Three Dramas - Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson (best biographies to read TXT) 📗

/> Hamar. "Oh, were I but the flowers in thy--." No, "hand" doesn't rhyme!

Tjaelde. (coming forward, meets MRS. TJAELDE, who has come in from the right.) Well, my dear, how are you?

Mrs. Tjaelde. Oh, I find it more and more difficult to get about.

Tjaelde. There is always something the matter with you, my dear! Can I have something to eat?

Mrs. Tjaelde. Yes, it has been standing waiting for you. Here it comes. (A maid brings in a tray which she lays on the table.)

Tjaelde. Good!

Mrs. Tjaelde. Will you have a cup of tea?

Tjaelde. No, thank you.

Mrs. Tjaelde. (sitting down beside him and pouring him out a glass of wine). And how have things gone with the Moellers?

Tjaelde. Badly. I told you so already.

Mrs. Tjaelde. I didn't hear you.

Valborg. I had a letter to-day from Nanna Moeller. She tells me all about it--how none of the family knew anything about it till the officers of the courts came.

Tjaelde. Yes, there must have been a dreadful scene.

Mrs. Tjaelde. Did he tell you anything about it?

Tjaelde (as he eats). I didn't speak to him.

Mrs. Tjaelde. My dear! Why, you are old friends!

Tjaelde. Bah! Old friends! He sat looking as if he had taken leave of his senses. Besides, I have had enough of that family. I didn't go there to hear them talk about their troubles.

Signe. I suppose it was all very sad?

Tjaelde (still eating). Shocking!

Mrs. Tjaelde. What will they have to live on?

Tjaelde. What is allowed them by their creditors, of course.

Signe. But all the things they had?

Tjaelde. Sold.

Signe. All those pretty things--their furniture, their carriages, their--?

Tjaelde. All sold.

Hamar. And his watch? It is the most beautiful watch I have ever seen--next to yours.

Tjaelde. It had to go, of course, being jewellery. Give me some wine; I am hot and thirsty.

Signe. Poor things!

Mrs. Tjaelde. Where are they going to live now?

Tjaelde. In the house of one of the skippers of what was their fleet. Two small rooms and a kitchen.

Signe. Two small rooms and a kitchen! (A pause.)

Mrs. Tjaelde. What do they intend to do?

Tjaelde. There was a subscription started to enable Mrs. Moeller to get the job of catering for the Club.

Mrs. Tjaelde. Is the poor woman going to have more cooking to do!

Signe. Did they send no messages to us?

Tjaelde. Of course they did; but I didn't pay any attention to them.

Hamar (who has been standing on the verandah). But Moeller--what did he say? What did he do?

Tjaelde. I don't know, I tell you.

Valborg (who has been walking up and down the room during the preceding conversation). He has said and done quite enough already.

Tjaelde (who has at last finished eating and drinking, is struck by her words). What do you mean by that, Valborg?

Valborg. That if I were his daughter I would never forgive him.

Mrs. Tjaelde. My dear Valborg, don't say such things!

Valborg. I mean it! A man who would bring such shame and misery upon his family does not deserve any mercy from them.

Mrs. Tjaelde. We are all in need of mercy.

Valborg. In one sense, yes. But what I mean is that I could never give him my respect or my affection again. He would have wronged me too cruelly.

Tjaelde (getting up). Wronged you?

Mrs. Tjaelde. Have you finished already, dear?

Tjaelde. Yes.

Mrs. Tjaelde. No more wine?

Tjaelde. I said I had finished. Wronged you? How?

Valborg. Well, I cannot imagine how one could be more cruelly wronged than to be allowed to assume a position that was nothing but a lie, to live up to means that had no real existence but were merely a sham--one's clothes a lie, one's very existence a lie! Suppose I were the sort of girl that found a certain delight in making use of her position as a rich man's daughter--in using it to the fullest possible extent; well, when I discovered that all that my father had given me was stolen-that all he had made me believe in was a lie--I am sure that then my anger and my shame would be beyond all bounds!

Mrs. Tjaelde. My child, you have never been tried. You don't know how such things may happen. You don't really know what you are saying!

Hamar. Well it might do Moeller good if he heard what she says!

Valborg. He has heard it. His daughter said that to him.

Mrs. Tjaelde. His own daughter! Child, child, is that what you write to each other about? God forgive you both!

Valborg. Oh, He will forgive us, because we speak the truth.

Mrs. Tialde. Child, child!

Tjaelde. You evidently don't understand what business is--success one day and failure the next.

Valborg. No one will ever persuade me that business is a lottery.

Tjaelde. No, a sound business is not.

Valborg. Exactly. It is the unsound sort that I condemn.

Tjaelde. Still, even the soundest have their anxious moments.

Valborg. If the anxious moments really foreshadow a crisis, no man of honour would keep his family o: his creditors in ignorance of the fact. My God, how Mr. Moeller has deceived his!

Signe. Valborg is always talking about business!

Valborg. Yes, it has had an attraction for me ever since I was a child. I am not ashamed of that.

Signe. You think you know all about it, anyway.

Valborg. Oh, no; but you can easily get to know a little about anything you are fond of.

Hamar. And one would need no great knowledge of business to condemn the way Moeller went on. It was obvious to every one. And the way his family went on, too! Who went the pace as much as the Moellers? Think of his daughter's toilettes!

Valborg. His daughter is my best friend. I don't want to hear her abused.

Hamar. Your Highness will admit that it is possible to be the daughter of a _very_ rich man without being as proud and as vain as--as the lady I am not allowed to mention!

Valborg. Nanna is neither proud nor vain. She is absolutely genuine. She had the aptitude for being exactly what she thought she was--a rich man's daughter.

Hamar. Has she the "aptitude" for being a bankrupt's daughter now?

Valborg. Certainly. She has sold all her trinkets, her dresses--every single thing she had. What she wears, she has either paid for herself or obtained by promising future payment.

Hamar. May I ask if she kept her stockings?

Valborg. She sent everything to a sale.

Hamar. If I had known that I would certainly have attended it!

Valborg. Yes, I daresay there was plenty to make fun of, and plenty of idle loafers, too, who were not ashamed to do so.

Mrs. Tjaelde. Children, children!

Hamar. May I ask if Miss Nanna sent her own idleness to the sale with her other effects?--because I have never known any one with a finer supply of it!

Valborg. She never thought she would need to work.

Tjaelde (coming forward to VALBORG). To take up the thread of what we were saying: you don't understand what a business-man's hope is from one day to the other--always a renewed hope. That fact does not make him a swindler. He may be unduly sanguine, perhaps--a poet, if you like, who lives in a world of dreams--or he may be a real genius, who sees land ahead when no one else suspects it.

Valborg. I don't think I misunderstand the real state of affairs. But perhaps you do, father. Because is not what you call hope, poetry, genius, merely speculating with what belongs to others, when a man knows that he owes more than he has got?

Tjaelde. It may be very difficult to be certain even whether he does that or not.

Valborg. Really? I should have thought his books would tell him--

Tjaelde. About his assets and his liabilities, certainly. But values are fluctuating things; and he may always have in hand some venture which, though it cannot be specified, may alter the whole situation.

Valborg. If he undeniably owes more than he possesses, any venture he undertakes must be a speculation with other people's money.

Tjaelde. Well--perhaps that is so; but that does not mean that he steals the money--he only uses it in trust for them.

Valborg. Entrusted to him on the false supposition that he is solvent.

Tjaelde. But possibly that money may save the whole situation.

Valborg. That does not alter the fact that he has got the use of it by a lie.

Tjaelde. You use very harsh terms. (MRS. TJAELDE has once or twice been making signs to VALBORG, which the latter sees but pays no attention to.)

Valborg. In that case the lie consists in the concealment.

Tjaelde. But what do you want him to do? To lay all his cards on the table, and so ruin both himself and the others?

Valborg. Yes, he ought to take every one concerned into his confidence.

Tjaelde. Bah! In that case we should see a thousand failures every year, and fortunes lost one after the other everywhere! No, you have a level head, Valborg, but your ideas are narrow. Look here, where are the newspapers? (SIGNE, who has been talking confidentially to HAMAR on the verandah, comes forward.)

Signe. I took them down to your office. I did not know you meant to stay in here.

Tjaelde. Oh, bother the office! Please fetch them for me. (SIGNE goes out, followed by Hamar.)

Mrs. Tjaelde (in an undertone to VALBORG). Why will you never listen to your mother, Valborg? (VALBORG goes out to the verandah; leans on the edge of it, with her head on her hands, and looks out.)

Tjaelde. I think I will change my coat. Oh no, I will wait till dinner-time.

Mrs. Tjaelde. Dinner! And here I am still sitting here!

Tjaelde. Are we expecting any one?

Mrs. Tjaelde. Yes, have you forgotten?

Tjaelde. Of course, yes.

Mrs. Tjaelde (going out). What on earth am I to order?

(TJAELDE comes forward as soon as he is alone, sits down on a chair with a weary, harassed expression, and buries his face in his hands with a sigh. SIGNE and HAMAR come back, she carrying some newspapers. HAMAR is going out to the verandah again, but SIGNE pulls him back.)

Signe. Here you are, father. Here are--

Tjaelde. What? Who?

Signe (astonished). The newspapers.

Tjaelde. Ah, yes. Give them to me.(Opens them hurriedly. They are mostly foreign papers, in which he scans the money articles one after another.)

Signe (after a whispered conversation with HAMAR). Father!

Tjaelde (without looking up from the papers).Well? (To himself, gloomily.) Down again, always down!

Signe. Hamar and I want so much to go into town again to Aunt Ulla's.

Tjaelde. But you know you were there only a fortnight ago. I received your bills yesterday. Have you seen them?

Signe. No need for that, father, if _you_ have seen them! Why do you sigh?

Tjaelde. Oh--because I see that stocks keep falling.

Signe. Pooh! Why should you bother about that? Now you