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THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

HENRIK IBSEN

VOLUME I

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT

THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG

LOVE'S COMEDY

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF

HENRIK IBSEN

Copyright Edition. Complete in 11 Volumes.

Crown 8vo, price 4s. each.

ENTIRELY REVISED AND EDITED BY

WILLIAM ARCHER

London: WILLIAM HEINEMANN

21 Bedford Street, W.C.

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
HENRIK IBSEN

Copyright Edition

VOLUME I

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT

THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG

LOVE'S COMEDY

WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY

WILLIAM ARCHER

AND

C. H. HERFORD, Litt.D., M.A.

LONDON

WILLIAM HEINEMANN

1910

First printed (Collected Edition) 1908

Second Impression 1910

Copyright 1908 by William Heinemann

CONTENTS

GENERAL PREFACE

The eleven volumes of this edition contain all, save one, of the dramas which Henrik Ibsen himself admitted to the canon of his works. The one exception is his earliest, and very immature, tragedy, Catilina, first published in 1850, and republished in 1875. This play is interesting in the light reflected from the poet’s later achievements, but has little or no inherent value. A great part of its interest lies in the very crudities of its style, which it would be a thankless task to reproduce in translation. Moreover, the poet impaired even its biographical value by largely rewriting it before its republication. He did not make it, or attempt to make it, a better play, but he in some measure corrected its juvenility of expression. Which version, then, should a translator choose? To go back to the original would seem a deliberate disregard of the poet’s wishes; while, on the other hand, the retouched version is clearly of far inferior interest. It seemed advisable, therefore, to leave the play alone, so far as this edition was concerned. Still more clearly did it appear unnecessary to include The Warrior’s Barrow and Olaf Liliekrans, two early plays which were never admitted to any edition prepared by the poet himself. They were included in a Supplementary Volume of the Norwegian collected edition, issued in 1902, when Ibsen’s life-work was over. They have even less intrinsic value than Catilina, and ought certainly to be kept apart from the works by which he desired to be remembered. A fourth youthful production, St. John’s Night, remains to this day in manuscript. Not even German piety has dragged it to light.

With two exceptions, the plays appear in their chronological order. The exceptions are Love’s Comedy, which ought by rights to come between The Vikings and The Pretenders, and Emperor and Galilean, which ought to follow The League of Youth instead of preceding it. The reasons of convenience which prompted these departures from the exact order are pretty obvious. It seemed highly desirable to bring the two Saga Plays, if I may so call them, into one volume; while as for Emperor and Galilean, it could not have been placed between The League of Youth and Pillars of Society save by separating its two parts, and assigning Caesar’s Apostasy to Volume V., The Emperor Julian to Volume VI.

For the translations of all the plays in this edition, except Love’s Comedy and Brand, I am ultimately responsible, in the sense that I have exercised an unrestricted right of revision. This means, of course, that, in plays originally translated by others, the merits of the English version belong for the most part to the original translator, while the faults may have been introduced, and must have been sanctioned, by me. The revision, whether fortunate or otherwise, has in all cases been very thorough.

In their unrevised form, these translations have met with a good deal of praise and with some blame. I trust that the revision has rendered them more praiseworthy, but I can scarcely hope that it has met all the objections of those critics who have found them blameworthy. For, in some cases at any rate these objections proceeded from theories of the translator’s function widely divergent from my own—theories of which nothing, probably, could disabuse the critic’s mind, save a little experience of the difficulties of translating (as distinct from adapting) dramatic prose. Ibsen is at once extremely easy and extremely difficult to translate. It is extremely easy, in his prose plays, to realise his meaning; it is often extremely difficult to convey it in natural, colloquial, and yet not too colloquial, English. He is especially fond of laying barbed-wire entanglements for the translator’s feet, in the shape of recurrent phrases for which it is absolutely impossible to find an equivalent that will fit in all the different contexts. But this is only one of many classes of obstacles which encountered us on almost every page. I think, indeed, that my collaborators and I may take it as no small compliment that some of our critics have apparently not realised the difficulties of our task, or divined the laborious hours which have often gone to the turning of a single phrase. And, in not a few cases, the difficulties have proved sheer impossibilities. I will cite only one instance. Writing of The Master Builder, a very competent, and indeed generous, critic finds in it “a curious example of perhaps inevitable inadequacy.... ‘Duty! Duty! Duty!’ Hilda once exclaims in a scornful outburst. ‘What a short, sharp, stinging word!’ The epithets do not seem specially apt. But in the original she cries out ‘Pligt! Pligt! Pligt!’ and the very word stings and snaps.” I submit that in this criticism there is one superfluous word—to wit, the “perhaps” which qualifies “inevitable.” For the term used by Hilda, and for the idea in her mind, there is only one possible English equivalent: “Duty.” The actress can speak it so as more or less to justify Hilda’s feeling towards it; and, for the rest, the audience must “piece out our imperfections with their thoughts” and assume that the Norwegian word has rather more of a sting in its sound. It might be possible, no doubt, to adapt Hilda’s phrase to the English word, and say, “It sounds like the swish of a whip lash,” or something to that effect. But this is a sort of freedom which, rightly or wrongly, I hold inadmissible. Once grant the right of adaptation, even in small particulars, and it would be impossible to say where it should stop. The versions here presented (of the prose plays, at any rate) are translations, not paraphrases. If we have ever dropped into paraphrase, it is a dereliction of principle; and I do not remember an instance. For stage purposes, no doubt, a little paring of rough edges is here and there allowable; but even that, I think, should seldom go beyond the omission of lines which manifestly lose their force in translation, or are incomprehensible without a footnote.

In the Introductions to previous editions I have always confined myself to the statement of biographical and historic facts, holding criticism no part of my business. Now that Henrik Ibsen has passed away, and his works have taken a practically uncontested place in world-literature, this reticence seemed no longer imposed upon me. I have consequently made a few critical remarks on each play, chiefly directed towards tracing the course of the poet’s technical development. Nevertheless, the Introductions are still mainly biographical, and full advantage has been taken of the stores of new information contained in Ibsen’s Letters, and in the books and articles about him that have appeared since his death. I have prefixed to Lady Inger of Östråt a sketch of the poet’s life down to the date of that play; so that the Introductions, read in sequence, will be found to form a pretty full record of a career which, save for frequent changes of domicile, and the issuing of play after play, was singularly uneventful.

The Introductions to Loves Comedy and Brand, as well as the translations, are entirely the work of Professor Herford.

A point of typography perhaps deserves remark. The Norwegian (and German) method of indicating emphasis by spacing the letters of a word, thus, has been adopted in this edition. It is preferable for various reasons to the use of italics. In dramatic work, for one thing, emphases have sometimes to be indicated so frequently that the peppering of the page with italics would produce a very ugly effect. But a more important point is this: the italic fount suggests a stronger emphasis than the author, as a rule, intends. The spacing of a word, especially if it be short, will often escape the eye which does not look very closely; and this is as it should be. Spacing, as Ibsen employs it, does not generally indicate any obtrusive stress, but is merely a guide to the reader in case a doubt should arise in his mind as to which of two words is intended to be the more emphatic. When such a doubt occurs, the reader, by looking closely at the text, will often find in the spacing an indication which may at first have escaped him. In almost all cases, a spaced word in the translation represents a spaced word in the original. I have very seldom used spacing to indicate an emphasis peculiar to the English phraseology. The system was first introduced in 1897, in the translation of John Gabriel Borkman. It has no longer even the disadvantage of unfamiliarity, since it has been adopted by Mr. Bernard Shaw in his printed plays, and, I believe, by other dramatists.

Just thirty years have passed since I first put pen to paper in a translation of Ibsen. In October 1877, Pillars of Society reached me hot from the press; and, having devoured it, I dashed off a translation of it in less than a week. It has since cost me five or six times as much work in revision as it originally did in translation. The manuscript was punctually returned to me by more than one publisher; and something like ten years elapsed before it slowly dawned on me that the translating and editing of Ibsen’s works was to be one of the chief labours, as it has certainly been one of the greatest privileges, of my life. Since 1887 or thereabouts, not many months have passed in which a considerable portion of my time has not been devoted to acting, in one form or another, as intermediary between Ibsen and the English-speaking public. The larger part of the work, in actual bulk, I have myself done; but I have had invaluable aid from many quarters, and not merely from those fellow workers who are named in the following pages as the original translators of certain of the plays. These “helpers and servers,” as Solness would say, are too many to be individually mentioned; but to all of them, and chiefly to one who has devoted to the service of Ibsen a good deal of the hard-won leisure of Indian official life, I hereby convey my heartfelt thanks.

The task is now ended. Though it has involved not a little sheer drudgery, it has, on the whole, been of absorbing interest. And I should have been ungrateful indeed had I shrunk from drudgery in the cause of an author who had meant so much to me. I have experienced no other literary emotion at all comparable to the eagerness with which, ever since 1877, I awaited each new play of Ibsen’s, or the excitement with which I tore off the wrapper of the postal packets in which the little paper-covered books arrived from Copenhagen. People who are old enough to remember the appearance of the monthly parts of David Copperfield or Pendennis may have some inkling of my sensations; but they were all the intenser as they recurred at intervals, not of one month, but of two years. And it was not Ibsen the man of ideas or doctrines that meant so much to me; it was Ibsen the pure poet, the creator of men and women, the searcher of hearts, the weaver of strange webs of destiny. I can only trust that, by diligence in seeking for the best interpretation of his thoughts, I have paid some part of my debt to that great spirit, and to the glorious country that gave him birth.

William Archer.

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT

INTRODUCTION

Henrik Johan Ibsen was born on March 20, 1828, at the little seaport of Skien, situated at the head of a long fiord on the south coast of Norway. His great-great-grandfather was a Dane who settled in Bergen about 1720. His great-grandmother, Wenche Dischington, was the daughter of a Scotchman, who had settled and become naturalised in Norway; and Ibsen himself was inclined to ascribe some of his characteristics to the Scottish strain in his blood. Both his grandmother (Plesner by name) and his mother, Maria Cornelia Altenburg, were of German descent. It has been said that there was not a drop of Norwegian blood in Ibsen’s composition; but it is doubtful whether this statement can be substantiated. Most of his male ancestors were sailors; but his father, Knud Ibsen, was a merchant. When Henrik (his first child) was born, he seems to have been prosperous, and to have led a very social and perhaps rather extravagant life. But when the poet was eight years old financial disaster overtook the family, and they had to withdraw to a comparatively small farmhouse on the outskirts of the little town, where they lived in poverty and retirement.

As a boy, Ibsen appears to have been lacking in animal spirits and the ordinary childish taste for games. Our chief glimpses of his home life are due to his sister Hedvig, the only one of his family with whom, in after years, he maintained any intercourse, and whose name he gave to one of his most beautiful creations.[^[1]] She relates that the only out-door amusement he cared for was “building”—in what material does not appear. Among indoor diversions, that to which he was most addicted was conjuring, a younger brother serving as his confederate. We also hear of his cutting out fantastically-dressed figures in pasteboard, attaching them to wooden blocks, and ranging them in groups or tableaux. He may be said, in short, to have had a toy theatre without the stage. In all these amusements it is possible, with a little goodwill, to divine the coming dramatist—the constructive faculty, the taste for technical legerdemain (which made him in his youth so apt a disciple of Scribe), and the fundamental passion for manipulating fictitious characters. The education he received was of the most ordinary, but included a little Latin. The subjects which chiefly interested him were history and religion. He showed no special literary proclivities, though a dream which he narrated in a school composition so impressed his master that he accused him (much to the boy’s indignation) of having copied it out of some book.

His chief taste was for drawing, and he was anxious to become an artist; but his father could not afford to pay for his training.[^[2]] At the age of fifteen, therefore, he had to set about earning his living, and was apprenticed to an apothecary in Grimstad, a town on the south-west coast of Norway, between Arendal and Christianssand. He was here in even narrower social surroundings than at Skien. His birthplace numbered some 3000 inhabitants, Grimstad about 800. That he was contented with his lot cannot be supposed; and the short, dark, taciturn youth seems to have made an unsympathetic and rather uncanny impression upon the burghers of the little township. His popularity was not heightened by a talent which he presently developed for drawing caricatures and writing personal lampoons. He found, however, two admiring friends in Christopher Lorentz Due, a custom-house clerk, and a law student named Olë Schulerud.

The first political event which aroused his interest and stirred him to literary expression was the French Revolution of 1848. He himself writes:[^[3]] “The times were much disturbed. The February revolution, the rising in Hungary and elsewhere, the Slesvig War—all this had a strong and ripening effect on my development, immature though it remained both then and long afterwards. I wrote clangorous poems of encouragement to the Magyars, adjuring them, for the sake of freedom and humanity, not to falter in their righteous war against ‘the tyrants’; and I composed a long series of sonnets to King Oscar, mainly, so far as I remember, urging him to set aside all petty considerations, and march without delay, at the head of his army, to the assistance of our Danish brothers on the Slesvig frontier.” These effusions remained in manuscript, and have, for the most part, perished. About the same time he was reading for his matriculation examination at Christiania University, where he proposed to study medicine; and it happened that the Latin books prescribed were Sallust’s Catiline and Cicero’s Catilinarian Orations. “I devoured these documents,” says Ibsen, “and a few months later my drama [Catilina] was finished.” His friend Schulerud took it to Christiania, to offer it to the theatre and to the publishers. By both it was declined. Schulerud, however, had it printed at his own expense; and soon after its appearance, in the early spring of 1850, Ibsen himself came to Christiania.[^[4]]

For the most part written in blank verse, Catilina towards the close breaks into rhyming trochaic lines of thirteen and fifteen syllables. It is an extremely youthful production, very interesting from the biographical point of view, but of small substantive merit. What is chiefly notable in it, perhaps, is the fact that it already shows Ibsen occupied with the theme which was to run through so many of his works—the contrast between two types of womanhood, one strong and resolute, even to criminality, the other comparatively weak, clinging, and “feminine” in the conventional sense of the word.

In Christiania Ibsen shared Schulerud’s lodgings, and his poverty. There is a significant sentence in his preface to the re-written Catilina, in which he tells how the bulk of the first edition was sold as waste paper, and adds: “In the days immediately following we lacked none of the first necessities of life.” He went to a “student-factory,” or, as we should say, a “crammer’s,” managed by one Heltberg; and there he fell in with several of the leading spirits of his generation—notably with Björnson, A. O. Vinje, and Jonas Lie. In the early summer of 1850 he wrote a one-act play, Kiæmpehöien (The Warrior’s Barrow), entirely in the sentimental and somewhat verbose manner of the Danish poet Oehlenschläger. It was accepted by the Christiania Theatre, and performed three times, but cannot have put much money in the poet’s purse. With Paul Botten-Hansen and A. O. Vinje he co-operated in the production of a weekly satirical paper, at first entitled Manden (The Man), but afterwards Andhrimner, after the cook of the gods in Valhalla. To this journal, which lasted only from January to September 1851, he contributed, among other things, a satirical “music-tragedy,” entitled Norma, or a Politician’s Love. As the circulation of the paper is said to have been something under a hundred, it cannot have paid its contributors very lavishly. About this time, too, he narrowly escaped arrest on account of some political agitation, in which, however, he had not been very deeply concerned.

Meanwhile a movement had been going forward in the capital of Western Norway, Bergen, which was to have a determining influence on Ibsen’s destinies.

Up to 1850 there had been practically no Norwegian drama. The two great poets of the first half of the century, Wergeland and Welhaven, had nothing dramatic in their composition, though Wergeland more than once essayed the dramatic form. Danish actors and Danish plays held entire possession of the Christiania Theatre; and, though amateur performances were not uncommon in provincial towns, it was generally held that the Norwegians, as a nation, were devoid of all talent for acting. The very sound of Norwegian (as distinct from Danish) was held by Norwegians themselves to be ridiculous on the stage. Fortunately Olë Bull, the great violinist, was not of that opinion. With the insight of genius, he saw that the time had come for the development of a national drama; he set forth this view in a masterly argument addressed to the Storthing; and he gave practical effect to it by establishing, at his own risk, a Norwegian Theatre in Bergen. How rightly he had judged the situation may be estimated from the fact that among the raw lads who first presented themselves for employment was Johannes Brun, afterwards one of the greatest of comedians; while the first “theatre-poet” engaged by the management was none other than Henrik Ibsen.

The theatre was opened on January 2, 1850; Ibsen entered upon his duties (at a salary of less than £70 a year) in November 1851.[^[5]]

Incredibly, pathetically small, according to our ideas, were the material resources of Bull’s gallant enterprise. The town of Bergen numbered only 25,000 inhabitants. Performances were given only twice, or, at the outside, three times, a week; and the highest price of admission was two shillings. What can have been attempted in the way of scenery and costumes it is hard to imagine. Of a three-act play, produced in 1852, we read that “the mounting, which cost £22 10s., left nothing to be desired.”

Ibsen’s connection with the Bergen Theatre lasted from November 6, 1851, until the summer of 1857—that is to say, from his twenty-fourth to his thirtieth year. He was engaged in the first instance “to assist the theatre as dramatic author,” but in the following year he received from the management a “travelling stipend” of £45 to enable him to study the art of theatrical production in Denmark and Germany, with the stipulation that, on his return, he should undertake the duties of “scene instructor”—that is to say, stage-manager or producer. In this function he seems to have been—as, indeed, he always was—extremely conscientious. A book exists in the Bergen Public Library containing (it is said) careful designs by him for every scene in the plays he produced, and full notes as to entrances, exits, groupings, costumes, accessories, &c. But he was not an animating or inspiring producer. He had none of the histrionic vividness of his successor in the post, Björnstjerne Björnson, who, like all great producers, could not only tell the actors what to do, but show them how to do it. Perhaps it was a sense of his lack of impulse that induced the management to give him a colleague, one Herman Låding, with whom his relations were none of the happiest. Ibsen is even said, on one occasion, to have challenged Låding to a duel.

One of the duties of the “theatre-poet” was to have a new play ready for each recurrence of the “Foundation Day” of the theatre, January 2. On that date, in 1853, Ibsen produced a romantic comedy, St. John’s Night. This is the only one of his plays that has never been printed. From the accounts of those who have seen the manuscript, it would appear to be a strange jumble of fantastic fairy-lore with modern comedy or melodrama. Perhaps it is not quite fanciful to regard it as a sort of half-way house between A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Peer Gynt. In one of its scenes there appears to be an unmistakable foreshadowing of the episode in the Troll-King’s palace (Peer Gynt, Act II., Sc. 6). The play had no success, and was performed only twice. For the next Foundation Day, January 2, 1854, Ibsen prepared a revised version of The Warrior’s Barrow, already produced in Christiania. A year later, January 2, 1855, Lady Inger of Östråt was produced—a work still immature, indeed, but giving, for the first time, no uncertain promise of the master dramatist to come.

In an autobiographical letter to the Danish critic Peter Hansen, written from Dresden in 1870, Ibsen says: “Lady Inger of Östråt is the result of a love-affair—hastily entered into and violently broken off—to which several of my minor poems may also be attributed, such as Wild-flowers and Pot-plants, A Bird-Song, &c.” The heroine of this love-affair can now be identified as a lady named Henrikke Holst, who seems to have preserved through a long life the fresh, bright spirit, the overflowing joyousness, which attracted Ibsen when she was only in her seventeenth year. Their relation was of the most innocent. It went no further than a few surreptitious rambles in the romantic surroundings of Bergen, usually with a somewhat older girl to play propriety, and with a bag of sugar-plums to fill up pauses in the conversation. The “violent” ending seems to have come when the young lady’s father discovered the secret of these excursions, and doubtless placed her under more careful control. What there was in this episode to suggest, or in any way influence, Lady Inger, I cannot understand. Nevertheless the identification seems quite certain. The affair had a charming little sequel. During the days of their love’s young dream, Ibsen treated the “wild-flower” with a sort of shy and distant chivalry at which the wood-gods must have smiled. He avoided even touching her hand, and always addressed her by the “De” (you) of formal politeness. But when they met again after many years, he a famous poet and she a middle-aged matron, he instinctively adopted the “Du” (thou) of affectionate intimacy, and she responded in kind. He asked her whether she had recognised herself in any of his works, and she replied: “I really don’t know, unless it be in the parson’s wife in Love’s Comedy, with her eight children and her perpetual knitting.” “Ibsen protested,” says Herr Paulsen, in whose Samliv med Ibsen a full account of the episode may be read. It is interesting to note that the lady did not recognise herself in Eline Gyldenlöve, any more than we can.

It must have been less than a year after the production of Lady Inger that Ibsen made the acquaintance of the lady who was to be his wife. Susanna Dåe Thoresen was a daughter (by his second marriage) of Provost[^[6]] Thoresen, of Bergen, whose third wife, Magdalene Krag, afterwards became an authoress of some celebrity. It is recorded that Ibsen’s first visit to the Thoresen household took place on January 7, 1856,[^[7]] and that on that occasion, speaking to Susanna Thoresen, he was suddenly moved to say to her: “You are now Elina, but in time you will become Lady Inger.” Twenty years later, at Christmas 1876, he gave his wife a copy of the German translation of Lady Inger, with the following inscription on the fly-leaf:

“This book is by right indefeasible thine,

Who in spirit art born of the Östråt line.”

In Lady Inger Ibsen has chosen a theme from the very darkest hour of Norwegian history. King Sverre’s democratic monarchy, dating from the beginning of the thirteenth century, had paralysed the old Norwegian nobility. One by one the great families died out, their possessions being concentrated in the hands of the few survivors, who regarded their wealth as a privilege unhampered by obligations. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, then, patriotism and public spirit were almost dead among the nobles, while the monarchy, before which the old aristocracy had fallen, was itself dead, or rather merged (since 1380) in the Crown of Denmark. The peasantry, too, had long ago lost all effective voice in political affairs; so that Norway lay prone and inert at the mercy of her Danish rulers. It is at the moment of deepest national degradation that Ibsen has placed his tragedy; and the degradation was, in fact, even deeper than he represents it, for the longings for freedom, the stirrings of revolt, which form the motive-power of the action, are invented, or at any rate idealised, by the poet. Fru Inger Ottisdatter Gyldenlöve was, in fact, the greatest personage of her day in Norway. She was the best-born, the wealthiest, and probably the ablest woman in the land. At the time when Ibsen wrote, little more than this seems to have been known of her; so that in making her the victim of a struggle between patriotic duty and maternal love, he was perhaps poetising in the absence of positive evidence, rather than in opposition to it. Subsequent research, unfortunately, has shown that Fru Inger was but little troubled with patriotic aspirations. She was a hard and grasping woman, ambitious of social power and predominance, but inaccessible, or nearly so, to national feeling. It was from sheer social ambition, and with no qualms of patriotic conscience, that she married her daughters to Danish noblemen. True, she lent some support to the insurrection of the so-called “Dale-junker,” a peasant who gave himself out as the heir of Sten Sture, a former regent of Sweden; but there is not a tittle of ground for making this pretender her son. He might, indeed, have become her son-in-law, for, speculating on his chances of success, she had betrothed one of her daughters to him. Thus the Fru Inger of Ibsen’s play is, in her character and circumstances, as much a creation of the poet’s as though no historic personage of that name had ever existed. Olaf Skaktavl, Nils Lykke, and Eline Gyldenlöve are also historic names; but with them, too, Ibsen has dealt with the utmost freedom. The real Nils Lykke was married in 1528 to the real Eline Gyldenlöve. She died four years later, leaving him two children; and thereupon he would fain have married her sister Lucia. Such a union, however, was regarded as incestuous, and the lovers failed in their effort to obtain a special dispensation. Lucia then became her brother-in-law’s mistress, and bore him a son. But the ecclesiastical law was in those days not to be trifled with; Nils Lykke was thrown into prison for his crime, condemned, and killed in his dungeon, in the year of grace 1535. Thus there was a tragedy ready-made in Ibsen’s material, though it was not the tragedy he chose to write.

The Bergen public did not greatly take to Lady Inger, and it was performed, in its novelty, only twice. Nor is the reason far to seek. The extreme complexity of the intrigue, and the lack of clear guidance through its mazes, probably left the Bergen audiences no less puzzled than the London audiences who saw the play at the Scala Theatre in 1906.[^[8]] It is a play which can be appreciated only by spectators who know it beforehand. Such audiences it has often found in Norway, where it was revived at the Christiania Theatre in 1875; but in Denmark and Germany, though it has been produced several times, it has never been very successful. We need go no further than the end of the first act to understand the reason. On an audience which knows nothing of the play, the sudden appearance of a “Stranger,” to whose identity it has not the slightest clue, can produce no effect save one of bewilderment. To rely on such an incident for what was evidently intended to be a thrilling “curtain,” was to betray extreme inexperience; and this single trait is typical of much in the play. Nevertheless Lady Inger marks a decisive advance in Ibsen’s development. It marks, one may say, the birth of his power of invention. He did not as yet know how to restrain or clarify his invention, and he made clumsy use of the stock devices of a bad school. But he had once for all entered upon that course of technical training which it took him five-and-twenty years to complete. He was learning much that he was afterwards to unlearn; but had he not undergone this apprenticeship, he would never have been the master he ultimately became.

When Ibsen entered upon his duties at the Bergen Theatre, the influence of Eugène Scribe and his imitators was at its very height. Of the 145 plays produced during his tenure of office, more than half (seventy-five) were French, twenty-one being by Scribe himself, and at least half the remainder by adepts of his school, Bayard, Dumanoir, Mélesville, &c. It is to this school that Ibsen, in Lady Inger, proclaims his adherence; and he did not finally shake off its influence until he wrote the Third Act of A Doll’s House in 1879. Although the romantic environment of the play, and the tragic intensity of the leading character, tend to disguise the relationship, there can be no doubt that Lady Inger is, in essence, simply a French drama of intrigue, constructed after the method of Scribe, as exemplified in Adrienne Lecouvreur, Les Contes de la Reine de Navarre,[^[9]] and a dozen other French plays, with the staging of which the poet was then occupied. It might seem that the figure of Elina, brooding over the thought of her dead sister, coffined in the vault below the banqueting-hall, belonged rather to German romanticism; but there are plenty of traces of German romanticism even in the French plays with which the good people of Bergen were regaled. For the suggestion of grave-vaults and coffined heroines, for example, Ibsen need have gone no further than Dumas’s Catherine Howard, which he produced in March 1853. I do not, however, pretend that his romantic colouring came to him from France. It came to him, doubtless, from Germany, by way of Denmark. My point is that the conduct of the intrigue in Lady Inger shows the most unmistakable marks of his study of the great French plot-manipulators. Its dexterity and its artificiality alike are neither German nor Danish, but French. Ibsen had learnt the great secret of Scribe—the secret of dramatic movement. The play is full of those ingenious complications, mistakes of identity, and rapid turns of fortune by which Scribe enchained the interest of his audiences. Its central theme—a mother plunging into intrigue and crime for the advancement of her son, only to find that her son himself has been her victim—is as old as Greek tragedy. The secondary story, too—that of Elina’s wild infatuation for the betrayer and practically the murderer of her sister—could probably be paralleled in the ballad literature of Scotland, Germany, or Denmark, and might, indeed, have been told, in verse or prose, by Sir Walter Scott. But these very un-Parisian elements are handled in a fundamentally Parisian fashion, and Ibsen is clearly fascinated, for the time, by the ideal of what was afterwards to be known as the “well-made play.” The fact that the result is in reality an ill-made play in no way invalidates this theory. It is perhaps the final condemnation of the well-made play that in nine cases out of ten—and even in the hands of far more experienced playwrights than the young Bergen “theatre-poet”—it is apt to prove ill-made after all.

Far be it from me, however, to speak in pure disparagement of Lady Inger. With all its defects, it seems to me manifestly the work of a great poet—the only one of Ibsen’s plays prior to The Vikings at Helgeland of which this can be said. It may be that early impressions mislead me; but I still cannot help seeing in Lady Inger a figure of truly tragic grandeur; in Nils Lykke one of the few really seductive seducers in literature; and in many passages of the dialogue, the touch of a master hand.

W. A.

[1]. See Introduction to The Wild Duck, p. xxiii.

[2]. He continued to dabble in painting until he was thirty, or thereabouts.

[3]. Preface to the second edition of Catilina, 1875.

[4]. This is his own statement of the order of events. According to Halvdan Koht (Samlede Værker, vol. x. p. i) he arrived in Christiania in March 1850, and Catilina did not appear until April.

[5]. The history of Ibsen’s connection with the Bergen Theatre is written at some length in an article by me, entitled “Ibsen’s Apprenticeship,” published in the Fortnightly Review for January 1904. From that article I quote freely in the following pages.

[6]. Provost (“Provst”) is an ecclesiastical title, roughly equivalent to Dean.

[7]. See article by Dr. Julius Elias in Die neue Rundschau, December 1906, p. 1463. Dr. Brahm, in the same magazine (p. 1414), writes as though this were Ibsen’s first meeting with his wife; and a note by Halvdan Koht, in the Norwegian edition of Ibsen’s Letters, seems to bear out this view. But it would appear that what Fru Ibsen told Dr. Elias was that on the date mentioned Ibsen for “the first time visited at her father’s house.” The terms of the anecdote almost compel us to assume that he had previously met her elsewhere. It seems almost inconceivable that Ibsen, of all people, should have made such a speech to a lady on their very first meeting.

[8]. Stage Society performances, January 28 and 29, 1906. Lady Inger was played by Miss Edyth Olive, Elina by Miss Alice Crawford, Nils Lykke by Mr. Henry Ainley, Olaf Skaktavl by Mr. Alfred Brydone, and Nils Stenssön by Mr. Harcourt Williams.

[9]. These two plays were produced, respectively, in March and October 1854, at the very time when Ibsen must have been planning and composing Lady Inger.

THE FEAST AT SOLHOUG

INTRODUCTION

Exactly a year after the production of Lady Inger of Östråt—that is to say on the “Foundation Day” of the Bergen Theatre, January 2, 1856—The Feast at Solhoug was produced. The poet himself has written its history in full in the Preface to the second edition (see p. [183]). The only comment that need be made upon his rejoinder to his critics has been made, with perfect fairness as it seems to me, by George Brandes in the following passage:[^[10]] “No one who is unacquainted with the Scandinavian languages can fully understand the charm that the style and melody of the old ballads exercise upon the Scandinavian mind. The beautiful ballads and songs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn have perhaps had a similar power over German minds; but, as far as I am aware, no German poet has ever succeeded in inventing a metre suitable for dramatic purposes, which yet retained the mediæval ballad’s sonorous swing and rich aroma. The explanation of the powerful impression produced in its day by Henrik Hertz’s Svend Dyring’s House is to be found in the fact that in it, for the first time, the problem was solved of how to fashion a metre akin to that of the heroic ballads, a metre possessing as great mobility as the verse of the Niebelungenlied, along with a dramatic value not inferior to that of the iambic pentameter. Henrik Ibsen, it is true, has justly pointed out that, as regards the mutual relations of the principal characters, Svend Dyring’s House owes more to Kleist’s Käthchen von Heilbronn than The Feast at Solhoug owes to Svend Dyring’s House. But the fact remains that the versified parts of the dialogue of both The Feast at Solhoug and Olaf Liliekrans are written in that imitation of the tone and style of the heroic ballad, of which Hertz was the happily-inspired originator. There seems to me to be no depreciation whatever of Ibsen in the assertion of Hertz’s right to rank as his model. Even the greatest must have learnt from some one.”

The question is, to put it in a nutshell: Supposing Hertz had never adapted the ballad measures to dramatic purposes, would Ibsen have written The Feast at Solhoug, at any rate in its present form? I think we must answer: Almost certainly, no.

But while the influence of Danish lyrical romanticism is apparent in the style of the play, the structure, as it seems to me, shows no less clearly that influence of the French plot-manipulators which we found so unmistakably at work in Lady Inger. Despite its lyrical dialogue, The Feast at Solhoug has that crispness of dramatic action which marks the French plays of the period. It may indeed be called Scribe’s Bataille de Dames writ tragic. Here, as in the Bataille de Dames (one of the earliest plays produced under Ibsen’s supervision), we have the rivalry of an older and a younger woman for the love of a man who is proscribed on an unjust accusation, and pursued by the emissaries of the royal power. One might even, though this would be forcing the point, find an analogy in the fact that the elder woman (in both plays a strong and determined character) has in Scribe’s comedy a cowardly suitor, while in Ibsen’s tragedy, or melodrama, she has a cowardly husband. In every other respect the plays are as dissimilar as possible; yet it seems to me far from unlikely that an unconscious reminiscence of the Bataille de Dames may have contributed to the shaping of The Feast at Solhoug in Ibsen’s mind. But more significant than any resemblance of theme is the similarity of Ibsen’s whole method to that of the French school—the way, for instance, in which misunderstandings are kept up through a careful avoidance of the use of proper names, and the way in which a cup of poison, prepared for one person, comes into the hands of another person, is, as a matter of fact, drunk by no one, but occasions the acutest agony to the would-be poisoner. All this ingenious dovetailing of incidents and working-up of misunderstandings, Ibsen unquestionably learned from the French. The French language, indeed, is the only one which has a word—quiproquo—to indicate the class of misunderstanding which, from Lady Inger down to The League of Youth, Ibsen employed without scruple.

Ibsen’s first visit to the home of his future wife took place five days after the production of The Feast at Solhoug. It seems doubtful whether this was actually his first meeting with her;[^[11]] but at any rate we can scarcely suppose that he knew her during the previous summer, when he was writing his play. It is a curious coincidence, then, that he should have found in Susanna Thoresen and her sister Marie very much the same contrast of characters which had occupied him in his first dramatic effort, Catilina, and which had formed the main subject of the play he had just produced. It is less wonderful that the same contrast should so often recur in his later works, even down to John Gabriel Borkman. Ibsen was greatly attached to his gentle and retiring sister-in-law, who died unmarried in 1874.

The Feast at Solhoug has been translated by Miss Morison and myself, only because no one else could be found to undertake the task. We have done our best; but neither of us lays claim to any great metrical skill, and the light movement of Ibsen’s verse is often, if not always, rendered in a sadly halting fashion. It is, however, impossible to exaggerate the irregularity of the verse in the original, or its defiance of strict metrical law. The normal line is one of four accents; but when this is said, it is almost impossible to arrive at any further generalisation. There is a certain lilting melody in many passages, and the whole play has not unfairly been said to possess the charm of a northern summer night, in which the glimmer of twilight gives place only to the gleam of morning. But in the main (though much better than its successor, Olaf Liliekrans) it is the weakest thing that Ibsen admitted into the canon of his works. He wrote of it in 1870 as “a study which I now disown”; and had he continued in that frame of mind, the world would scarcely have quarrelled with his judgment. At worst, then, my collaborator and I cannot be accused of marring a masterpiece; but for which assurance we should probably have shrunk from the attempt.

W. A.

[10]. Ibsen and Björnson. London, Heinemann, 1899, p. 88.

[11]. See [note], p. xxv.

LOVE'S COMEDY

INTRODUCTION

Kærlighedens Komedie was published at Christiania in 1862. The polite world—so far as such a thing existed at that time in the Northern capital—received it with an outburst of indignation not now entirely easy to understand. It has indeed faults enough. The character-drawing is often crude, the action, though full of effective by-play, extremely slight, and the sensational climax has little relation to human nature as exhibited in Norway, or out of it, at that or any other time. But the sting lay in the unflattering veracity of the piece as a whole; in the merciless portrayal of the trivialities of persons, or classes, high in their own esteem; in the unexampled effrontery of bringing a clergyman upon the stage. All these have long since passed in Scandinavia, into the category of the things which people take with their Ibsen as a matter of course, and the play is welcomed with delight by every Scandinavian audience. But in 1862 the matter was serious, and Ibsen meant it to be so.

For they were years of ferment—those six or seven which intervened between his return to Christiania from Bergen in 1857, and his departure for Italy in 1864. As director of the newly founded “Norwegian Theatre,” Ibsen was a prominent member of the little knot of brilliant young writers who led the nationalist revolt against Danish literary tradition, then still dominant in well-to-do, and especially in official, Christiania. Well-to-do and official Christiania met the revolt with contempt. Under such conditions, the specific literary battle of the Norwegian with the Dane easily developed into the eternal warfare of youthful idealism with “respectability” and convention. Ibsen had already started work upon the greatest of his Norse Histories—The Pretenders. But history was for him little more than material for the illustration of modern problems; and he turned with zest from the task of breathing his own spirit into the stubborn mould of the thirteenth century, to hold up the satiric mirror to the suburban drawing-rooms of Christiania, and to the varied phenomena current there,—and in suburban drawing-rooms elsewhere,—under the name of Love.

Yet Love’s Comedy is much more than a satire, and its exuberant humour has a bitter core; the laughter that rings through it is the harsh, implacable laughter of Carlyle. His criticism of commonplace love-making is at first sight harmless and ordinary enough. The ceremonial formalities of the continental Verlobung, the shrill raptures of aunts and cousins over the engaged pair, the satisfied smile of enterprising materfamilias as she reckons up the tale of daughters or of nieces safely married off under her auspices; or, again, the embarrassments incident to a prolonged Brautstand following a hasty wooing, the deadly effect of familiarity upon a shallow affection, and the anxious efforts to save the appearance of romance when its zest has departed—all these things had yielded such “comedy” as they possess to many others before Ibsen, and an Ibsen was not needed to evoke it. But if we ask what, then, is the right way from which these “comic” personages in their several fashions diverge; what is the condition which will secure courtship from ridicule, and marriage from disillusion, Ibsen abruptly parts company with all his predecessors. “‘Of course,’ reply the rest in chorus, ‘a deep and sincere love’;—‘together,’ add some, 'with prudent good sense.'” The prudent good sense Ibsen allows; but he couples with it the startling paradox that the first condition of a happy marriage is the absence of love, and the first condition of an enduring love the absence of marriage.

The student of the latter-day Ibsen is naturally somewhat taken aback to find the grim poet of Doubt, whose task it seems to be to apply a corrosive criticism to modern institutions in general and to marriage in particular, gravely defending the “marriage of convenience.” And his amazement is not diminished by the sense that the author of this plea for the loveless marriage, which poets have at all times scorned and derided, was himself beyond question a poet, ardent, brilliant, and young, and himself, what is more, quite recently and beyond question happily, married. The truth is that there are two men—in Ibsen an idealist, exalted to the verge of sentimentality, and a critic, hard, inexorable, remorseless, to the verge of cynicism. What we call his “social philosophy” is a modus vivendi arrived at between them. Both agree in repudiating “marriage for love”; but the idealist repudiates it in the name of love, the critic in the name of marriage. Love, for the idealist Ibsen, is a passion which loses its virtue when it reaches its goal, which inspires only while it aspires, and flags bewildered when it attains. Marriage, for the critic Ibsen, is an institution beset with pitfalls into which those are surest to step who enter in blinded with love. In the latter dramas the tragedy of married life is commonly generated by other forms of blindness—the childish innocence of Nora, the maidenly ignorance of Helena Alving, neither of whom married precisely “for love”; here it is blind Love alone who, to the jealous eye of the critic, plays the part of the Serpent in the Edens of wedded bliss. There is, it is clear, an element of unsolved contradiction in Ibsen’s thought;—Love is at once so precious and so deadly, a possession so glorious that all other things in life are of less worth, and yet capable of producing only disastrously illusive effects upon those who have entered into the relations to which it prompts. But with Ibsen—and it is a grave intellectual defect—there is an absolute antagonism between spirit and form. An institution is always, with him, a shackle for the free life of souls, not an organ through which they attain expression; and since the institution of marriage cannot but be, there remains as the only logical solution that which he enjoins—to keep the soul’s life out of it. To “those about to marry,” Ibsen therefore says in effect, “Be sure you are not in love!” And to those who are in love he says, “Part!”

It is easy to understand the irony with which a man who thought thus of love contemplated the business of “love-making,” and the ceremonial discipline of Continental courtship. The whole unnumbered tribe of wooing and plighted lovers were for him unconscious actors in a world-comedy of Love’s contriving—naïve fools of fancy, passionately weaving the cords that are to strangle passion. Comedy like this cannot be altogether gay; and as each fresh romance decays into routine, and each aspiring passion goes out under the spell of a vulgar environment, or submits to the bitter salvation of a final parting, the ringing laughter grows harsh and hollow, and notes of ineffable sadness escape from the poet’s Stoic self-restraint.

Ibsen had grown up in a school which cultivated the romantic, piquant, picturesque in style; which ran riot in wit, in vivacious and brilliant imagery, in resonant rhythms and telling double rhymes. It must be owned that this was not the happiest school for a dramatist, nor can Love’s Comedy be regarded, in the matter of style, as other than a risky experiment which nothing but the sheer dramatic force of an Ibsen could have carried through. As it is, there are palpable fluctuations, discrepancies of manner; the realism of treatment often provokes a realism of style out of keeping with the lyric afflatus of the verse; and we pass with little warning from the barest colloquial prose to strains of high-wrought poetic fancy. Nevertheless, the style, with all its inequalities, becomes in Ibsen’s hands a singularly plastic medium of dramatic expression. The marble is too richly veined for ideal sculpture, but it takes the print of life. The wit, exuberant as it is, does not coruscate indiscriminately upon all lips; and it has many shades and varieties—caustic, ironical, imaginative, playful, passionate—which take their temper from the speaker’s mood.

The present version of the play retains the metres of the original, and follows it in general line for line. For a long passage, occupying substantially the first twenty pages, the translator is indebted to the editor of the present work; and two other passages—Falk’s tirades on pp. [58] and [100]—result from a fusion of versions made independently by us both.

C. H. H.

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT
(1855)

CHARACTERS

• Lady Inger Ottisdaughter Römer, widow of High Steward Nils Gyldenlöve.
• Elina Gyldenlöve, her daughter.
• Nils Lykke, Danish knight and councillor.
• Olaf Skaktavl, an outlawed Norwegian noble.
• Nils Stensson.
• Jens Bielke, Swedish commander.
• Biörn, majordomo at Östråt.
• Finn, a servant.
• Einar Huk, bailiff at Östråt.
• Servants, peasants, and Swedish men-at-arms.

The action takes place at Östråt Manor, on the Trondhiem Fiord, in the year 1528.

[Pronunciation of Names.—Östråt = Östrot; Elina (Norwegian, Eline) = Eleena; Stensson = Staynson; Biörn = Byörn; Jens Bielke = Yens Byelke; Huk = Hook. The g's in “Inger” and in “Gyldenlöve” are, of course, hard. The final e's and the ö's pronounced much as in German.]

LADY INGER OF ÖSTRÅT | DRAMA IN FIVE ACTS

ACT FIRST

A room at Östråt. Through an open door in the back, the Banquet Hall is seen in faint moonlight, which shines fitfully through a deep bow-window in the opposite wall. To the right, an entrance-door; further forward, a curtained window. On the left, a door leading to the inner rooms; further forward a large open fireplace, which casts a glow over the room. It is a stormy evening.

Biörn and Finn are sitting by the fireplace. The latter is occupied in polishing a helmet. Several pieces of armour lie near them, along with a sword and shield.

Finn.

[After a pause.] Who was Knut[^[12]] Alfson?

Biörn.

My Lady says he was the last of Norway’s knighthood.

Finn.

And the Danes killed him at Oslo-fiord?

Biörn.

If you know not that, ask any child of five.

Finn.

So Knut Alfson was the last of our knighthood? And now he’s dead and gone! [Holds up the helmet.] Well, thou must e’en be content to hang scoured and bright in the Banquet Hall; for what art thou now but an empty nut-shell? The kernel—the worms have eaten that many a winter agone.

What say you, Biörn—may not one call Norway’s land an empty nut-shell, even like the helmet here; bright without, worm-eaten within?

Biörn.

Hold your peace, and mind your task!—Is the helmet ready?

Finn.

It shines like silver in the moonlight.

Biörn.

Then put it by.—See here; scrape the rust off the sword.

Finn.

[Turning the sword over and examining it.]

Is it worth while?

Biörn.

What mean you?

Finn.

The edge is gone.

Biörn.

What’s that to you? Give it me.—Here, take the shield.

Finn.

[As before.] There is no grip to it!

Biörn.

[Mutters.] Let me get a grip on you——

[Finn hums to himself for a while.

Biörn.

What now?

Finn.

An empty helmet, a sword with no edge, a shield with no grip—so it has all come to that. Who can blame Lady Inger if she leaves such weapons to hang scoured and polished on the walls, instead of rusting them in Danish blood?

Biörn.

Folly! Is there not peace in the land?

Finn.

Peace? Ay, when the peasant has shot away his last arrow, and the wolf has reft the last lamb from the fold, then is there peace between them. But ’tis a strange friendship. Well, well; let that pass. ’Tis fitting, as I said, that the harness hang bright in the hall; for you know the old saw: “Call none a man but the knightly man.” So now that we have never a knight in the land, we have never a man; and where no man is, there must women order things; therefore——

Biörn.

Therefore—therefore I bid you hold your foul prate!

[Rises.

The evening wears on. Enough; you may hang the helmet and armour in the hall again.

Finn.

[In a low voice.] Nay, best let it be till to-morrow.

Biörn.

What, do you fear the dark?

Finn.

Not by day. And if so be I fear it at even, I am not the only one. Ah, you may look; I tell you in the housefolk’s room there is talk of many things. [Lower.] They say that, night by night, a tall figure, clad in black, walks the Banquet Hall.

Biörn.

Old wives’ tales!

Finn.

Ah, but they all swear ’tis true.

Biörn.

That I well believe.

Finn.

The strangest of all is that Lady Inger thinks the same——

Biörn.

[Starting.] Lady Inger? What does she think?

Finn.

What Lady Inger thinks? I warrant few can tell that. But sure it is that she has no rest in her. See you not how day by day she grows thinner and paler? [Looks keenly at him.] They say she never sleeps—and that it is because of the black figure——

[While he is speaking, Elina Gyldenlöve has appeared in the half-open door on the left. She stops and listens, unobserved.

Biörn.

And you believe such follies?

Finn.

Well, half and half. There be folk, too, that read things another way. But that is pure malice, I’ll be bound.—Hearken, Biörn—know you the song that is going round the country?

Biörn.

A song?

Finn.

Ay, ’tis on all folks’ lips. ’Tis a shameful scurril thing, for sure; yet it goes prettily. Just listen:

[Sings in a low voice.

Dame Inger sitteth in Östråt fair,

She wraps her in costly furs—

She decks her in velvet and ermine and vair,

Red gold are the beads that she twines in her hair—

But small peace in that soul of hers.

Dame Inger hath sold her to Denmark’s lord.

She bringeth her folk ’neath the stranger’s yoke—

In guerdon whereof—

[Biörn enraged, seizes him by the throat. Elina Gyldenlöve withdraws without having been seen.

Biörn.

I will send you guerdonless to the foul fiend, if you prate of Lady Inger but one unseemly word more.

Finn.

[Breaking from his grasp.] Why—did I make the song?

[The blast of a horn is heard from the right.

Biörn.

Hark—what is that?

Finn.

A horn. Then there come guests to-night.

Biörn.

[At the window.] They are opening the gate. I hear the clatter of hoofs in the courtyard. It must be a knight.

Finn.

A knight? Nay, that can scarce be.

Biörn.

Why not?

Finn.

Did you not say yourself: the last of our knighthood is dead and gone?

[Goes out to the right.

Biörn.

The accursed knave, with his prying and peering! What avails all my striving to hide and hush things? They whisper of her even now—; soon all men will be shouting aloud that——

Elina.

[Comes in again through the door on the left; looks round her, and says with suppressed emotion:] Are you alone, Biörn?

Biörn.

Is it you, Mistress Elina?

Elina.

Come, Biörn, tell me one of your stories; I know you can tell others than those that-—-

Biörn.

A story? Now—so late in the evening——?

Elina.

If you count from the time when it grew dark at Östråt, then ’tis late indeed.

Biörn.

What ails you? Has aught crossed you? You seem so restless.

Elina.

May be so.

Biörn.

There is something amiss. I have hardly known you this half year past.

Elina.

Bethink you: this half year past my dearest sister Lucia has been sleeping in the vault below.

Biörn.

That is not all, Mistress Elina—it is not that alone that makes you now thoughtful and white and silent, now restless and ill at ease, as you are to-night.

Elina.

Not that alone, you think? And wherefore not? Was she not gentle and pure and fair as a summer night? Biörn,—I tell you, Lucia was dear to me as my life. Have you forgotten how many a time, when we were children, we sat on your knee in the winter evenings? You sang songs to us, and told us tales——

Biörn.

Ay, then you were blithe and gay.

Elina.

Ah, then, Biörn! Then I lived a glorious life in fable-land, and in my own imaginings. Can it be that the sea-strand was naked then as now? If it was so, I knew it not. ’Twas there I loved to go weaving all my fair romances; my heroes came from afar and sailed again across the sea; I lived in their midst, and set forth with them when they sailed away. [Sinks on a chair.] Now I feel so faint and weary; I can live no longer in my tales. They are only—tales. [Rising, vehemently.] Biörn, know you what has made me sick? A truth; a hateful, hateful truth, that gnaws me day and night.

Biörn.

What mean you?

Elina.

Do you remember how sometimes you would give us good counsel and wise saws? Sister Lucia followed them; but I—ah, well-a-day!

Biörn.

[Consoling her.] Well, well—-!

Elina.

I know it—I was proud, overweening! In all our games, I would still be the Queen, because I was the tallest, the fairest, the wisest! I know it!

Biörn.

That is true.

Elina.

Once you took me by the hand and looked earnestly at me, and said: “Be not proud of your fairness, or your wisdom; but be proud as the mountain eagle as often as you think: I am Inger Gyldenlöve’s daughter!”

Biörn.

And was it not matter enough for pride?

Elina.

You told me so often enough, Biörn! Oh, you told me many a tale in those days. [Presses his hand.] Thanks for them all!—Now, tell me one more; it might make me light of heart again, as of old.

Biörn.

You are a child no longer.

Elina.

Nay, indeed! But let me dream that I am.—Come, tell on!

[Throws herself into a chair. Biörn sits on the edge of the high hearth.

Biörn.

Once upon a time there was a high-born knight——

Elina.

[Who has been listening restlessly in the direction of the hall, seizes his arm and breaks out in a vehement whisper.] Hush! No need to shout so loud; I can hear well!

Biörn.

[More softly.] Once upon a time there was a high-born knight, of whom there went the strange report——

[Elina half rises, and listens in anxious suspense in the direction of the hall.

Biörn.

Mistress Elina,—what ails you?

Elina.

[Sits down again.] Me? Nothing. Go on.

Biörn.

Well, as I was saying—did this knight but look straight in a woman’s eyes, never could she forget it after; her thoughts must follow him wherever he went, and she must waste away with sorrow.

Elina.

I have heard that tale.—Moreover, ’tis no tale you are telling, for the knight you speak of is Nils Lykke, who sits even now in the Council of Denmark——

Biörn.

May be so.

Elina.

Well, let it pass—go on!

Biörn.

Now it happened once on a time——

Elina.

[Rises suddenly.] Hush; be still!

Biörn.

What now? What is the matter?

Elina.

[Listening.] Do you hear?

Biörn.

What?

Elina.

It is there! Yes, by the cross of Christ, it is there!

Biörn.

[Rises.] What is there? Where?

Elina.

She herself—in the hall——

[Goes hastily towards the hall.

Biörn.

[Following.] How can you think—? Mistress Elina,—go to your chamber!

Elina.

Hush; stand still! Do not move; do not let her see you! Wait—the moon is coming out. Can you not see the black-robed figure——?

Biörn.

By all the saints——!

Elina.

Do you see—she turns Knut Alfson’s picture to the wall. Ha-ha; be sure it looks her too straight in the eyes!

Biörn.

Mistress Elina, hear me!

Elina.

[Going back towards the fireplace.] Now I know what I know!

Biörn.

[To himself.] Then it is true!

Elina.

Who was it, Biörn? Who was it?

Biörn.

You saw as plainly as I.

Elina.

Well? Whom did I see?

Biörn.

You saw your mother.

Elina.

[Half to herself.] Night after night I have heard her steps in there. I have heard her whispering and moaning like a soul in pain. And what says the song—? Ah, now I know! Now I know that——

Biörn.

Hush!

[Lady Inger Gyldenlöve enters rapidly from the hall, without noticing the others; she goes to the window, draws the curtain, and gazes out as if watching for some one on the high road; after a while, she turns and goes slowly back into the hall.

Elina.

[Softly, following her with her eyes.] White, white as the dead——!

[An uproar of many voices is heard outside the door on the right.

Biörn.

What can this be?

Elina.

Go out and see what is amiss.

[Einar Huk, the bailiff, appears in the anteroom, with a crowd of Retainers and Peasants.

Einar Huk.

[In the doorway.] Straight in to her! And be not abashed!

Biörn.

What seek you?

Einar Huk.

Lady Inger herself.

Biörn.

Lady Inger? So late?

Einar Huk.

Late, but time enough, I wot.

The Peasants.

Yes, yes; she must hear us now!

[The whole rabble crowds into the room. At the same moment Lady Inger appears in the doorway of the hall. A sudden silence.

Lady Inger.

What would you with me?

Einar Huk.

We sought you, noble lady, to——

Lady Inger.

Well—say on!

Einar Huk.

Why, we are not ashamed of our errand. In one word—we come to pray you for weapons and leave——

Lady Inger.

Weapons and leave—? And for what?

Einar Huk.

There has come a rumour from Sweden that the people of the Dales have risen against King Gustav——

Lady Inger.

The people of the Dales?

Einar Huk.

Ay, so the tidings run, and they seem sure enough.

Lady Inger.

Well—if it were so—what have you to do with, the Dale-folk’s rising?

The Peasants.

We will join them! We will help. We will free ourselves!

Lady Inger.

[To herself.] Can the time be come?

Einar Huk.

From all our borderlands the peasants are pouring across to the Dales. Even outlaws that have wandered for years in the mountains are venturing down to the homesteads again, and drawing men together, and whetting their rusty swords.

Lady Inger.

[After a pause.] Tell me, men—have you thought well of this? Have you counted the cost, if King Gustav’s men should win?

Biörn.

[Softly and imploringly to Lady Inger.] Count the cost to the Danes if King Gustav’s men should lose.

Lady Inger.

[Evasively.] That reckoning is not for me

to make. [Turns to the people.

You know that King Gustav is sure of help from Denmark. King Frederick is his friend, and will never leave him in the lurch—-—-

Einar Huk.

But if the people were now to rise all over Norway’s land?—if we all rose as one man, nobles and peasants together?—Ay, Lady Inger Gyldenlöve, the time we have waited for is surely come. We have but to rise now to drive the strangers from the land.

The Peasants.

Ay, out with the Danish sheriffs! Out with the foreign masters! Out with the Councillors’ lackeys!

Lady Inger.

[To herself.] Ah, there is metal in them; and yet, yet——!

Biörn.

[To himself.] She is of two minds. [To Elina.] What say you now, Mistress Elina—have you not sinned in misjudging your mother?

Elina.

Biörn—if my eyes have lied to me, I could tear them out of my head!

Einar Huk.

See you not, my noble lady, King Gustav must be dealt with first. Were his power once gone, the Danes cannot long hold this land——

Lady Inger.

And then?

Einar Huk.

Then we shall be free. We shall have no more foreign masters, and can choose ourselves a king, as the Swedes have done before us.

Lady Inger.

[With animation.] A king for ourselves! Are you thinking of the Sture[^[13]] stock?

Einar Huk.

King Christiern and others after him have swept bare our ancient houses. The best of our nobles are outlaws on the mountain paths, if so be they still live. Nevertheless, it might still be possible to find one or other shoot of the old stems——

Lady Inger.

[Hastily.] Enough, Einar Huk, enough! [To herself.] Ah, my dearest hope!

[Turns to the Peasants and Retainers.

I have warned you, now, as well as I can. I have told you how great is the risk you run. But if you are fixed in your purpose, ’twere folly in me to forbid what I have no power to prevent.

Einar Huk.

Then we have your leave to——?

Lady Inger.

You have your own firm will; take counsel with that. If it be as you say, that you are daily harassed and oppressed——I know but little of these matters. I will not know more! What can I, a lonely woman—? Even if you were to plunder the Banquet Hall—and there’s many a good weapon on the walls—you are the masters at Östråt to-night. You must do as seems good to you. Good-night!

[Loud cries of joy from the multitude. Candles are lighted; the Retainers bring out weapons of different kinds from the hall.

Biörn.

[Seizes Lady Inger’s hand as she is going.] Thanks, my noble and high-souled mistress! I, that have known you from childhood up—I have never doubted you.

Lady Inger.

Hush, Biörn—’tis a dangerous game I have ventured this night. The others stake only their lives; but I, trust me, a thousandfold more!

Biörn.

How mean you? Do you fear for your power and your favour with——?

Lady Inger.

My power? O God in Heaven!

A Retainer.

[Comes from the hall with a large sword.]

See, here’s a real good wolf’s-tooth! With this will I flay the blood-suckers’ lackeys!

Einar Huk.

[To another.] What is that you have found?

The Retainer.

The breastplate they call Herlof Hyttefad’s.

Einar Huk.

’Tis too good for such as you. Look, here is the shaft of Sten Sture’s[^[14]] lance; hang the breastplate upon it, and we shall have the noblest standard heart can desire.

Finn.

[Comes from the door on the left, with a letter in his hand, and goes towards Lady Inger.] I have sought you through all the house——

Lady Inger.

What would you?

Finn.

[Hands her the letter.] A messenger is come from Trondhiem[^[15]] with a letter for you.

Lady Inger.

Let me see! [Opening the letter.] From Trondhiem? What can it be? [Runs through the letter.] O God! From him! and here in Norway——

[Reads on with strong emotion, while the men go on bringing out arms from the hall.

Lady Inger.

[To herself.] He is coming here. He is coming here to-night!—Ay, then ’tis with our wits we must fight, not with the sword.

Einar Huk.

Enough, enough, good fellows; we are well armed now. Set we forth now on our way!

Lady Inger.

[With a sudden change of tone.] No man shall leave my house to-night!

Einar Huk.

But the wind is fair, noble lady; ’twill take us quickly up the fiord, and——

Lady Inger.

It shall be as I have said.

Einar Huk.

Are we to wait till to-morrow, then?

Lady Inger.

Till to-morrow, and longer still. No armed man shall go forth from Östråt yet awhile.

[Signs of displeasure among the crowd.

Some of the Peasants.

We will go all the same, Lady Inger!

The Cry Spreads.

Ay, ay; we will go!

Lady Inger.

[Advancing a step towards them.] Who dares to move?

[A silence. After a moment’s pause, she adds:

I have thought for you. What do you common folk know of the country’s needs? How dare you judge of such things? You must e’en bear your oppressions and burdens yet awhile. Why murmur at that, when you see that we, your leaders, are as ill bested as you?——Take all the weapons back to the hall. You shall know my further will hereafter. Go!

[The Retainers take back the arms, and the whole crowd then withdraws by the door on the right.

Elina.

[Softly to Biörn.] Say you still that I have sinned in misjudging—the Lady of Östråt?

Lady Inger.

[Beckons to Biörn, and says.] Have a guest-chamber ready.

Biörn.

It is well, Lady Inger!

Lady Inger.

And let the gate be open to whoever shall knock.

Biörn.

But——?

Lady Inger.

The gate open!

Biörn.

The gate open. [Goes out to the right.

Lady Inger.

[To Elina, who has already reached the door on the left.] Stay here!——Elina—my child—I have something to say to you alone.

Elina.

I hear you.

Lady Inger.

Elina——you think evil of your mother.

Elina.

I think, to my sorrow, what your deeds have forced me to think.

Lady Inger.

And you answer as your bitter spirit bids you.

Elina.

Who has filled my spirit with bitterness? From my childhood I had been wont to look up to you as a great and high-souled woman. ’Twas in your likeness that I pictured the women of the chronicles and the Book of Heroes. I thought the Lord God himself had set his seal on your brow, and marked you out as the leader of the helpless and the oppressed. Knights and nobles sang your praise in the feast-hall; and even the peasants, far and near, called you the country’s pillar and its hope. All thought that through you the good times were to come again! All thought that through you a new day was to dawn over the land! The night is still here; and I scarce know if through you I dare look for any morning.

Lady Inger.

’Tis easy to see whence you have learnt such venomous words. You have let yourself give ear to what the thoughtless rabble mutters and murmurs about things it can little judge of.

Elina.

“Truth is in the people’s mouth,” was your word when they praised you in speech and song.

Lady Inger.

May be so. But if indeed I chose to sit here idle, though it was my part to act—think you not that such a choice were burden enough for me, without your adding to its weight?

Elina.

The weight I add to your burden crushes me no less than you. Lightly and freely I drew the breath of life, so long as I had you to believe in. For my pride is my life; and well might I have been proud, had you remained what once you were.

Lady Inger.

And what proves to you that I have not? Elina—how know you so surely that you are not doing your mother wrong?

Elina.

[Vehemently.] Oh, that I were!

Lady Inger.

Peace! You have no right to call your mother to account.—With a single word I could——; but ’twould be an ill word for you to hear; you must await what time shall bring; may be that——

Elina.

[Turns to go.] Sleep well, my mother!

Lady Inger.

[Hesitates.] Nay—stay with me; I have still somewhat—— Come nearer;—you must hear me, Elina!

[Sits down by the table in front of the window.

Elina.

I hear you.

Lady Inger.

For as silent as you are, I know well that you often long to be gone from here. Östråt is too lonely and lifeless for you.

Elina.

Do you wonder at that, my mother?

Lady Inger.

It rests with you whether all this shall henceforth be changed.

Elina.

How so?

Lady Inger.

Listen.—I look for a guest to-night.

Elina.

[Comes nearer.] A guest?

Lady Inger.

A guest, who must remain a stranger to all. None must know whence he comes or whither he goes.

Elina.

[Throws herself, with a cry of joy, at her mother’s feet, and seizes her hands.] My mother! My mother! Forgive me, if you can, all the wrong I have done you!

Lady Inger.

What do you mean? Elina, I do not understand you.

Elina.

Then they were all deceived! You are still true at heart!

Lady Inger.

Rise, rise and tell me——

Elina.

Think you I do not know who the stranger is?

Lady Inger.

You know? And yet——?

Elina.

Think you the gates of Östråt shut so close, that never a whisper of the country’s woe can slip through them? Think you I do not know that the heir of many a noble line wanders outlawed, without rest or shelter, while Danish masters lord it in the home of his fathers?

Lady Inger.

And what then?

Elina.

I know well that many a high-born knight is hunted through the woods like a hungry wolf. No hearth has he to rest by, no bread to eat——

Lady Inger.

[Coldly.] Enough! Now I understand you.

Elina.

[Continuing.] And that is why the gates of Östråt must stand open by night! That is why he must remain a stranger to all, this guest of whom none must know whence he comes or whither he goes! You are setting at naught the harsh decree that forbids you to harbour or succour the outlaw——

Lady Inger.

Enough, I say!

[After a short silence, adds with an effort: You mistake, Elina—’tis no outlaw I look for.

Elina.

[Rises.] Then I have understood you ill indeed.

Lady Inger.

Listen to me, my child; but think as you listen; if indeed you can tame that wild spirit of yours.

Elina.

I am tame, till you have spoken.

Lady Inger.

Attend, then, to what I have to tell you.—I have sought, so far as lay in my power, to keep you in ignorance of all our griefs and miseries. What could it avail to fill your young heart with wrath and care? ’Tis not women’s weeping and wailing that can deliver us; we need the courage and strength of men.

Elina.

Who has told you that, when courage and strength are needed, I shall be found wanting?

Lady Inger.

Hush, child;—I might take you at your word.

Elina.

How mean you, my mother?

Lady Inger.

I might call on you for both; I might——; but let me say my say out first.

Know then that the time seems now to be drawing nigh, towards which the Danish Council have been working for many a year—the time, I mean, for them to strike the last blow at our rights and our freedom. Therefore must we now——

Elina.

[Eagerly.] Openly rebel, my mother?

Lady Inger.

No; we must gain breathing-time. The Council is now assembled at Copenhagen, considering how best to go to work. Most of them hold, ’tis said, that there can be no end to dissensions till Norway and Denmark are one; for should we still possess our rights as a free land when the time comes to choose the next king, ’tis most like that the feud will break out openly. Now the Danish councillors would hinder this——

Elina.

Ay, they would hinder it—! But are we to endure such things? Are we to look on quietly while——?

Lady Inger.

No, we will not endure it. But to take up arms—to declare open war—what would come of that, so long as we are not united? And were we ever less united in this land than we are even now?—No, if aught is to be accomplished, it must be secretly and in silence. Even as I said, we must have time to draw breath. In the South, a good part of the nobles are for the Dane; but here in the North they are still in doubt. Therefore has King Frederick sent hither one of his most trusted councillors, to assure himself with his own eyes how we stand affected.

Elina.

[In suspense.] Well—and then——?

Lady Inger.

He is the guest I look for to-night.

Elina.

He comes hither? And to-night?

Lady Inger.

A trading ship brought him to Trondhiem yesterday. News has just reached me of his approach; he may be here within the hour.

Elina.

And you do not bethink you, my mother, how ’twill endanger your fame thus to receive the Danish envoy? Do not the people already look on you with distrustful eyes? How can you hope that, when the time comes, they will let you rule and guide them, if it be known that——

Lady Inger.

Fear not. All this I have fully weighed; but there is no danger. His errand in Norway is a secret; he has come unknown to Trondhiem, and unknown shall he be our guest at Östråt.

Elina.

And the name of this Danish lord——?

Lady Inger.

It sounds well, Elina; Denmark has scarce a nobler name.

Elina.

But what then do you purpose? I cannot yet grasp your meaning.

Lady Inger.

You will soon understand.—Since we cannot trample on the serpent, we must bind it.

Elina.

Take heed that it burst not your bonds.

Lady Inger.

It rests with you to tighten them as you will.

Elina.

With me?

Lady Inger.

I have long seen that Östråt is as a cage to you. The young falcon chafes behind the iron bars.

Elina.

My wings are clipped. Even if you set me free—’twould avail me little.

Lady Inger.

Your wings are not clipped, save by your own will.

Elina.

Will? My will is in your hands. Be what you once were, and I too——

Lady Inger.

Enough, enough. Hear me further.—It would scarce break your heart to leave Östråt?

Elina.

Maybe not, my mother!

Lady Inger.

You told me once, that you lived your happiest life in your tales and histories. What if that life were to be yours once more?

Elina.

What mean you?

Lady Inger.

Elina—if a mighty noble were to come and lead you to his castle, where you should find damsels and squires, silken robes and lofty halls awaiting you?

Elina.

A noble, you say?

Lady Inger.

A noble.

Elina.

[More softly.] And the Danish envoy comes hither to-night?

Lady Inger.

To-night.

Elina.

If so be, then I fear to read the meaning of your words.

Lady Inger.

There is naught to fear if you misread them not. It is far from my thought to put force upon you. You shall choose for yourself in this matter, and follow your own rede.

Elina.

[Comes a step nearer.] Know you the tale of the mother who drove across the hills by night, with her little children in the sledge? The wolves were on her track; ’twas life or death with her;—and one by one she cast out her little ones, to win time and save herself.

Lady Inger.

Nursery tales! A mother would tear the heart from her breast, before she would cast her child to the wolves!

Elina.

Were I not my mother’s daughter, I would say you were right. But you are like that mother; one by one have you cast out your daughters to the wolves. The eldest went first. Five years ago Merete[^[16]] went forth from Östråt; now she dwells in Bergen, and is Vinzents Lunge’s[^[17]] wife. But think you she is happy as the Danish noble’s lady? Vinzents Lunge is mighty, well-nigh as a king; Merete has damsels and squires, silken robes and lofty halls; but the day has no sunshine for her, and the night no rest; for she has never loved him. He came hither and he wooed her, for she was the greatest heiress in Norway, and ’twas then needful for him to gain a footing in the land. I know it; I know it well! Merete bowed to your will; she went with the stranger lord.—But what has it cost her? More tears than a mother should wish to answer for at the day of reckoning!

Lady Inger.

I know my reckoning, and I fear it not.

Elina.

Your reckoning ends not here. Where is Lucia, your second child?

Lady Inger.

Ask God, who took her.

Elina.

’Tis you I ask; ’tis you must answer for her young life. She was glad as a bird in spring when she sailed from Östråt to be Merete’s guest. A year passed, and she stood in this room once more; but her cheeks were white, and death had gnawed deep into her breast. Ah, I startle you, my mother! You thought the ugly secret was buried with her;—but she told me all. A courtly knight had won her heart. He would have wedded her. You knew that her honour was at stake; yet your will never bent—and your child had to die. You see, I know all!

Lady Inger.

All? Then she told you his name?

Elina.

His name? No; his name she did not tell me. She shrank from his name as though it stung her;—she never uttered it.

Lady Inger.

[Relieved, to herself.] Ah, then you do not know all——

Elina—’tis true that the whole of this matter was well known to me. But there is one thing it seems you have overlooked. The lord whom Lucia met in Bergen was a Dane——

Elina.

That, too, I know.

Lady Inger.

And his love was a lie. With guile and soft speeches he had ensnared her.

Elina.

I know it; but nevertheless she loved him; and had you had a mother’s heart, your daughter’s honour had been more to you than all.

Lady Inger.

Not more than her happiness. Think you that, with Merete’s lot before my eyes, I could sacrifice my second child to a man that loved her not?

Elina.

Cunning words may beguile many, but they beguile not me——

Think not I know nothing of all that is passing in our land. I understand your counsels but too well. I know that in you the Danish lords have no true friend. It may be that you hate them; but you fear them too. When you gave Merete to Vinzents Lunge, the Danes held the mastery on all sides throughout our land. Three years later, when you forbade Lucia to wed the man to whom, though he had deceived her, she had given her life—things were far different then. The King’s Danish governors had shamefully misused the common people, and you deemed it not wise to link yourself still more closely to the foreign tyrants.

And what have you done to avenge her that was sent so young to her grave? You have done nothing. Well then, I will act in your stead; I will avenge all the shame they have brought upon our people and our house!

Lady Inger.

You? What will you do?

Elina.

I will go my way, even as you go yours. What I shall do I myself know not; but I feel within me the strength to dare all for our righteous cause.

Lady Inger.

Then have you a hard fight before you. I once promised as you do now—and my hair has grown grey under the burden of that promise.

Elina.

Good-night! Your guest will soon be here, and at that meeting I should be one too many.

It may be there is yet time for you——; well, God strengthen and guide you on your path! Forget not that the eyes of many thousands are fixed on you. Think on Merete, weeping late and early over her wasted life. Think on Lucia, sleeping in her black coffin.

And one thing more. Forget not that in the game you play this night, your stake is your last child. [Goes out to the left.

Lady Inger.

[Looks after her awhile.] My last child? You know not how true was that word——But the stake is not my child only. God help me, I am playing to-night for the whole of Norway’s land.

Ah—is not that some one riding through the gateway? [Listens at the window.

No; not yet. Only the wind; it blows cold as the grave——

Has God a right to do this?—To make me a woman—and then to lay on my shoulders a man’s work?

For I have the welfare of the country in my hands. It is in my power to make them rise as one man. They look to me for the signal; and if I give it not now—it may never be given.

To delay? To sacrifice the many for the sake of one?—Were it not better if I could——? No, no, no—I will not! I cannot!

[Steals a glance towards the Banquet Hall, but turns away again as if in dread, and whispers:

I can see them in there now. Pale spectres—dead ancestors—fallen kinsfolk.—Ah, those eyes that pierce me from every corner!

[Makes a gesture of repulsion, and cries:

Sten Sture! Knut Alfson! Olaf Skaktavl! Back—back!—I cannot do this!

[A Stranger, strongly built, and with grizzled hair and beard, has entered from the Banquet Hall. He is dressed in a torn lambskin tunic; his weapons are rusty.

The Stranger.

[Stops in the doorway, and says in a low voice.] Hail to you, Inger Gyldenlöve!

Lady Inger.

[Turns with a scream.] Ah, Christ in heaven save me!

[Falls back into a chair. The Stranger stands gazing at her, motionless, leaning on his sword.

ACT SECOND

The room at Östråt, as in the first Act.

Lady Inger Gyldenlöve is seated at the table on the right, by the window. Olaf Skaktavl is standing a little way from her. Their faces show that they have been engaged in a heated discussion.

Olaf Skaktavl.

For the last time, Inger Gyldenlöve—you are not to be moved from your purpose?

Lady Inger.

I can do nought else. And my counsel to you is: do as I do. If it be Heaven’s will that Norway perish utterly, perish it must, for all we may do to save it.

OLAF SKAKTAVL.

And think you I can content my heart with that belief? Shall I sit and look idly on, now that the hour is come? Do you forget the reckoning I have against them? They have robbed me of my lands, and parcelled them out among themselves. My son, my only child, the last of my race, they have slaughtered like a dog. Myself they have outlawed and hunted through forest and fell these twenty years.—Once and again have folk whispered of my death; but this I believe, that they shall not lay me beneath the sod before I have seen my vengeance.

Lady Inger.

There is there a long life before you. What have you in mind to do?

Olaf Skaktavl.

Do? How should I know what I will do? It has never been my part to plot and plan. That is where you must help me. You have the wit for that. I have but my sword and my two arms.

Lady Inger.

Your sword is rusted, Olaf Skaktavl! All the swords in Norway are rusted.

Olaf Skaktavl.

That is doubtless why some folk fight only with their tongues.—Inger Gyldenlöve—great is the change in you. Time was when the heart of a man beat in your breast.

Lady Inger.

Put me not in mind of what was.

Olaf Skaktavl.

’Tis for that very purpose I am here. You shall hear me, even if——

Lady Inger.

Be it so then; but be brief; for—I must say it—this is no place of safety for you.

Olaf Skaktavl.

Östråt is no place of safety for an outlaw? That I have long known. But you forget that an outlaw is unsafe wheresoever he may wander.

Lady Inger.

Speak then; I will not hinder you.

Olaf Skaktavl.

’Tis nigh on thirty years now since first I saw you. It was at Akershus[^[18]] in the house of Knut Alfson and his wife. You were little more than a child then; yet were you bold as the soaring falcon, and wild and headstrong too at times. Many were the wooers around you. I too held you dear—dear as no woman before or since. But you cared for nothing, thought of nothing, save your country’s evil case and its great need.

Lady Inger.

I counted but fifteen summers then—remember that! And was it not as though a frenzy had seized us all in those days?

Olaf Skaktavl.

Call it what you will; but one thing I know—even the old and sober men among us thought it written in the counsels of the Lord on high that you were she who should break our thraldom and win us all our rights again. And more: you yourself then thought as we did.

Lady Inger.

’Twas a sinful thought, Olaf Skaktavl. ’Twas my proud heart, and not the Lord’s call, that spoke in me.

Olaf Skaktavl.

You could have been the chosen one had you but willed it. You came of the noblest blood in Norway; power and riches were soon to be yours; and you had an ear for the cries of anguish—then!

Do you remember that afternoon when Henrik Krummedike and the Danish fleet anchored off Akershus? The captains of the fleet offered terms of peace, and, trusting to the safe-conduct, Knut Alfson rowed on board. Three hours later, we bore him through the castle gate——

Lady Inger.

A corpse; a corpse!

Olaf Skaktavl.

The best heart in Norway burst, when Krummedike’s hirelings struck him down. Methinks I still can see the long procession that passed into the banquet-hall, heavily, two by two. There he lay on his bier, white as a spring cloud, with the axe-cleft in his brow. I may safely say that the boldest men in Norway were gathered there that night. Lady Margrete stood by her dead husband’s head, and we swore as one man to venture lands and life to avenge this last misdeed and all that had gone before.—Inger Gyldenlöve,—who was it that burst through the circle of men? A maiden—almost a child—with fire in her eyes and her voice half choked with tears.—What was it she swore? Shall I repeat your words?

Lady Inger.

I swore what the rest of you swore; neither more nor less.

Olaf Skaktavl.

You remember your oath—and yet you have forgotten it.

Lady Inger.

And how did the others keep their promise? I speak not of you, Olaf Skaktavl, but of your friends, all Norway’s nobles? Not one of them, in all these years, has had the courage to be a man; yet they lay it to my charge that I am a woman.

Olaf Skaktavl.

I know what you would say. Why have they bent to the yoke, and not defied the tyrants to the last? ’Tis but too true; there is base metal enough in our noble houses nowadays. But had they held together—who knows what then might have been? And you could have held them together, for before you all had bowed.

Lady Inger.

My answer were easy enough, but ’twould scarce content you. So let us leave speaking of what cannot be changed. Tell me rather what has brought you to Östråt. Do you need harbour? Well, I will try to hide you. If you would have aught else, speak out; you shall find me ready——

Olaf Skaktavl.

For twenty years have I been homeless. In the mountains of Jæmteland my hair has grown grey. My dwelling has been with wolves and bears.—You see, Lady Inger—I need you not; but both nobles and people stand in sore need of you.

Lady Inger.

The old burden.

Olaf Skaktavl.

Ay, it sounds but ill in your ears, I know; yet hear it you must, for all that. In brief, then: I come from Sweden: troubles are brewing: the Dales are ready to rise.

Lady Inger.

I know it.

Olaf Skaktavl.

Peter Kanzler[^[19]] is with us—secretly, you understand.

Lady Inger.

[Starting.] Peter Kanzler?

Olaf Skaktavl.

’Tis he that has sent me to Östråt.

Lady Inger.

[Rises.] Peter Kanzler, say you?

Olaf Skaktavl.

He himself;—but mayhap you no longer know him?

Lady Inger.

[Half to herself.] Only too well!—But tell me, I pray you,—what message do you bring?

Olaf Skaktavl.

When the rumour of the rising reached the border mountains, where I then was, I set off at once into Sweden. ’Twas not hard to guess that Peter Kanzler had a finger in the game. I sought him out and offered to stand by him;—he knew me of old, as you know, and knew that he could trust me; so he has sent me hither.

Lady Inger.

[Impatiently.] Yes yes,—he sent you hither to——?

Olaf Skaktavl.

[With secrecy.] Lady Inger—a stranger comes to Östråt to-night.

Lady Inger.

[Surprised.] What? Know you that——?

Olaf Skaktavl.

Assuredly I know it. I know all. ’Twas to meet him that Peter Kanzler sent me hither.

Lady Inger.

To meet him? Impossible, Olaf Skaktavl,—impossible!

Olaf Skaktavl.

’Tis as I tell you. If he be not already come, he will soon——

Lady Inger.

Doubtless, doubtless; but——

Olaf Skaktavl.

Then you knew of his coming?

Lady Inger.

Ay, surely. He sent me a message. ’Twas therefore they opened to you as soon as you knocked.

Olaf Skaktavl.

[Listens.] Hush!—some one is riding along the road. [Goes to the window.] They are opening the gate.

Lady Inger.

[Looks out.] It is a knight and his attendant. They are dismounting in the courtyard.

Olaf Skaktavl.

’Tis he then. His name?

Lady Inger.

You know not his name?

Olaf Skaktavl.

Peter Kanzler refused to tell it me. He would say no more than that I should find him at Östråt the third evening after Martinmas——

Lady Inger.

Ay; even to-night.

Olaf Skaktavl.

He was to bring letters with him; and from them, and from you, I was to learn who he is.

Lady Inger.

Then let me lead you to your chamber. You have need of rest and refreshment. You shall soon have speech with the stranger.

Olaf Skaktavl.

Well, be it as you will.

[Both go out to the left.

[After a short pause, Finn enters cautiously by the door on the right, looks round the room, and peeps into the Banquet Hall; he then goes back to the door, and makes a sign to some one outside. Immediately after, enter Councillor Nils Lykke and the Swedish Commander, Jens Bielke.

Nils Lykke.

[Softly.] No one?

Finn.

[In the same tone.] No one, master!

Nils Lykke.

And we may depend on you in all things?

Finn.

The commandant in Trondhiem has ever given me a name for trustiness.

Nils Lykke.

’Tis well; he has said as much to me. First of all, then—has there come any stranger to Östråt to-night, before us?

Finn.

Ay; a stranger came an hour since.

Nils Lykke.

[Softly, to Jens Bielke.] He is here. [Turns again to Finn.] Would you know him again? Have you seen him?

Finn.

Nay, none has seen him, that I know, but the gatekeeper. He was brought at once to Lady Inger, and she——

Nils Lykke.

Well? What of her? He is not gone again already?

Finn.

No; but it seems she holds him hidden in one of her own rooms; for——

Nils Lykke.

It is well.

Jens Bielke.

[Whispers.] Then the first thing is to put a guard on the gate; so are we sure of him.

Nils Lykke.

[With a smile.] H’m! [To Finn.] Tell me—is there any way of leaving the castle, save by the gate? Gape not at me so! I mean—can one escape from Östråt unseen, though the castle gate be barred?

Finn.

Nay, that I know not. ’Tis true they talk of secret ways in the vaults beneath; but no one knows them save Lady Inger—and mayhap Mistress Elina.

Jens Bielke.

The devil!

Nils Lykke.

It is well. You may go.

Finn.

Should you need me in aught again, you have but to open the second door on the right in the Banquet Hall, and I shall presently be at hand.

Nils Lykke.

Good.

[Points to the entrance-door. Finn goes out.

Jens Bielke.

Now, by my soul, dear friend and brother—this campaign is like to end but scurvily for both of us.

Nils Lykke.

[With a smile.] Oh—not for me, I hope.

Jens Bielke.

Say you so? First of all, there is little honour to be won in hunting an overgrown whelp like this Nils Sture. Are we to think him mad or in his sober senses after the pranks he has played? First he breeds bad blood among the peasants; promises them help and all their hearts can desire;—and then, when it comes to the pinch, off he runs to hide behind a petticoat!

Moreover, to say truth, I repent that I followed your counsel and went not my own way.

Nils Lykke.

[To himself.] Your repentance comes somewhat late, my brother!

Jens Bielke.

For, let me tell you, I have never loved digging at a badger’s earth. I looked for quite other sport. Here have I ridden all the way from Jæmteland with my horsemen, and have got me a warrant from the Trondhiem commandant to search for the rebel wheresoever I please. All his tracks point towards Östråt——

Nils Lykke.

He is here! He is here, I tell you!

Jens Bielke.

Were it not liker, in that case, that we had found the gate barred and well guarded? Would that we had; then could I have found use for my men-at-arms——

Nils Lykke.

But instead, the gate is very courteously thrown open to us. Mark now—if Inger Gyldenlöve’s fame belie her not, I warrant she will not let her guests lack for either meat or drink.

Jens Bielke.

Ay, to turn us aside from our errand! And what wild whim was that of yours to have me leave my horsemen half a league from the castle? Had we come in force——

Nils Lykke.

She had made us none the less welcome for that. But mark well that then our coming had made a stir. The peasants round about had held it for an outrage against Lady Inger; she had risen high in their favour once more—and with that, look you, we were ill served.

Jens Bielke.

May be so. But what am I to do now? Count Sture is in Östråt, you say. Ay, but how does that profit me? Be sure Lady Inger Gyldenlöve has as many hiding-places as the fox, and more than one outlet to them. You and I, alone, may go snuffing about here as long as we please. I would the devil had the whole affair!

Nils Lykke.

Well, then, my friend—if you like not the turn your errand has taken, you have but to leave the field to me.

Jens Bielke.

To you? What will you do?

Nils Lykke.

Caution and cunning may in this matter prove of more avail than force of arms.—And to say truth, Captain Jens Bielke—something of the sort has been in my mind ever since we met in Trondhiem yesterday.

Jens Bielke.

Was that why you persuaded me to leave the men-at-arms?

Nils Lykke.

Both your purpose at Östråt and mine could best be served without them; and so——

Jens Bielke.

The foul fiend seize you—I had almost said! And me to boot! Might I not have known that there is guile in all your dealings?

Nils Lykke.

Be sure I shall need all my guile here, if I am to face my foe with even weapons. And let me tell you, ’tis of the utmost moment to me that I acquit me of my mission secretly and well. You must know that when I set forth I was scarce in favour with my lord the King. He held me in suspicion; though I dare swear I have served him as well as any man could, in more than one ticklish charge.

Jens Bielke.

That you may safely boast. God and all men know you for the craftiest devil in all the three kingdoms.

Nils Lykke.

I thank you! Though, after all, ’tis not much to say. But this present errand I count as indeed a crowning test of my powers; for here I have to outwit a woman——

Jens Bielke.

Ha-ha-ha! In that art you have long since given crowning proofs of your skill, dear brother. Think you we in Sweden know not the song— Fair maidens a-many they sigh and they pine: “Ah God, that Nils Lykke were mine, mine, mine!”

Nils Lykke.

Alas, ’tis women of twenty and thereabouts that ditty speaks of. Lady Inger Gyldenlöve is nigh on fifty, and wily to boot beyond all women. ’Twill be no light matter to overmatch her. But it must be done—at any cost. Should I contrive to win certain advantages over her that the King has long desired, I can reckon on the embassy to France next spring. You know that I spent three years at the University in Paris? My whole soul is set on coming thither again, most of all if I can appear in lofty place, a king’s ambassador.—Well, then—is it agreed—do you leave Lady Inger to me? Remember—when you were last at Court in Copenhagen, I made way for you with more than one fair lady——

Jens Bielke.

Nay, truly now—that generosity cost you little; one and all of them were at your beck and call. But let that pass; now that I have begun amiss in this matter, I had as lief that you should take it on your shoulders. Yet one thing you must promise—if the young Count Sture be in Östråt, you will deliver him into my hands, dead or alive!

Nils Lykke.

You shall have him all alive. I, at any rate, mean not to kill him. But now you must ride back and join your people. Keep guard on the road. Should I mark aught that mislikes me, you shall know it forthwith.

Jens Bielke.

Good, good. But how am I to get out——?

Nils Lykke.

The fellow that brought us in will show the way. But go quietly——

Jens Bielke.

Of course, of course. Well—good fortune to you!

Nils Lykke.

Fortune has never failed me in a war with women. Haste you now!

[Jens Bielke goes out to the right.

Nils Lykke.

[Stands still for a while; then walks about the room, looking round him; then he says softly:] At last, then, I am at Östråt—the ancient hall whereof a child, two years ago, told me so much.

Lucia. Ay, two years ago she was still a child. And now—now she is dead. [Hums with a half-smile.] “Blossoms plucked are blossoms withered——”

[Looks round him again.

Östråt. ’Tis as though I had seen it all before; as though I were at home here.—In there is the Banquet Hall. And underneath is—the grave-vault. It must be there that Lucia lies.

[In a lower voice, half seriously, half with forced gaiety.

Were I timorous, I might well find myself fancying that when I set foot within Östråt gate she turned about in her coffin; as I crossed the courtyard she lifted the lid; and when I named her name but now, ’twas as though a voice summoned her forth from the grave-vault.—Maybe she is even now groping her way up the stairs. The face-cloth blinds her, but she gropes on and on in spite of it.

Now she has reached the Banquet Hall! She stands watching me from behind the door!

[Turns his head backwards over one shoulder, nods, and says aloud:

Come nearer, Lucia! Talk to me a little! Your mother keeps me waiting. ’Tis tedious waiting—and you have helped me to while away many a tedious hour——

[Passes his hand over his forehead, and takes one or two turns up and down.

Ah, there!—Right, right; there is the deep curtained window. ’Tis there that Inger Gyldenlöve is wont to stand gazing out over the road, as though looking for one that never comes. In there—[looks towards the door on the left]—somewhere in there is Sister Elina’s chamber. Elina? Ay, Elina is her name.

Can it be that she is so rare a being—so wise and so brave as Lucia fancied her? Fair, too, they say. But for a wedded wife—? I should not have written so plainly.——

[Lost in thought, he is on the point of sitting down by the table, but stands up again.

How will Lady Inger receive me?—She will scarce burn the castle over our heads, or slip me through a trap-door. A stab from behind—? No, not that way either——

[Listens towards the hall.

Aha!

[Lady Inger Gyldenlöve enters from the hall.

Lady Inger.

[Coldly.] My greeting to you, Sir Councillor——

Nils Lykke.

[Bows deeply.] Ah—the Lady of Östråt!

Lady Inger.

——and my thanks that you have forewarned me of your visit.

Nils Lykke.

I could do no less. I had reason to think that my coming might surprise you——

Lady Inger.

Truly, Sir Councillor, therein you judged aright. Nils Lykke was indeed the last guest I looked to see at Östråt.

Nils Lykke.

And still less, mayhap, did you think to see him come as a friend?

Lady Inger.

As a friend? You add mockery to all the shame and sorrow you have heaped upon my house? After bringing my child to the grave, you still dare——

Nils Lykke.

With your leave, Lady Inger Gyldenlöve—on that matter we should scarce agree; for you count as nothing what I lost by that same unhappy chance. I purposed nought but in honour. I was tired of my unbridled life; my thirtieth year was already past; I longed to mate me with a good and gentle wife. Add to all this the hope of becoming your son-in-law——

Lady Inger.

Beware, Sir Councillor! I have done all in my power to hide my child’s unhappy fate. But because it is out of sight, think not it is out of mind. There may yet come a time——

Nils Lykke.

You threaten me, Lady Inger? I have offered you my hand in amity; you refuse to take it. Henceforth, then, it is to be open war between us?

Lady Inger.

I knew not there had ever been aught else?

Nils Lykke.

Not on your side, mayhap. I have never been your enemy,—though, as a subject of the King of Denmark, I lacked not good cause.

Lady Inger.

I understand you. I have not been pliant enough. It has not proved so easy as some of you hoped to lure me over into your camp.—Yet methinks you have nought to complain of. My daughter Merete’s husband is your countryman—further I cannot go. My position is no easy one, Nils Lykke!

Nils Lykke.

That I can well believe. Both nobles and people here in Norway think they have an ancient claim on you—a claim, ’tis said, you have but half fulfilled.

Lady Inger.

Your pardon, Sir Councillor,—I account for my doings to none but God and myself. If it please you, then, let me understand what brings you hither.

Nils Lykke.

Gladly, Lady Inger! The purpose of my mission to this country can scarce be unknown to you——?

Lady Inger.

I know the mission that report assigns you. Our King would fain know how the Norwegian nobles stand affected towards him.

Nils Lykke.

Assuredly.

Lady Inger.

Then that is why you visit Östråt?

Nils Lykke.

In part. But it is far from my purpose to demand any profession of loyalty from you——

Lady Inger.

What then?

Nils Lykke.

Hearken to me, Lady Inger! You said yourself but now that your position is no easy one. You stand half way between two hostile camps, whereof neither dares trust you fully. Your own interest must needs bind you to us. On the other hand, you are bound to the disaffected by the bond of nationality, and—who knows?—mayhap by some secret tie as well.

Lady Inger.

[To herself.] A secret tie! Oh God, can he——?

Nils Lykke.

[Notices her emotion, but makes no sign, and continues without change of manner.] You cannot but see that such a position must ere long become impossible.—Suppose, now, it lay in my power to free you from these embarrassments which——

Lady Inger.

In your power, you say?

Nils Lykke.

First of all, Lady Inger, I would beg you to lay no stress on any careless words I may have used concerning that which lies between us two. Think not that I have forgotten for a moment the wrong I have done you. Suppose, now, I had long purposed to make atonement, as far as might be, where I had sinned. Suppose it were for that reason I had contrived to have this mission assigned me.

Lady Inger.

Speak your meaning more clearly, Sir Councillor;—I cannot follow you.

Nils Lykke.

I can scarce be mistaken in thinking that you, as well as I, know of the threatened troubles in Sweden. You know, or at least you can guess, that this rising is of far wider aim than is commonly supposed, and you understand therefore that our King cannot look on quietly and let things take their course. Am I not right?

Lady Inger.

Go on.

Nils Lykke.

[Searchingly, after a short pause.] There is one possible chance that might endanger Gustav Vasa’s throne——

Lady Inger.

[To herself.] Whither is he tending?

Nils Lykke.

——the chance, namely, that there should exist in Sweden a man entitled by his birth to claim election to the kingship.

Lady Inger.

[Evasively.] The Swedish nobles have been even as bloodily hewn down as our own, Sir Councillor. Where would you seek for——?

Nils Lykke.

[With a smile.] Seek? The man is found already——

Lady Inger.

[Starts violently.] Ah! He is found?

Nils Lykke.

——and he is too closely akin to you, Lady Inger, to be far from your thoughts at this moment. [Looks fixedly at her.

The last Count Sture left a son——

Lady Inger.

[With a cry.] Holy Saviour, how know you——?

Nils Lykke.

[Surprised.] Be calm, Madam, and let me finish.—This young man has till now lived quietly with his mother, Sten Sture’s widow.

Lady Inger.

[Breathes more freely.] With—? Ah, yes—true, true!