V.
The "daemonic" was also responsible for the mingled attraction that was exerted over me at this point by a young foreign student, and for the intercourse which ensued between us. Kappers was born somewhere in the West Indies, was the son of a well-to-do German manufacturer, and had been brought up in a North German town. His father, for what reason I do not know, wished him to study at Copenhagen University, and there take his law examination. There was coloured blood in his veins, though much diluted, maybe an eighth or so. He was tall and slender, somewhat loose in his walk and bearing, pale-complexioned, with dark eyes and negro hair. His face, though not handsome, looked exceedingly clever, and its expression was not deceptive, for the young man had an astonishing intellect.
He was placed in the house of a highly respected family in Copenhagen, that of a prominent scientist, a good-natured, unpractical savant, very unsuited to be the mentor of such an unconventional young man. He was conspicuous among the native Danish freshmen for his elegant dress and cosmopolitan education, and was so quick at learning that before very many weeks he spoke Danish almost without a mistake, though with a marked foreign accent, which, however, lent a certain charm to what he said. His extraordinary intelligence was not remarkable either for its comprehensiveness or its depth, but it was a quicker intelligence than any his Copenhagen fellow-student had ever known, and so keen that he seemed born to be a lawyer.
Kappers spent almost all his day idling about the streets, talking to his companions; he was always ready for a walk; you never saw him work or heard him talk about his work. Nevertheless, he, a foreigner, who had barely mastered the language, presented himself after six months--before he had attended all the lectures, that is,--for the examination in philosophy and passed it with Distinction in all three subjects; indeed, Rasmus Nielsen, who examined him in Propaedeutics, was so delighted at the foreigner's shrewd and ready answers that he gave him Specially excellent, a mark which did not exist.
His gifts in the juridical line appeared to be equally remarkable. When he turned up in a morning with his Danish fellow-students at the coach's house it might occasionally happen that he was somewhat tired and slack, but more often he showed a natural grasp of the handling of legal questions, and a consummate skill in bringing out every possible aspect of each question, that were astonishing in a beginner.
His gifts were of unusual power, but for the externalities of things only, and he possessed just the gifts with which the sophists of old time distinguished themselves. He himself was a young sophist, and at the same time a true comedian, adapting his behaviour to whomsoever he might happen to be addressing, winning over the person in question by striking his particular note and showing that side of his character with which he could best please him. Endowed with the capacity of mystifying and dazzling those around him, exceedingly keen-sighted, adaptable but in reality empty, he knew how to set people thinking and to fascinate others by his lively, unprejudiced and often paradoxical, but entertaining conversation. He was now colder, now more confidential; he knew how to assume cordiality, and to flatter by appearing to admire.
With a young student like myself who had just left school, was quite inexperienced in all worldly matters, and particularly in the chapter of women, but in whom he detected good abilities and a very strained idealism, he affected ascetic habits. With other companions he showed himself the intensely reckless and dissipated rich man's son he was; indeed, he amused himself by introducing some of the most inoffensive and foolish of them into the wretched dens of vice and letting them indulge themselves at his expense.
Intellectually interested as he was, he proposed, soon after our first meeting, that we should start a "literary and scientific" society, consisting of a very few freshmen, who, at the weekly meetings, should read a paper one of them had composed, whereupon two members who had previously read the paper should each submit it to a prepared criticism and after that, general discussion of the question. All that concerned the proposed society was carried out with a genuine Kappers-like mystery, as if it were a conspiracy, and with forms and ceremonies worthy of a diplomat's action.
Laws were drafted for the society, although it eventually consisted only of five members, and elaborate minutes were kept of the meetings. Among the members was V. Topsöe, afterwards well known as an editor and author, at that time a cautious and impudent freshman, whose motto was: "It is protection that we people must live by." He read the society a paper On the Appearance, dealing with how one ought to dress, behave, speak, do one's hair, which revealed powers of observation and a sarcastic tendency. Amongst those who eagerly sought for admission but never secured it was a young student, handsome, and with no small love of study, but stupid and pushing, for whom I, who continued to see myself in Lermontof's Petsjórin, cherished a hearty contempt, for the curious reason that he in every way reminded me of Petsjórin's fatuous and conceited adversary, Gruchnitski. Vilsing was asked to take part in the society's endeavours, but refused. "What I have against all these societies," he said, "is the self-satisfaction they give rise to; the only theme I should be inclined to treat is that of how the modern Don Juan must be conceived; but that I cannot do, since I should be obliged to touch on so many incidents of my own life."
This was the society before which I read the treatise on The Daemonic, and it was Kappers who, with his well-developed intelligence, would not admit the existence of anything of the sort.
The regular meetings went on for six months only, the machinery being too large and heavy in comparison with the results attained. Kappers and his intimate friends, however, saw none the less of each other. The brilliant West Indian continued to pursue his legal studies and to carry on his merry life in Copenhagen for some eighteen months. But his studies gradually came to a standstill, while his gay life took up more and more of his time. He was now living alone in a flat which, to begin with, had been very elegantly furnished, but grew emptier and emptier by degrees, as his furniture was sold, or went to the pawnbroker's. His furniture was followed by his books, and when Schou's "Orders in Council" had also been turned into money, his legal studies ceased of themselves. When the bookshelves were empty it was the turn of the wardrobe and the linen drawers, till one Autumn day in 1861, an emissary of his father, who had been sent to Copenhagen to ascertain what the son was really about, found him in his shirt, without coat or trousers, wrapped up in his fur overcoat, sitting on the floor in his drawing- room, where there was not so much as a chair left. Asked how it was that things had come to such a pass with him, he replied: "It is the curse that follows the coloured race."
A suit of clothes was redeemed for Kappers junior, and he was hurried away as quickly as possible to the German town where his father lived, and where the son explained to everyone who would listen that he had been obliged to leave Copenhagen suddenly "on account of a duel with a gentleman in a very exalted position."