Prevod

There was an elderly man aboard the steamer whose face was so contented that, unless it deceived him, he must have been the happiest man on earth. And so he was, he said; I heard it from his own lips. He was a Dane, a countryman of mine, and the director of a travelling theatre. He had his entire company with him, packed in a large box: he was a puppet-showman. His natural good humour, he said, had been purified by a graduate of the Polytechnic Institute, and that experiment had made him perfectly happy. I did not understand him at first, but then he set the whole story clearly before me, and here it is.

It was in Slagelse, he said. I was giving a performance at the posting inn, and had a splendid house and a splendid audience, not one of them old enough to have been confirmed, apart from a couple of elderly ladies. Then in came a person dressed in black, with the look of a student. He sat down and laughed at precisely the right moments, and applauded just as he ought. He was an extraordinary spectator! I had to know who he was, and learned that he was a graduate of the Polytechnic Institute, sent out to instruct people in the provinces. My performance ended at eight o’clock; children must go to bed early, after all, and one must consider the convenience of one’s audience. At nine the graduate began his lectures and experiments, and now I was his audience. It was remarkable to hear and see. Most of it went over my head and into the parson’s, as the saying goes, but I could not help thinking: if we human beings can discover such things, surely we must be able to last longer than until we are put into the ground. He performed one little miracle after another, yet it was all as simple as putting a foot in a stocking, all straight from nature. In the days of Moses and the prophets, such a graduate of the Polytechnic would have become one of the wise men of the land, and in the Middle Ages he would have been burned. I did not sleep all night, and when I gave a performance the next evening and the graduate was there again, I really rose to the occasion. I once heard an actor say that when he played lovers’ parts, he thought of only one woman in the audience; he acted for her and forgot the rest of the house. The Polytechnic graduate was my “her,” the one spectator for whom I performed. When the performance was over, all the puppets were called before the curtain, and the graduate invited me to his room for a glass of wine. He talked about my plays and I talked about his science, and I think we took equal pleasure in both; but I did most of the talking, for there was so much in his subject that even he could not account for. Take, for instance, the way a piece of iron becomes magnetic when it falls through a coil. What is that? The spirit comes upon it, but where does it come from? It is just the same with the people of this world, I think. Our Lord lets them drop through the spiral of time, and the spirit comes upon them, and there stands a Napoleon, a Luther, or someone of that sort. “The whole world is a succession of wonders,” said the graduate, “but we are so used to them that we call them everyday things.” And he talked and explained, until at last it was as though he were lifting the top of my skull, and I frankly confessed that if I were not already an old fellow, I would go straight to the Polytechnic Institute and learn to look into the seams of the world, even though I was one of the happiest of men. “One of the happiest!” he said, as though savouring the words. “Are you happy?” he asked. “Yes,” I said, “happy I am, and welcome in every town I visit with my company. There is, to be sure, one wish that sometimes comes over me like a mischievous imp, a nightmare riding my good humour: to become the director of a living troupe, a company of real human beings.” “You wish your puppets brought to life; you wish them to become real actors,” he said, “with yourself as their director, and then you think you would be perfectly happy?” He did not believe it, but I did, and we argued back and forth, neither of us changing his opinion; but we did clink our glasses together, and the wine was very good. There must have been magic in it, though, or else the whole story amounts to no more than my getting drunk. But that was not it; I was clear-eyed. There was something like sunshine in the room, shining from the graduate’s face, and I could not help thinking of the ancient gods in their eternal youth, when they walked about the world. I told him so, and he smiled, and I could have sworn that he was a god in disguise, or one of the family—and so he was! My dearest wish was to be fulfilled, the puppets were to come alive, and I was to become the director of human beings. We drank to it. He packed all my puppets into the wooden box, strapped it to my back, and then let me drop through a spiral. I can still hear the thump as I landed. I was lying on the floor, that is the plain truth, and the whole company sprang out of the box. The spirit had come upon every one of them; all the puppets had become outstanding artists—they said so themselves—and I was the director. Everything was ready for the first performance. The entire company wanted to speak to me, and so did the audience. The dancer said that unless she stood on one leg, the house would fall; she was the mainstay of the whole enterprise and wanted to be treated accordingly. The puppet who played the empress insisted on being treated as an empress offstage too, or she would get out of practice. The fellow whose job was to come in with a letter made himself just as important as the leading lover, for the small parts were as important as the great ones in an artistic whole, he said. Then the hero demanded that his entire part should consist of exit lines, because those were what people applauded. The prima donna would perform only in red light, because it suited her; she would have nothing to do with blue. It was like flies in a bottle, and I was in the middle of the bottle: I was the director. I lost my breath, I lost my head, I was as miserable as a human being can be. I had found myself among a new race of people. I wished I had them all back in the box and had never become a director. I told them outright that, when all was said and done, they were nothing but puppets, and then they killed me. I was lying on the bed in my room. How I had got there from the Polytechnic graduate’s lodgings, he must know; I do not. The moon shone onto the floor, where the puppet box lay overturned and all the puppets were scattered about, big and small, the whole lot of them. But I wasted no time. Out of bed I flew, and into the box they all went, some head first and some feet first. I slammed down the lid and sat on the box myself. It was a picture worth painting! Can you see it? I can. “Now you shall stay there,” I said, “and never again will I wish you flesh and blood!” My heart was so light; I was the happiest man alive. The Polytechnic graduate had purified me. I sat there in sheer bliss and fell asleep on the box, and in the morning—it was really noon, but I slept an extraordinarily long time that morning—I was still sitting there, happy, for I had learned that what had once been my only wish had been a foolish one. I asked after the Polytechnic graduate, but he had vanished, like the Greek and Roman gods. And ever since then I have been the happiest of men. I am a happy director; my company does not argue, nor does my audience, which enjoys itself with all its heart. I am free to put all my plays together myself. I take whatever I please of the best in every play, and no one is offended. Plays now despised at the great theatres, but which thirty years ago the public flocked to see and wept over, I take for my own. Now I give them to the little ones, and the little ones weep just as their fathers and mothers wept. I put on “Johanna Montfaucon” and “Dyveke,” but in shortened versions, for little ones do not care for long-winded love nonsense. They want it unhappy, but quick. Now I have travelled the length and breadth of Denmark, know everyone and am known wherever I go. Now I have crossed over to Sweden, and if I am a success here and earn good money, I shall become a Scandinavian; otherwise not, I tell you, as one countryman to another.

And I, as his countryman, naturally pass the story straight on, simply for the sake of telling it.