Mysteries by Knut Hamsun Page B

repeated that he had to say whether it was true or not.
    Taken aback, Nagel replied, “That must be a mistake.”
    “I wouldn’t say that you reviled him,” Øien said. “You protested vehemently. For example, I recall your saying that Gladstone was a bigot.”
    “A bigot! Gladstone a bigot!” the doctor yelled. “Were you drunk, man?”
    Nagel laughed. “I don’t think so. Well, perhaps I was, I don’t know. It does sound like it.”
    “It certainly does!” the doctor said, appeased.
    Nagel refused to explain himself and wanted to drop the subject, but Dagny Kielland again asked Mrs. Stenersen to keep at it. “Get him to explain what he meant. It would be such fun.”
    “Well, what did you really mean?” the hostess asked. “Since you protested, you must have meant something by it. So, let’s hear! Besides, you will be doing us a favor, because if you men start playing cards, we’ll all be so bored.” 11
    “If it will amuse you all, that’s quite another matter,” Nagel answers.
    Did he intend, by this remark, to sneer at himself and the part he was playing? His lips curled slightly.
    He started by saying he couldn’t recall the occasion Mr. Øien was talking about.... “Have any of you seen Gladstone or heard him speak? What is most impressive about him when he speaks is the man’s candid behavior, his great sense of justice. It’s as though any suggestion other than his having a clear conscience was out of the question. How could that man ever do this great wickedness and sin against God! And he himself is so deeply saturated with this idea of a clear conscience that he presupposes the same among his listeners, truly presupposes that his listeners too have a clear conscience—”
    “But that’s one of his nice traits, isn’t it? It shows his integrity and his humane thinking,” the doctor cut in. “How absurd!”
    “I’m of the same opinion; I simply mention it as part of his profile, a nice feature of his portrait, heh-heh-heh. Let me cite an incident that I just recalled; well, maybe I don’t need to relate the whole incident, I’ll just mention the name Carey. I don’t know whether all of you remember how Gladstone, in his time as prime minister, accepted denunciations from Carey, the traitor. Subsequently he helped him over to Africa, so he could escape the revenge of the Fenians. However, that’s not the question, that’s another story, I don’t give any weight to the sort of peccadilloes a prime minister may be forced to commit now and then. No, to get back to what we were talking about, the fact is that Gladstone as a speaker has the clearest conscience imaginable.... If you had seen or heard Gladstone speak, I would only have to call attention to his facial expressions during the speech. He’s so certain of his clear conscience that his certainty is mirrored in his eyes, his voice, his posture and his gestures. His speech is simple and easy to understand, slow and everlasting; oh, how everlasting it is, his barrel is never empty! You should see how he distributes his remarks around the hall—a few to the ironmonger over here, a few to that furrier over there—how he knows what he’s talking about to such a degree that he seems to appraise his words at a crown a piece. It’s quite a sight, truly entertaining! Gladstone, you see, is a knight of the indisputable right, and it’s the cause of that right he champions. It would never occur to him to make any sort of concession to error. That’s to say: if he knows he has the right on his side, he is ruthless in using it, displaying it, raising it to the skies, letting it flutter before the eyes of his listeners to put his opponents to shame. His morality is of the healthiest and most enduring kind: he’s working for Christianity, for humanism and for civilization. If someone offered that man so and so many thousand pounds to save an innocent woman from the scaffold, he would save the woman, refuse the money with contempt,