white stem. By the stem stood two young people kissing, and I saw that
one of them was the young girl who smelled of pine woods and heather.
But the other was the apothecary, and he was a quite ordinary apothecary
with a white vest. He held her pressed against the white stem of the
birch and kissed her.
But when he had kissed her three times, I went away and wept bitterly.
COMMUNION
It happened when I was hardly more than a boy.
It was on a blustering autumn evening on board a coast steamer. We had
not yet come in from the country, and I had to go in and out of town to
school. I had been lazy as usual and was to be examined in several
subjects in order to be promoted into a higher class.
I went back and forward on the deck in the darkness, with collar turned
up and hands in my coat pockets, thinking of my reverses at school. I
was almost sure to flunk. As I leaned forward over the railing and saw
how the foam hissed whitely and the starboard lantern threw sparkling
green reflections on the black water, I felt tempted to jump overboard.
Then at least the mathematics teacher would be sorry for the way he had
tormented me--then, when it was too late----
But in the end it grew cold outside, and when I thought I had been
freezing long enough, I went into the smoking cabin.
In my imagination I can still see the warm, comfortable interior which
met my view when I opened the door. The lighted ceiling-lamp swung
slowly back and forth like a pendulum. On the table steamed four whiskey
toddies, four cigars puffed, and four gentlemen were telling smutty
stories. I recognized them all as neighbors of our summer sojourn: a
company director, an old clergyman, a leading actor, and a button
dealer. I bowed politely and threw myself down in a corner. I had, to be
sure, a slight feeling that my presence might perhaps be superfluous;
but on the other hand it would have been asking too much of me to go out
into the wind and freeze when there was so much room in the cabin.
Furthermore I knew within myself that I might very well contribute to
the entertainment if necessary.
The four men looked askance at me with a certain coolness, and there was
a pause.
I was sixteen and had recently been confirmed. People have told me that
at that time I had a guileless and innocent appearance.
The pause, however, was not long. A few swallows from the glasses, a few
puffs at the cigars, and the exchange of opinions was once more in full
swing. A peculiar circumstance struck me, though: all the stories that
were told I had already heard innumerable times, and for my part I found
them comparatively flat. Smutty stories may, as is well known, be
divided into two chief groups, one of which concentrates itself mostly
about digestive processes and circumstances related to them, whereas, on
the contrary, the other, which stands incomparably higher in degree, has
preferably to do with woman. I and my schoolmates had long since left
the former group behind us; I was therefore the more surprised to hear
these mature gentlemen give it their liveliest interest, while the
other, much more appealing group was passed over in silence. I did not
understand it. Could this possibly be out of any undue consideration for
me? I need not say to what extent the suspicion of such a thing provoked
me. The lively tone of the cabin had affected me and made me
venturesome, so that I resolved to put an end to this childishness.
“Look here, uncle,” I burst out quite impulsively during a silence after
a story which was so harmless that even the clergyman guffawed at it,
“don’t you remember the story the captain told day before yesterday?”
“Uncle” was the company director, who was a friend of my father.
I continued undismayed: “That was the choicest I’ve heard in all my
days. Couldn’t you please tell it?”
Four pairs of astonished eyes were directed upon me, and a painful
silence set in. I already regretted my rash courage.
The company director broke the ice with a skittish little chuckle,
which was but a faint echo of the thunder he had allowed to roll out a
couple of days before when the captain had told the story.
“Tee-hee!--yes, that wasn’t so bad----”
He then began to tell it. It was very highly seasoned and had to do with
woman.
The leading actor at first hid his feelings behind his customary mask of
dignified seriousness, whereas on the other hand the button dealer, an
old buck who had grown gray in sin, regarded me with a sort of furtive
interest, in which was an element of increased respect for my
personality.
But when the anecdote began to take a somewhat precarious turn, it was
suddenly interrupted by the clergyman, a kindly old man with a pious and
childlike expression on his elderly smooth-shaven countenance.
“Pardon the interruption, my good brother, but”--and he turned a little
in his chair so that he could direct his words at me--“how old, may I
ask, is this young man? Has he been to Our Lord’s--to Communion?”
I felt that I flushed blood-red. I had forgotten that there was a
clergyman in the company.
“Y-yes,” I stammered almost inaudibly. “I was confirmed last winter.”
“Indeed!” returned the old clergyman, while he slowly stirred his glass
of toddy.
Then without looking up, in a voice which forty years of mediation
between God and the world had impressed with the mild tone of tolerance
and indulgence, he continued:
“Go on, my dear brother! Excuse the interruption!”
THE CLOWN
Yesterday a familiar face flitted by me on the street. It was pale and
had a tired expression, but the features were sharp and strongly marked.
I did not recall his name. I was sure I had seen him sometime, perhaps a
long while ago, but I could not remember when or under what
circumstances. His face had aroused my interest without my being able to
explain why, and I dug all sorts of old recollections out of the
junk-room of my memory in order to identify him, but in vain.
In the evening I was at the theatre. There to my surprise I found him
again on the stage in a minor rôle. He was but little disguised; I
recognized him at once and looked for his name on the program. I found
it, but it was unknown to me. I followed his acting with tense interest.
He took the part of a miserably stupid and ridiculous servant, whom
everybody made fun of. The rôle was as wretched as the piece, and he
played it mechanically and conventionally; but in certain intonations
his voice assumed a sharp and bitter character which did not belong to
the part.
They re-echoed in my ear, those tones, till late into the night, as I
went back and forth in my room. And with their help I at last succeeded
in digging up the recollection with which they belonged. I discovered
that we had been schoolmates, but he was many years younger than I; when
I was in the highest class, he was in one of the lowest.
* * * * *
When I was in the top class of the school, I was one day standing at the
window toward the end of a lunch recess. Recesses at the school were an
especial abomination of mine; I could never find anything to do. I knew
that I did not know my lesson, and I could not set myself to going over
it. The slight vexation I felt about the coming lesson always faded
before a greater: a vexation about life, a gnawing premonition that the
days to follow would be as empty and meaningless as those which had
passed.
So I was walking back and forth with my hands in my jacket pockets, now
and then stopping at the window, which was open. As I stood there, my
attention was caught by a peculiar occurrence which was taking place
down in the yard just below the window. A little boy in one of the
lowest classes, a lad of ten or eleven, lay stretched on his back,
surrounded by a crowd of other boys in a ring. Their faces, most of them
at any rate, had the expression of evil curiosity which children and
uncultured people do not know how to conceal. A little broad-shouldered
fellow with high cheekbones, who gave the impression of being very
strong for his age, stood in the ring with a whip in his hand.
“You are my slave,” he said to the boy on the ground, “aren’t you? Say:
‘I am your slave!’”
“I am your slave,” answered the child without hesitating; which
indicated that this was not the first time he had said it.
“Get up,” ordered the other.
The boy got up.
“Imitate B., the way he looks when he comes into class!”
B. was a teacher who went on crutches. The boy went a couple of steps
outside the ring, which opened to give him space; then he came back on
the improvised stage and executed as he did so the movements of a man
walking on crutches. He did his part very well; the illusion was
complete, and the onlookers applauded, but the little actor stood there
with a serious expression. He had a pallid little face and black
clothes; perhaps he had just lost his father or mother.
“Laugh!” ordered the other with a light flick of the whip which he had
in his hand.
The boy tried to obey, but it did not come easily. The laugh sounded
forced at the start, but it was not long before he succeeded in
laughing himself into a genuine, quite natural guffaw, and with that he
turned toward his “master,” as if it was at him that he laughed. But the
latter already desired to have his slave show off new accomplishments.
“Say: ‘My farsher is a damned scoundrel!’”
The boy looked around the circle with a helpless glance. When he saw
that no one gave a semblance of wanting to help him, and that, on the
contrary, all stood in eager expectation of something really amusing, he
said as low as he dared:
“My farsher is a damned scoundrel.”
That drew unbounded applause.
“Laugh--Cry!”
The child began to simulate weeping, but with that he now came into the
mood he was ordered to imagine. The weeping stuck in his throat, and he
shed actual tears.
“Let him be!” said an older boy in the circle, “he’s crying in earnest.”
And with that the school bell rang.
* * * * *
Some days afterwards he ran past me on the way from school. I noticed
that his jacket was ripped open in the back.
“Wait a bit!” I said to him, “your jacket has split open in the back.”
“No,” he said, “it hasn’t split open, they have cut it open with a
penknife.”
“Have they dirtied your book for you, too?” I asked.
“Yes, they’ve laid it in the gutter.”
“Why are they so mean to you?”
“I don’t know. They are stronger than I am.”
He knew of no other reason. But of course that was not the only one;
they must have found something in him that irritated them. I saw it in
him that he was not like the others. The exceptional, the divergent
always irritates children and mobs. A school-boy’s eccentricities are
punished by the teacher with a well-intended monition or a dry satiric
smile; but by his comrades they are punished with kicks and cuffs and a
bloody nose, with a torn jacket, a cap carefully laid under a
rain-spout, and his best book thrown into the gutter.
Well, he is an actor now; that was surely his natural predestination. He
now talks from the stage to a large public. It would be strange if
sometime he did not make his way; I believe he has talent. Perhaps he
will gradually transform his peculiarity to a pattern, according to
which others try to conform as to an inoffensive regular verb.
SIGNY
Signy was a little girl about as old as I, with a pink dress and a pink
ribbon in her hair. Her hair was dark, with curly locks, and she had
dark blue starry eyes with long lashes. She was not at all angelic. I
didn’t care a great deal for angels, perhaps in especial because they
always had fair hair. I had fair hair myself at that time, like most
children, and light hair wasn’t much, I thought.
But I thought an awful lot of Signy. I could go about thinking of her
for whole days. It was not seldom that she did something naughty, which
I was blamed for, and sometimes I myself took the blame voluntarily. I
cared no less for her on that account, but only wished that she would do
more naughty things and I get the blame for them. But what was that bit
of deviltry she hit upon? Let me think.--She ran off and hid somewhere
where we were forbidden to go, in some dangerous place where there might
be trolls and spooks. One time I remember clearly that she wheedled me
into playing with matches--playing with fire, the most dangerous and
most strictly forbidden thing there was. Didn’t she set fire to an old
dry bush in the garden? Why, to be sure she did; and I got the switch
from mother. Oh, how I cared for Signy. And sometimes she said words
that shouldn’t be said. The shivers went up and down my back, but I only
wanted her to say them again.
I don’t know just where she lived. It wasn’t in the same house as we
did; the other children whom I played with didn’t know her. But she must
have lived in the same street--I suppose--in a little home with a garden
surrounded by a fence. Or did she live in a garret cupola obliquely
across the street, with flowers on the window-sill?--I may just as well
say right out that she didn’t live anywhere. She existed only in my
imagination.
Signy was the first creation of my fancy, at least the first I can
recall. I was a good six or seven years old, and at the age (just as,
besides, at sixty, seventy or more) one often thinks aloud. To be brief,
I went about prattling to myself as I imagined things about Signy, and
one fine day it happened, of course, that my mother heard me.
“Listen to the boy,” she said to my father. “Listen how he goes around
talking to himself!”
And to me she said, “What is it you go around talking about? What are
you thinking about?”
Grown-ups have a terrible passion for asking children the most
inconsiderate questions. I ran off and hid.
Another day it was the same story, and still another day. Pain and
embarrassment, questions that couldn’t be answered.
My father said to me, “Other children talk to themselves up to four and
five years old; you are too big for that.”
I perceived that things couldn’t go on any longer so; something must be
done. It occurred to me that it was the sibilant sound that betrayed me:
Signy, Signy; that wouldn’t do. So I changed Signy’s name to Ida. In
that way I succeeded in having her sometimes in peace, but Ida never
really got the same power of enchantment over me as Signy. One fine day
we became enemies, I quarreled with her and called her a silly girl, and
perhaps I even went so far as to scratch her. I regretted it to be sure
but wouldn’t ask her pardon, and soon after I let her go to the deuce.
At the same time I learned to think in silence--and with a few
exceptions have continued to do so.
But whence had I got Signy? In the same house with us lived a little
girl, with whom I sometimes played. Her mother was in the ballet, and
once she dressed herself in one of her mother’s ballet skirts. But she
was neither Signy nor Ida, she performed no deviltries and had none of
Signy’s magic power over my heart. I must, then, at the age of seven
have created Signy as the German creates a camel: out of the depths of
my consciousness.
Then, too, I was predestined.
After that the years rolled on, and my genuinely literary impulses
arrived, only quite late. The first strong urge came when one of my
schoolmates--it was the present Professor Almqvist at the Caroline
Institute--during a lesson in Mother Tongue declaimed with powerful
effect Viktor Rydberg’s “Flying Dutchman.” I became wild with enthusiasm
and for months afterwards dreamed of nothing else than being able at
some period in the remote future to write something equally fine.
So far I haven’t succeeded, but why should one give up hope?
A MASTERLESS DOG
A man died, and after he was dead no one looked after his black dog. The
dog mourned him long and bitterly. He did not, however, lie down to die
on his master’s grave; possibly because he did not know where it was;
possibly, too, because he was at bottom a young and happy dog, who
considered that there was still something left for him in life.
There are two kinds of dogs: dogs that have a master, and dogs that have
none. Outwardly the difference is not material; a masterless dog may be
as fat as others, often fatter. No, the difference lies in another
direction. Mankind is for dogs the infinite, providence. To obey a
master, to follow him, rely upon him--that is, so to speak, the meaning
of a dog’s existence. To be sure, he has not his master in his thoughts
every minute of the day, nor does he always follow close at his heels.
No, he often runs about of his own accord with business-like intent,
sniffs around the corners of houses, makes alliance with his kind,
snatches a bone, if it comes in his way, and concerns himself about
much. Yet on the instant that his master whistles, all this is out of
his canine head more quickly than the scourge drove the hucksters out of
the temple, for he knows that there is but one thing he must attend to.
So forgetting his house-corner and his bone and his companions, he
hurries to his master.
The dog whose master died without the dog’s knowing how, and who was
buried without the dog’s knowing where, mourned him long; but as the
days passed and nothing occurred to remind him of his master, he forgot
him. He no longer perceived the scent of his master’s footsteps on the
street where he lived. As he rolled about on a grass plot with a
comrade, it often happened that a whistle pierced the air, and in that
instant his comrade had vanished like the wind. Then he pricked up his
ears, but no whistle resembled his master’s. So he forgot him, and he
forgot still more: he forgot that he had ever had a master. He forgot
that there had ever been a time when he would not have regarded it as
possible for a dog to live without a master. He became what one would
call a dog that had seen better days, though it was in the inner meaning
of the expression, for outwardly he got along fairly well. He lived as a
dog does live: he now and then stole a good meal in the square, and got
beaten, and had love affairs, and lay down to sleep when he was tired.
He made friends and enemies. One day he thoroughly thrashed a dog that
was weaker than he, and another day he was badly handled by one that was
stronger. Early in the morning one might see him run out along his
master’s street, where out of habit he mostly continued to resort. He
ran straight forward with an air of having something important to attend
to; smelt in passing a dog that he met, but was not eager to follow up
the acquaintance; then continued his journey; but all at once sat down
and scratched himself behind the ear with intense energy. The next
moment he started up and flew right across the street to chase a red cat
down into a cellar window; whereupon, re-assuming his business manner,
he proceeded on his way and vanished around the corner.
So his day was spent. One year followed close in the track of another,
and he grew old without noticing it.
Then there came at last a gloomy evening. It was wet and cold, and now
and then there came a shower. The old dog had been all day on an
expedition down in the city. He walked slowly along the street, limping
a little; a couple of times he stood still and shook his black hide,
which with the years had become sprinkled with gray about the head and
neck. According to his wont he walked and sniffed, now to right, now to
left. He took an excursion in at a gateway, and when he came out had
another dog in his company. Next moment came a third. They were young
and sportive dogs that wanted to entice him to play, but he was in a bad
humor, and furthermore it began to sleet. Then a whistle pierced the
air, a long and sharp whistle. The old dog looked at both the young
ones, but they paid no attention; it was not one of their masters that
whistled. Then the old masterless dog pricked up his ears; he felt all
at once so strange. There was a fresh whistle, and the old dog sprang
irresolutely first to one side, then to the other. It was his master
that whistled, and he surely had to follow! For the third time someone
whistled, sharply and persistently as before. Where is he then, in what
direction? How could I have been separated from my master? And when did
it happen, yesterday or day before yesterday, or perhaps only a little
while ago? And what did my master look like, and what sort of smell had
he, and where is he, where is he? He sprang about and sniffed at all the
passers-by, but none of them was his master, and none wanted to be. Then
he turned and bounded along the street; at the corner he stood still and
looked around in all directions. His master was not there. Then he went
back down the street at a gallop; the mud spattered about him and the
rain dripped from his fur. He stood at all the corners, but nowhere was
his master. Then he sat down on his haunches at a street crossing,
stretched his shaggy head toward heaven, and howled.
Have you ever seen, have you ever heard such a forgotten, masterless
dog, when he stretches his neck toward heaven and howls, howls? The
other dogs slink softly away with their tails between their legs; for
they cannot comfort him and they cannot help him.
STORIES BY
SIGFRID SIWERTZ
THE LADY IN WHITE
The little town slept in the noonday sunlight. Even the flowers leaned
slumberously against the lowered blinds of the open windows. Not a human
being remained in the courthouse square. Down at the harbor it was
equally quiet. A little beyond the big bridge lay a lumber barge with
limp sail. It seemed that it would be hours before she could get in.
From a dressing room of the bath-house came a middle-aged man of rather
spare figure, with a very white and delicate skin. He carefully hung his
eye-glasses on a nail, sat down on the sunny side of a bench, blinked at
the light and smiled to himself.
With that, there emerged into the vista toward the bay a veritable
walrus head; a coarse, hairy body shone through the green shimmering
water; and with several sharp, panting strokes the giant plunged forward
to the stairway, climbed up, and threw himself blinking upon the hot
bridge of the bath-house.
The small white-skinned man surveyed anxiously but with interest the
face of the other; the eagle nose, the bushy eyebrows, and the bristly
drooping mustache.
Where the deuce had he seen that face before?
Thereupon the walrus suddenly got up and stretched out his flipper.
“Why, devil’s in it if that isn’t little Modin!”
“Yes, I surely thought it was someone I knew. Good-day, Brother Axelson!
Lord! but it’s hard to recognize folks out of their clothes.”
“Aye, your own dog barks at you when you’re naked. I’m scared to death
of myself when I look at myself in a glass.”--Axelson surveyed his
new-found acquaintance with the critical look of a doctor.--“You seem to
be in good condition, Modin. Aren’t you going to plunge in?”
“No, thanks; I’m just enjoying a sun bath. I love to sit here like this
and take in the special bath-house smell of water and sun-steeped wood.
It has a holiday scent, don’t you think?--Well, do you know, I hadn’t a
notion it was in this town you were a doctor. That’s how folks lose
sight of each other.”
“Aye, I’ve stuck it out here these seventeen years now, you faithless
little devil.--And you’ve taken over your father’s big antiquarian book
business.”
“Oh, you know everything of course. The same horse’s memory as ever. I
taught a while, but that didn’t suit me at all. And so when my father
died”----
“Your catalog is always prized by connoisseurs.”
“The first assistant, old Salin, deserves the credit of that. He’s a
faithful martinet. It’s really the etchings and engravings that interest
me. There’s certainly a bad feeling among our regular customers because
I can’t let the finest things go away from me. I’m here to look at the
collection of the deceased banker. I was here once fifteen years ago,
while I was still a teacher. I didn’t suspect then either that you were
in the neighborhood. That visit is connected with an exquisite memory, a
fleeting yet pervasive experience, which I can only compare with the
fragrance of certain delicate perfumes.”
“You’re very keen about perfumes, my dear Modin; I remember that from of
old. Is it because the sense of smell is the weakest of the senses?”
Modin made the gesture of pushing up his absent spectacles.
“The weakest? On the contrary, smell is an extraordinarily fine sense.
We can distinguish the smallest nuances with it. The truth of the matter
is simply this, that we have only fixed a few of these nuances in
words.”
“True. But at any rate smell belongs to those senses which have least to
do with our thought.”
“It has infinitely much to do with all that lies above or below our
comprehension. It is in the highest degree a poetic sense, and I am
sorry for anyone who has a weak power of smell.”
Axelson turned over with a grunt so as to be burnt evenly all over.