’t matter. Gladstone is a kind of knight errant of right and truth, his brain is rigid with acknowledged results. That two and two is four is, to him, the greatest truth under the sun. Shall we, then, deny that two and two is four? Of course not; and I say this to show that Gladstone is most certainly right. The question is whether you are sufficiently mad for truth to put up with it, whether your mind has become so blunted