town for great experiences.”
“Very good. I came here by accident on a vacation trip. The ticket was
good for a longer journey, but the train stopped, it looked pretty, and
I got off. I left my knapsack at the hotel of Comfort and betook myself
to strolling along the select avenues of Peace.”
“Hm! Traveling is nothing but trying to get away from yourself with
lies.”
Modin seemed not to hear. He looked down into the water, which tossed up
a thousand splinters of sunlight.
“It was a royal day in June: lofty blue heavens, a light breeze,
transfiguration in the air. The gardens blossomed within their red
palings and the daws cried merrily around the high church steeple. It
was a day when one suddenly stands still in the blue shade, looks over
the crosses in the churchyard grass, and finds that even death is
gentle.”
“Hm, hm!”
“Well, so I ate a light dinner and adventured out along the road into
the wide land of summer leafage. I have never in my life seen so much
white bloom: hedge, sloe, apple, pear, cherry. I recall too a linden
avenue--the gravel was quite yellow with the rain of blossoms--and the
branches murmured solemnly.”
Axelson twisted himself over on his back again.
“Excuse me, my dear brother, but did you meet anything?”
“Everything and nothing, old friend. Without meeting a living soul I had
got out into a landscape of billowy grain fields and meadows with islets
of splendid old oaks. I walked along a blossoming ditch side and sat
down on a mossy stone close to a fence that ran around one of the knolls
of oak. It began to draw on a bit towards evening. The light had not yet
the garish colors of sunset; it was merely a thought more golden than
before. And in the low, warm light the green of the fields took on a
full-toned richness, a vehement intensity, which I shall never forget.
One speaks more often of an intense blue, but green too can take on such
a tone toward evening.
“I don’t know how long I had sat absorbed in all this, when for some
reason or other I turned around and on the other side of the
half-dilapidated fence discovered a young lady dressed in white who was
sitting on the same slope with me. She had let the book she had been
reading sink down on her knees and was gazing similarly out into the
wondrous living sea of color.
“At first I was almost taken aback at not being absolutely alone with my
emotion, which was so overpowering. But I soon came to myself. Very
good, thought I, at any rate there are at this moment no more than two
persons in the world, she and I. And--can you imagine it?--I, who am
ordinarily so shy and embarrassed in ladies’ society, began a
conversation: ‘Here we are sitting, we two, as _staffage_ for the
loveliest picture in the world.’ Words glided off my tongue of
themselves with a sort of gentle irresistibility which I have never felt
before or since. Perhaps my words fitted in in some way with what she
had just read in her book. She nodded with a slight smile: ‘Yes, it’s
wonderfully lovely.’ I leaned against the fence. ‘How insignificant is
all that _happens_ in life compared to such a moment of afternoon as
this?’ I said. ‘Even fate seems old and dusty, dusty with stage dust.’
“This was the introduction to a long conversation, at the beginning very
lively--a conversation about everything and nothing, of various colors,
of flowers and perfumes, of the flight of the swallows that wheeled
above our heads.”
Axelson pricked up his ears.
“Swallows,” he muttered; “then there was a barn or a dwelling-house in
the neighborhood.”
But Modin meanwhile heard only his own voice.
“Gradually the evening grew utterly quiet. I can still hear the soft
incessant rustling among the dry leaves heaped up in the ditch, a
rustling that told of minute unknown lives. And I can still see her
white skirt against the green hillside. Behind her the thick blossoms of
the hawthorn shone mysteriously under black, dead branches in the green
half-darkness of the oak wood. It was in truth a wood for the
imagination, a Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden. And the young woman I
talked with was Rosalind. I told her so, and she seemed to appreciate
it.
“Gradually our conversation grew more serious. We spoke of special,
intimate, personal memories and of our common interests in life. We
weighed life and death with swift, light sensitive words. What we said
was simple, frank, stamped with the most eager and honest wish to give a
living impression of our true character. It was a genuine contact of
soul with soul.
“Well, then the shadows of the trees on the field began to grow long and
contemplative, so we said good-bye. She picked up her book and gave me
her hand across the fence, for I had kept on standing on the other side.
‘Thanks and good evening,’ she murmured, ‘thanks and farewell.’ With
that she was gone into the woods. As for me, I went home to the hotel
and lay down in my clothes with my hands under my head, and there I lay
awake all night. That was the loveliest night of my life, I may tell
you. I felt myself marvelously cleansed and exalted, lonely and yet not
alone.--Next day I went on where my ticket was made out for. And that
was the whole thing.”
Axelson smiled:
“That wasn’t so terribly much.”
“It was much to me, my dear friend. You have, to be sure, a more robust
appetite.”
“But why the devil did you go on? Why didn’t you go back to your Forest
of Arden?”
Modin blinked at the sun with a smile of quiet fanaticism:
“I am no fool.”
“But it might have been something for your whole life.”
“As it is it’s something for my whole life, though of course you can’t
understand it. I dare affirm that never has a meeting of two persons
been so unconstrained, so deep and free. People talk of intuitive
thought, but here was an intuitive companionship without selfish purpose
or social barrier. Never a second time would such a flood of clear and
radiant ideas have surged through my consciousness. I tell you, the most
involved concatenation arranged itself automatically with lightning
speed like nodal figures at the stroke of the bow. And the memory of our
communion remains always equally fresh and pure just because I did not
wear it stale with further acquaintance. I don’t lie when I say that I
have lived in a sort of spiritual wedlock with that unknown woman. Who
can prove that the long years give more than one exquisite hour?
Humanity is so brittle and changeful that a long life together must
always be precarious. I have no idea whether she was married or became
married later. But it may very well be that I know that woman better
than her husband does. Strong impressions wear away. People can’t be
true to each other over a long period. For truth the great requisite is
freshness, immediateness. Truth must always be new, according to my
philosophy. Habit is truth’s worst enemy. How then can a lifelong
marriage be true?”
Axelson raised his eyebrows:
“Wait a bit. I must strike in and put a few questions before I get
angry. For instance, it would be nice to hear a closer description of
this lady with whom you have lived in such a remarkable wedlock.”
“Very good, I can answer you, since I’m fully armed against all
sarcasms. She was a woman of an altogether unusual feminine spirit. In
her archness there was a delicate acknowledgment of her womanly
limitations. And he who knows his bounds is already beyond them. She
had, perhaps, no thoughts that were actually her own, but she had a
quick, gentle receptivity which gave one the pleasant feeling that
everything fell upon good ground and bore fruit a hundredfold. I begot
thoughts and dreams upon her and enjoyed a sort of intellectual
fertilization.”
“But may I permit myself to doubt whether this glorified bridal mood
really made such a permanent impression on the other person?”
“What right have you to do that?”
“Oh, one might suppose it was only for a moment that she reverted to the
usual flighty sentimentality which lies like a broken husk around a
woman’s realism. The realism is genuine because it is rooted in
suffering and the hard limitations of nature. No, woman is not what the
bachelor thinks, not what either the ethereal or the crude bachelors
think. It may well be that her instinct was whispering all the time in
the depths: Look out for this man, because he is in reality a damned
little egoist.”
Modin did not seem to be impressed.
“That’s just like you, Axelson,” he muttered. “You were in the landscape
then, too. You were the corncrake. Just a harsh, obstinate noise.”
Axelson grew all the more contentious. He strode back and forth over the
hot bridge, unconsciously holding his fists where his trousers pockets
should have been. At last he halted in front of Modin:
“My dear brother, we have come into a condition of moral nakedness.
Permit me to be wholly frank. It looks from your body as if you had
never tried a tussle with life. I take back the term bachelor, for, with
your pardon, there is more of the old maid about you. Yes, don’t be
angry. But, you see, you keep irritating me damnably with your misuse of
the word marriage. For me marriage is a deep word, deeper even than the
word love. Marriage is something big, hard; even rough, if you like. It
is brimmed with sweetness and suffering and bitter necessity as
inescapable as the fact that you as a little delicate creature have lain
crumpled up in your tortured mother’s body. One may say in a certain
manner that a fleeting, loose relation is purer and finer than marriage,
but that is a desertion from reality, an unorganic arabesque, a petty
splendor. Marriage is an heroic word. Yes, because man and woman must
inflict heavy suffering upon each other. Sex, which frets them both,
must at certain times be felt as a curse. Between even the best and most
sober couples there are times of despair and hate. There is a disease of
hatred which is inborn in man. But still it is great to endure together.
And an honest and deep despair is something quite different from a
little cold and limp aversion without marrow in its bones. Everything
that’s honest, everything that doesn’t falsify the fundamentals of life,
has a worth, let it look as devilish bitter as it may.”
Modin looked away, troubled by the other’s confidence.
“My dear friend, I haven’t desired to hear all this. From your
experience you will hardly succeed in making an apology for marriage.”
Axelson gave a jump.
“On the contrary, you little idiot, my marriage is an uncommonly good
one. We have five children and are inseparable till death. I tell you
this: Cut out woman from your life and you are only half a man! But
that’s enough of this. I’m now--deuce take it!--roasted through. Shall
we get dressed?”
“All right.”
Axelson dove into his cabin. But he had scarcely got on his shirt and
trousers before he came rushing into Modin’s compartment.
“Listen! Excuse a question. You were telling about an avenue of lindens
and a grove of oaks. Do you happen to remember anything more definite
about the road out?”
“I don’t know of what use all this is. For the matter of that I remember
less about localities than of my own feelings.”
“Come, try now, or I’ll think you are tricking me.”
“I’ve a notion that I passed over a little bridge and under a high red
shaky gable, that somehow made me think of Almkvist’s story, _The Mill_.
That was surely just before my digression.”
Axelson’s eyes gleamed.
“My good fellow, you must have taken a remarkable circuit, because the
mill lies just two and a half minutes’ journey outside the town. Do you
by any chance remember a giant oak almost dead, which stood down on the
slope away from the others?”
“Yes, I think I do.”
“Good, good! Then I may tell you that about a hundred yards from the
place of your meeting stood a dwelling-house, though you could not see
it; an ordinary, white-plastered, fire-insured, fairly well mortgaged,
decent two-story house with young folks and servants and a croquet
ground. So the wonderful loneliness didn’t amount to much.”
Modin carefully tied his necktie.
“You’re making a fantastically vain attempt to rob me of my illusions.”
“Just one more question: Do you remember something special in the white
lady’s appearance?”
“By something special you mean of course a blemish. Yes, I was really
fascinated by a little scar she had on her forehead. It was a very
decorative scar, because it drew up one eyebrow a trifle and at first
glance gave her a lively and somewhat mocking appearance.”
Axelson’s whole countenance glowed.
“Splendid, splendid! I sewed that scar together. I know as much as you
like of the lady in question. The doctor is the whole town’s father
confessor.”
Modin made a gesture of refusal with both hands.
“I wish to know absolutely nothing, I beg you, nothing!”
But Axelson was merciless.
“This much you must know at any rate, that she got the scar when she
fell off a bicycle. And that she lived with her parents in the
white-plastered two-story house. And that she worked at the post office
from nine to one. And furthermore that she had probably just been
betrothed in that very dress. You see that I know my community.”
“But all this is most uninteresting, my dear Axelson.”
“Not altogether, my dear brother, not altogether.”
Axelson dived back into his cabin.
The two men were soon ready. Despite the summer heat Modin was attired
in black, and very jauntily; Axelson on the other hand wore a gray check
suit. The walrus looked very masterful and imposing when he was dressed.
One understood directly that he amounted to something in his community.
He stood forth on the quay and slapped the other man on the shoulder.
“Hope you’ll do me the honor of eating dinner with me.”
Modin as a matter of fact was much disinclined but did not see how he
could refuse. Axelson lived a little way out of the town. They passed
through an avenue of lindens. The doctor from time to time ogled his
friend sidewise. Modin walked slowly and often looked about him. He
seemed irresolute. They passed a bridge and the high red gable of a
mill. They branched off on a somewhat narrower by-road by the side of
the pond. They rounded a hillside with oaks and soon stood before a
fruit orchard, behind which rose a white-plastered two-story house.
Axelson hastened to open a gate at the gable end.
“Be so good as to come in, my dear brother.”
Modin hesitated, paled and grew faint, but Axelson took him by the arm
and drew him hastily along.
Up on the veranda stood a robust lady of middle age, and on the lawn
played several bare-legged boys.
Modin just saved himself from falling on the steps. He looked toward the
edge of the woods with a helpless glance. But his host introduced him
with a grim quiver of the mustache.
“Doctor Amadeus Modin--my wife.”
With that Axelson’s commanding voice rang out across the lawn, “Come
children, aren’t you going to say how-do-you-do to uncle?”
The five boys came forward and bowed in turn. It was agony to Modin. He
sank down on a sofa and cast an anxious sidelong glance over their
close-cropped heads at the lady of the house. She was still dressed in
white, and the scar over her eyebrow was still visible. It became her as
well as ever, though in a different way. Her figure was full but firm.
She had in her something of the matron, in the proud Roman significance
of the word. They were a seasoned and vigorous couple, she and her
husband. A noticeably stern matrimonial resemblance had arisen between
these two persons, whom it never would have occurred to him to associate
with each other. Their mouths had the same expression of sharp humor.
Two veterans who had fought their battles side by side, they might have
been marching along together for many years.
All of this passed like lightning through poor Modin’s brain. He no
longer believed actually that he knew more about the lady in white than
did her husband.
Axelson was on the watch when his wife went in to arrange about dinner
and pounced on his guest.
“Beware of white ladies, dear brother. So far it seems that she doesn’t
recognize you. But at dinner I may perhaps make her memory clearer. It’s
uncanny when the dead come to life, eh?”
And with that if the brutal dog didn’t go on to hum:
“Look out, my boy, look out, look out!
’Tis the White Lady beyond a doubt.”
He then hurried in for a moment after his wife, presumably to order the
wine. But Modin used the moment. He had no wish whatever to be
recognized by the bride of his dreams. On the contrary he seized his
hat, bounded away over cucumber frames and strawberry patches, and swift
as the timid doe threw himself among the sheltering trees of the wood.
LEONARD AND THE FISHERMAN
After a dinner consisting of an anchovy and four cold potatoes Leonard,
a needy artist in wood-cuts, wandered about aimlessly through the city.
It was a May day of the grand and dangerous sort. Over the heavens
voyaged festal white clouds of giant size, bulging with undefined
expectations. And the cool, prickly wind whistled with seductive mockery
of all that lay behind the horizon: explorations, adventures, visions of
beauty. It was a day of lightness and oppression; of futile longing for
action; of cold, far-reaching perfidy; and deep, exhausting unrest. How
can the breast expand to bursting and at the same time feel so horribly
empty? thought Leonard. Spring is the time when we not only make solemn
confession but are merged into a new vital existence; whence, then, in
the name of all the devils, is this emptiness, this lack in the midst of
plenty, this criminal tendency to put all the glory behind one as
quickly as possible?
Brooding painfully over these things, Leonard reeled about half blind
and with aching eyes through Gustavus Adolphus Place. Finally he
succeeded in making a resolution: to go down to the River Terrace and
see whether the apple trees had begun to blossom yet.
It proved that they had not gone beyond the budding stage.
Leonard then dragged himself up to the railing and stood there a long
while under the branches of a large poplar, watching the Northstream
tumble its waters between the piers.
There is a certain immobility in the midst of motion in rushing water.
The same foaming, roaring wave stays there hour after hour, year after
year, indicating a stone in the uneven bed of the torrent. Leonard
sought to calm himself with philosophizing over this wave. So does life
go on through its forms, he thought. Yonder fettered wave corresponds to
the ripple of a flower petal, the curve of a chin. Then some spring day,
maybe, the stone is undermined, an unknown obstruction in the furrow of
the stream of life is cleared away, and the wave is transformed, the
flower petal changes, the curve of the chin becomes different and
softer.
Leonard was not the first man who had philosophized above the running
stream. But he found no rest thereby. His thoughts merely played on the
surface; they served only to sharpen his feeling of uncertainty. The
fettered wave irritated him with its feeble trembling, its futile
tossing. The continuous roar was like an indefinite warning, a dark
threat. A warning of what? A threat of what? Ah, thou wonderful month of
May!
Leonard clenched his empty fists and sank down on a bench in complete
despair.
With that his eye fell on a little old man of the fisher trade. He was
smoking in great repose a short pipe, muttering to himself, and picking
at his clasp-knife, which he had taken apart and hung on the railing to
dry. Leonard observed him a long time with secret envy. In winter it’s
all very fine to be young, he thought, but in spring a man ought to be
as old as possible--or at least to have rheumatism that lets up in fair
weather. He got up laboriously and pushed his way to the fisherman.
“What have you to say to a day like this?” he grumbled.
“Eh, well, just that I think there are bream under the bridge piers
today,” the old man said reflectively and puffed out a little blue
cloud.
Leonard was struck by the answer. He began a long conversation with the
fisherman, whose name was Lundstrom. The best fishing was spring and
autumn, he learned. It was mostly smelt and bream. Perhaps a perch now
and again. And before Christmas everybody got a burbot or two in
eel-pots a little further up the Malar.
He doesn’t make any too much, thought Leonard. But he doesn’t talk about
his fishing in the surly tone that poor men mostly use in growling about
their scanty earnings. He is proud of his catches, he fondles his
tackle, and his eyes rest confidently and patiently on the water. I
gather from that that he is a true fisherman, which a man isn’t very
likely to become unless he has left much behind him.
This quiet fisher person had a strange and enigmatical charm for
Leonard. The old man had pulled together the large iron rings, and
already the dip-net was swinging festively at its gallows on his low
green-painted craft. There was only the grapnel to be pulled in.
Thereupon Leonard reached over the railing and pled touchingly to be
taken along for once.
Yes, that would be all right enough.
The boat was first hauled along the stone quay to the bridge and then
out with the stem set straight into the roaring whirlpool. A few quick,
well-directed oar-strokes, and they floated calmly in the back eddy from
the nearest pier of the bridge with the foaming surge to right and left
and the dusky arches of the bridge ringing and singing over their heads.
There was a dizziness in the suction between the bridge piers, a
sensation of rapid movement and yet of rest.
Lundstrom made fast to a ring and sat down at the crank by means of
which he lowered and raised his net.
“Now the job is to sink the net straight down,” he said; “and to do that
one must manage so that it is half taken by the current and half by the
back eddy. Perhaps the gentleman will give a pull at the oars. There,
bring her in a little and it’ll be fine!”
Leonard brought the boat in and the net descended solemnly.
The old man sank into meditation for a while, and this was a good time
to study him. He was by no means ill to look at.
Why should the upper classes be condemned to appear correct and banal?
Why should fine folk go about as a monstrosity to every practised and
sensitive eye? Look at Lundstrom’s jacket here! The sun and rain of all
seasons has given it the most delicate shade of green. His hat with its
admirable patina might be of bronze. And his trousers!--what a
combination of characteristic wrinkles, telling of age, experience and
strife well sustained. What a treasure for an artist in wood-cuts!
Lundstrom’s custom had grown as one with him. It was no wretched
accident. Is there anything more agonizing than a tired, grumpy
scarecrow that peers out of a brand new summer suit, glittering with
naïve optimism? Or red-cheeked, pious rusticity sewed up in cautiously
gray, pessimistic duds from a distant, smoky, rain-dripping, overcrowded
factory district? But out of Lundstrom’s worn collar grew a face covered
with moss-gray stubble over a network of friendly wrinkles and furrows.
And out of the stubble shot up a two-story nose with room for many a
pinch of reflective snuff. Large noses may be either volcanic or placid.
Lundstrom’s was placid. It separated genially but firmly two small gray,
liquidly bright eyes, which never seemed to have fastened on anything
that burned too hot, never to have stared at anything helplessly, never
to have wavered anxiously about over empty, exhausting horizons.
Lucky man, sighed Leonard. He sits peacefully under the voyaging clouds,
in the midst of the Northstream swollen with spring freshets he sits
peacefully at his crank. He is on the far side of indefinite
expectations and adventure and drifting about in the inane. He has
happily left his future behind him.
“But for heaven’s sake it must surely be time for you to haul up.”
“No hurry, no hurry,” opined Lundstrom, who nevertheless began gently to
turn the crank. The net came up with a good sediment of silver-white
splashing smelts.
With a quiet pursing of the lips the old man emptied his cargo into the
fish-well.
Next time there was a bream, a plump rascal.