The Red Room August Strindberg (best english novels to read txt) 📖

until a quarter to one, and then set himself to fathom the meaning of paragraph one of the statutes. “The theatre is a moral institution,” it ran, “therefore the members of the company should endeavour to live in the fear of God, and to lead a virtuous and moral life.” He turned and twisted the sentence about, trying to throw light upon it, without succeeding. “If the theatre is a moral institution,” he mused, “the members who⁠—in addition to the manager, the cashier, the secretary, the machinists, and scene-shifters⁠—form the institution, need not endeavour to practise all these beautiful things. If it said: The theatre is an immoral institution and therefore⁠ ⁠… there would be some sense in it; but that, surely, the management does not intend to convey.”

He thought of Hamlet’s “words, words,” but immediately remembered that to quote Hamlet was stale, and that one ought to clothe one’s thoughts in one’s own words; he chose his own term, and called the regulations nonsense, but discarded the expression again, because it was not original; but then the original was not original either.

Paragraph two helped him to while away a quarter of an hour in meditation on the text: “The theatre is not a place for amusement; it does not merely exist to give pleasure.” In one place it said the theatre is not a place for amusement and in another the theatre does not “merely” exist to give pleasure, therefore it did exist to give pleasure⁠—to a certain extent.

He reflected under what circumstances the theatre ministered to one’s pleasure. It was amusing to see children, especially sons, defrauding their parents, more particularly when the parents were thrifty, goodhearted, and sensible; it was amusing to see wives deceiving their husbands; especially when the husband was old and required his wife’s care. Besides this he remembered having laughed very heartily at two old men who nearly died of starvation because their business was on the decline, and that to this day all the world laughed at it in a piece written by a classical author. He also recollected having been much amused by the misfortune of an elderly man who had become deaf; and that, together with six hundred other men and women, he had shouted with laughter at a priest, who tried, by natural means, to cure his insanity, the result of self-restraint; his mirth had been particularly stimulated by the hypocrisy displayed by the wily priest in order to gain the object of his desire.

Why does one laugh? he wondered. And as he had nothing else to do, he tried to find an answer. One laughed at misfortune, want, misery, vice, virtue, the defeat of good, the victory of evil.

This conclusion, which was partly new to him, put him into a good temper; he found a great deal of amusement in playing with his thoughts. As the management still remained invisible, he went on playing, and, before the lapse of five minutes, he had come to the following conclusion: In a tragedy one weeps at just those things which in comedy make one laugh.

At this point his thoughts were arrested; the great actor-manager burst into the room, brushed past Rehnhjelm without apparently being aware of his presence and entered a room on the left, whither, a moment afterwards, the violent ringing of a bell summoned the porter. In less than half a minute he had gone in and come out again, announcing that his Highness was ready to receive the visitor.

As Rehnhjelm entered, the director had already fired his shot and his mortar was fixed at an angle which quite prevented him from perceiving the nervous mortal who was timidly coming into the room. But he had no doubt heard him, for he asked him immediately, in an offensive manner, what he wanted.

Rehnhjelm stammered that he was anxious to make his debut on the stage.

“What? A debut? Have you a repertory, sir? Have you played Hamlet, Lear, Richard Sheridan; been called ten times before the curtain after the third act? What?”

“I’ve never played a part.”

“Oh, I see! That’s quite another thing!”

He sat down in an easy-chair painted with silver paint and covered with blue brocade. His face had become a mask. He might have been sitting for a portrait for one of the biographies of Suetonius.

“Shall I give you my candid opinion, what? Leave the theatrical profession alone!”

“Impossible!”

“I repeat, leave it alone! It’s the worst of all professions! Full of humiliations, unpleasantnesses, little annoyances, and thorns which will embitter your life so that you’ll wish you had never been born.”

He looked as if he were speaking the truth, but Rehnhjelm’s resolution was not to be shaken.

“I beg you to take my advice! I solemnly adjure you to drop this idea. I tell you that the prospects are so bad, that for years to come you’ll have simply to walk on. Think of it! And don’t come to me with complaints when it is too late. The theatrical career is so infernally difficult, sir, that you would not dream of taking it up, if you had the least knowledge of it! It’s a hell! believe me. I have spoken.”

It was a waste of breath.

“Well, wouldn’t you prefer an engagement without a debut? The risk is less great.”

“I shall be only too pleased; I never expected more.”

“Then you’d better sign this agreement. A salary of twelve hundred crowns and a two years’ engagement. Do you agree?”

He pulled a filled-up agreement, signed by the management, from underneath the blotting-pad, and gave it to Rehnhjelm. The latter’s brain was whirling at the thought of the twelve hundred crowns and he signed it without a look at the contents.

When he had signed the actor-manager held out his large middle finger with the cornelian ring, and said: “Be welcome!” He flashed at him with the gums of his upper jaw and the yellow and bloodshot whites of his eyes with their green irises.

The audience was over. But Rehnhjelm⁠—in whose opinion the whole business had been hurried