The professor was ashamed to say, "Go to my only soul-saving laboratory."
John went out furious. Here then again neither diligence nor knowledge prevailed, but only cash and cringing! Had he tried short cuts? No, on the contrary, he had been obliged to travel by painful circuitous paths, while others had gone the direct road, and the directest is the shortest.
He went to the Carolina Park, as angry as an irritated bee. He did not wish to return at once to the town, but sat down on a seat. If he could only set this devil's hole on fire! Another year? No, never! Why read so much unnecessary stuff, which would only be forgotten, and be of no practical use? And slave in order to enter this dirty profession where one had to analyse urine, pick about in vomit, poke about in all the recesses of the body? Faugh! Just as he was sitting there, a group of cheerful-looking people came by, and stood laughing outside the Carolina library. They looked up to the window's, through which long rows of books were visible, shelf after shelf. They laughed,—the men and women laughed at the books. He thought he recognised them. Yes, they were Levasseur's French actors, whom he had seen in Stockholm and who were now visiting Upsala. They laughed at the books! Lucky people who could be importers of genius and culture without books. Perhaps every soul had something to give which was not in books, but would be there some day. Yes, certainly it was so. He himself possessed stories of experience and thoughts, which could enrich anthropology, and were ready to be throw out.
Again there stole upon him the thought of entering this privileged profession, which stood outside and above petty social conventions which ignored distinctions of rank, and in which one need never be conscious of belonging to the lower classes. There one could appeal to the universal judgment, and work in full publicity instead of being hung up here in a remote dark hole, without a verdict, examination, or witnesses.
Strengthened by this new idea, he stood up, east a glance at the books above, and went down to the town resolved to go home and seek for an engagement in the Theatre Royal.
Every townsman has probably felt once in his life the wish to appear as an actor. This is probably due to the impulse of the cultivated man to magnify and make himself something, to identify himself with great and celebrated personalities. John, who was a romanticist, had also the desire to step forward and harangue the public. He believed that he could choose his proper rôle, and he knew beforehand which it would be. The fact that he, like all others, believed that he had the capacity to become an actor, sprang from the superfluity of unused force, produced by a want of sufficient physical exercise, and from the tendency to megalomania connected with mental over-exertion. He saw no difficulties in the profession itself, but expected opposition from another quarter.
To attribute his being stage-struck to hereditary tendencies would perhaps be hasty, since we have just remarked that it is an almost universal impulse. But his paternal grandfather, a Stockholm citizen, had written dramatic pieces for an amateur theatre, and a young distant relative still lived as a warning example. The latter had been an engineer, had been through a course of instruction in the Motala iron-works, and had a post on the Köping-Hult railway. He therefore had fine prospects in front of him, but suddenly threw them up, and became an actor. This step of his was an incessant trouble to his family. Up to this time the young man had become nothing but was still travelling about with an obscure theatrical company. The danger of becoming like him was the difficult point. "Yes," said John to himself, "but I shall have luck." Why? Because he believed it; and he believed it because he wished it.
Some might be inclined to derive this strong impulse on John's part from the fact that he loved to play, as a child, with a toy theatre, but that is not sufficient, as all children do the same and he had got the taste from seeing them do it. The theatre was an unreal better world which enticed one out of the tedious real one. The latter would not have seemed so tedious if his education had been more harmonious and realistic and not given him such a strong tendency to romance. Enough; his resolution was taken; and without saying anything to any one, he went to the director of the Theatrical Academy the dramaturgist of the Theatre Royal.
When he heard the sound of his own words "I want to be an actor," he shuddered. He felt as though he tore down the veil of his inborn modesty, and did violence to his own nature.
The director asked what he was doing at present.