Adolphus Place it was already black with people. A little boy in a blue
embroidered blouse tried very cleverly to spit on Leonard’s hat. But
Leonard began to find the folk up there altogether ephemeral, them and
the whole muddle of palace, Parliament House, churches, theatres,
prisons and banks which chance had collected along the river; the river
which had run when there were only a few islands here inhabited by
fishermen, and which would continue to run when all the splendor was
dust again.
But Lundstrom, who grew cheerful with his good luck, began little by
little to express his opinion about one thing and another. It may as
well be said first as last that he regarded with slightly ironic
disapproval a good deal of the bustle up there in the city. Ministerial
crises, election campaigns, debates, law-suits, theatre intrigues, and
things of that sort struck him as mere nonsense.
“Folks babble and gad about so they get tired and cross,” he said. “They
ought to fish a little more than they do. All the ministers ought to
come down here and pull the net a couple of times a week. And the party
leaders and the soloists and the other star actors as well. That would
make them really good. And if there wasn’t room for them all here, let
the government hire a big boat and carry them all out to the coast. It’s
right astonishing how folks can work things out when they are together
in a boat. And likewise how it can thaw one’s head to sit and look at a
dipsy. I don’t know how it is, but there’s surely something specially
particular about water.
“Yes, I need only think about myself,” continued Lundstrom. “How should
I have ever got straight without this here boat and net? It doesn’t help
how quiet a man is; he gets stage fright sometimes just the same, in my
opinion. First night is first night, and that’s just how it feels in the
pit of the stomach many weeks ahead. The gentleman may imagine that it’s
a job to turn a wild and desolate wood into a fine castle hall with roof
chandeliers and a marble floor and pillars and pictures and chairs. And
all that must be done in less time than the gentleman needs to empty a
glass of punch. It was specially hard with that fellow Shakespeare, who
was hard on account of all his scenes. Imagine if a piece of cliff
scenery should come dancing down into the middle of a little petite
French boudoir, as they call it. That would look fine! Aye, if a man
went off and worried over all the misfortunes that could happen, it was
a good thing to have fishing to turn to. Down here it was as if all a
man’s troubles ran off him. Lord! a man would think, it isn’t the only
thing in life if a piece of building should go wrong up in that play-box
there. Yes, I’ve been in the theatre line over fifty years, I have. So a
man has his memories. ‘A Traveling Troupe’ was a crazy piece, for there
a man had to turn the wings hindside front, as the gentleman should
know, so that only the gray cloth could be seen from the hall. I believe
I know all the fine lines by heart from that day to this, and Hamlet too
at a pinch. One time Yorick’s skull was to have been brought out. The
public got impatient and began to cough and stamp. But we couldn’t raise
the curtain for the church-yard scene, because Hamlet had to have the
skull to make his speech about. There was the skull of a man who had
killed his wife and child and one and a half bailiffs; we had got the
loan of it from the Charles Institute. We hunted and hunted. At last I
came upon the skull in a trunk. The actor who was playing Hamlet was so
glad that he promised to give me a supper at Stromsholm. He kept his
word, too: steak and vegetables and fizzy pearls. Afterwards it came out
that somebody had hid the skull on purpose. It was somebody who wanted
to have the rôle and was nearly bursting with jealousy. He certainly
needed to get out and fish a little, eh?
“Well, that was Hamlet. Afterwards I went over to the opera. I didn’t
regret it; music suited me better. That comes about as a man gets older,
you see. A man gets tired of the many words. But with music one can
think anything at all. I was with the opera upwards of twenty years, up
to last Christmas--Aye, aye, a man gets old.... Well, so now I get to
amuse myself with the boat here and tramping for the organ at Jacob’s
Church. Yes, that affair of the organ tramping is a special particular
story which we shan’t talk over now,” said Lundstrom, who seemed to
touch with some shyness his transition to the churchly vocation.
Hereupon the old man again grasped his crank, and up came another
splendid batch of fat breams. With friendly, approving comment he let
them vanish into the well.
Look here, today is turning out better than I supposed, thought Leonard,
who could hardly keep from rubbing his hands. My life and trade seem
really prosperous from the frog’s-eye view of this old fisherman.
But Lundstrom cast a knowing, sidelong look at him.
“No, I steal up into the theatre garret sometimes and hear a little of
this world’s music yet, as old as I am. Though it doesn’t give me
sleepless nights any more, you see. A man sleeps well when he has a big
organ to turn to.”
Leonard smiled more broadly and sat quiet, struck by the old man’s
repose. This contented frog’s-eye view of the drama of life spread out
into a wider perspective than he had supposed at the start.
The old man pointed to a paper sticking out of the artist’s pocket.
“Should you perhaps care to look what they’re giving up there tonight?
‘Tristan and Isolde.’ Indeed! that’s a fine thing. Then I’ll go up a
while. You see I’ve been with them and set scenes for that opera, so
it’s an old acquaintance. Well, and so I’ll thank you for your help.
It’s past eight and that will have to be enough of the breams till
tonight.”
It was in fact drawing on towards evening. Heaven’s great voyaging
clouds had ceased to move, saturated with the newly-won warmth of the
light, and had sunk nearer to earth. In the stealthy silence of the
early twilight the roaring of the river grew suddenly stronger, and its
whirlpools more suckingly mysterious. It was evident that the spring day
had determined to show the last and most dangerous phase of its power.
But Lundstrom cast loose from the ring unconcernedly. His craft was
slung some fifty yards down with the surge but glided neatly into the
smooth water under the River Terrace, where it was moored at its usual
place.
It did not occur to Leonard to say good-bye. And yet as he went up the
granite steps he felt that now he was passing out of the worthy
Lundstrom’s perspective. Here ashore the fisherman’s power of giving
certitude was no longer the same.
No, for up on the bridge went Woman. Nothing could save one from her.
Ah, this delicate shiver in the air, this trembling in the nerves of the
invisible which sent its waves through coat and Sunday paper straight
into one’s heart! The restlessness of the day had deepened to a livelier
and more dangerous poison. That which in the morning was a sick longing
for distant horizons--what was it towards evening but the erotic urge?
Under the low rosy clouds too went Woman, she who grows with the shades
so as with night to overshadow the world.
A poor artist’s situation was again near to desperation.
The enviable Lundstrom was to go in a back way and listen to ‘Tristan
and Isolde.’ Leonard followed him shyly and irresolutely to the stage
entrance of the opera house. In his eyes lay a prayer not to be left
alone in the midst of the dreadful spring evening. Lundstrom did not
fail to see the young man’s helplessness.
“The gentleman may surely come with me,” he said. “I’m a good friend of
the porter from forty years back. He gets a bream or so now and then.
Just come along!”
Leonard passed a gray head which nodded at a rectangular peep-hole. He
then went into a long dark corridor, where a squire with brown kilt and
broadsword stood joking at a telephone. Next there were some steps,
where Leonard continually had to stand and wait for the puffing
Lundstrom. All was silent and empty here. They met only a fireman and a
scene-shifter in a blue coat, who called Lundstrom “uncle.”
Now a warm, dusky odor was perceptible and a muffled buzzing and
mumbling, which seemed to come from the very walls. That must be the
orchestra, which was tuning up somewhere in the depths. But Lundstrom
cautiously pushed up an iron door and they came out on the first gallery
of the stage. Down in the great cluttered space below ran workmen
arranging the ship’s deck for the first act, and some of the chorus men
stood in a laughing group waiting to take their places.
Lundstrom cast a searching glance below.
“Look at that!” he muttered with some disapproval; “they have made the
tent smaller. In my time it ran out to the fifth plank, mark H.”
It was still too noisy and disturbed where they were, so they went up by
a narrow ladder to the second gallery. Lundstrom sat down on a mighty
stage dragon of lath and plaster which was hoisted up in the back-scene,
and Leonard leaned against a great machine with handles, hexagonal
cylinders and heavy felt hammers.
“The old stage thunder,” whispered Lundstrom. “They have new, better
thunder now that goes by electricity.”
There was a fantastic play of light and shadow up through the enormously
high vault of the stage, which extended over their heads with five more
galleries. The electric footlights below threw splintered rays up
through the grilled flooring of the galleries, until the gleams were
lost in an incredible labyrinth of ropes, weights and pulleys. The whole
was like a giant skeleton, a fantastic loom.
This is where they weave dusty lies, thought Leonard, who found the rear
view of the drama grotesque and oppressive, so that he almost began to
long for the streets again. People must love illusion astoundingly, if
it can be made big business to such an extent.
But with this the trickling tones of the orchestra tuning up were
suddenly silent, and after a few moments the prelude broke out with a
voice of powerful earnestness. A thrill passed through Leonard’s nerves
and in a moment he was tense and expectant. Like a living, overwhelming
stream of actuality the music burst forth through all the dusty rubbish
of illusion.
Now the curtain was raised and the human voices came up, gushed up.
There was the sailor’s gay song of yearning on his billowy journey to
the land of King Mark, Isolde’s wildly surging hate and suffering,
Tristan’s timid, rock-firm defiance of death. So it went on to the magic
potion and the helpless, the irresistible love cry which is lost in
endless jubilation.
The curtain fell again.
Leonard looked at Lundstrom, wondering what he could possibly fish up
from such a stream. The old man seemed tranquil and unmoved, as he sat
on the scaly dragon and held in his mouth his unlighted pipe.
“Now they’ve got to hurry down there,” he said, “for now the ship must
become a park.”
Threads began to move on the giant loom, blocks creaked and giant
fabrics gave forth dust. With that the park was there, though it looked
very strange from the back, and the curtain solemnly came aloft once
more.
The two sat squatting again at the brink of the great music torrent.
Heavy, bottomless well of tone--dark purple, restlessly driving waves,
which now and then break into foam with a cry:
“O thou spirit’s
Highest, maddest
Exquisite burning joy!”
Love rescued from the cold glance of day--night without
morning--yearning for death--the world’s redemption through passionate
ecstasy!
“Quiet our trembling,
Sweetest death,
With yearning awaited,
O love-blent Death!”
And so on to the end--the sinister dawn with the chill spectres of day,
the discovery, the crossed blades and Tristan’s wound.
Such things are too much for a poor lonely and hungry artist on a lovely
evening in May.
“The deuce is in it,” he muttered, “the very deuce! Why after that
should a poor devil sit and carve in wood?”
But Lundstrom sat with his chin on his hand and gazed out of the
distance, paying hardly any attention to Leonard’s violent gestures. The
old man’s shadow was outlined on a blue background, large, vague, as
though ready to merge in the dimness of the thousand recesses around it.
Leonard was no longer interested in him, he would have preferred to be
alone. Pshaw! the poor old codger hasn’t a notion of what is seething
down there, he thought. He’s just moidering around with old stage
properties. But thereupon Lundstrom lifted his gray head and said
something which indicated that he nevertheless could fish memories out
of the stream of tone.
“Sometimes when I sit here I get to be with them that lie out in the
church-yard,” he muttered. “Wife and children and friends. It’s as if
the music rinsed one out inside. Everything gets clearer and one sees
that what’s been is still.”
“I see only what will never come to pass in life for my part, and that’s
a cursed lot different,” burst out Leonard with greater bitterness than
he himself realized. In his heat he was constrained to use strong words.
But in reality he felt the beginning of a relaxation and release.
Then came the third act.
Tristan lies in feverish dreams by the shore of the sea. He waits for
his Isolde. But when she finally comes, he, in the wild joy of
desperation, tears open his unhealed wound and bleeds to death before it
is vouchsafed him to kiss her. So, too, it had to be. Passion has
overleaped all human bounds. It is a cool, wondrous alleviation that
finally his blood may pour forth with the poison of the potion, with all
the endless, tempestuous, lamenting, jubilating desire.
They got up softly and pressed out through the glowing dust over mighty
craters of tone.
Outside, the spring night was cool. Leonard grew pale and his eyes
shone.
“In old times people opened their veins,” he muttered, “but this is a
much finer way.”
He edged hurriedly across Gustavus Adolphus Place and took his stand at
the barrier by the river. The moon hung thin as a flower petal up in the
greenish-blue heavens, whose color seemed to consist only of coolness
and depth. The river rolled along pale mother-of-pearl dust.
Here assuredly some one passed one day in May and was empty and sad and
full of fiery moods, thought Leonard. But now he has loved and died with
Tristan, so that now he hardly touches the ground, and everything is
silent and all the world appears as a cool and lovely memory. Yes, what
have I, Leonard the artist in wood-cuts, not experienced, seeing that I
stand here with the fate of a mighty heart behind me! In this hour I
feel love as a great enrapturing memory, something that lives in my soul
but is not able to choke my freedom. I have come to drink the potion
without its fatal poison. Verily art can give appeasement even to the
most burning Now. In art is freedom!
Leonard had almost wholly forgotten his fisherman. But now he noted that
the old man stood steadily beside him at the rampart. His face appeared
smaller than before in the moonlight. Despite the two-story nose and the
gray stubble it was almost like a child’s. But it had always the same
stamp of repose. It peered out into the spring night, as if all this
illimitable canopy was a friendly home for brisk old folks. Naturally,
thought Leonard, the whole world is for him just a beautiful dream of
once on a time. The moon, the trees, and the rushing water here, all are
his memory, all have flowed into a great certitude, all are his
innermost self, as memories are.
Leonard gave the old man his hand:
“Thanks for your help!” he said.
“Aye, thanks and good-bye, then. Now I must down there again a bit, I
suppose. Fishing is best at night.”
Thereupon Lundstrom went to his net. But Leonard strolled without
uncertainty or restlessness up to his den on the crest of South
Stockholm. His thoughts played meanwhile with the same daring little
speech:
Why should infinity make us homeless? he said to himself. Infinity has
its middle point somewhere. Well, and I, woodcut artist Leonard, am
sitting in the centre. Should I not then with a good heart cut at my
boxwood blocks?
STORIES BY
VERNER VON HEIDENSTAM
WHEN THE BELLS RING
In southern Småland, just where the stony road to Scania branches into
several village paths and a muddy slope leads up to the parish church,
there stood a mill, painted red and with the largest wings that anyone
had ever seen in all that region. The miller was dead long since. His
widow, named Kerstin Bure, a woman who in her childhood had seen happier
days and eaten from shining plates of pewter, managed the mill after her
own fashion. She never made mention of her birth or of the love-dealings
that had enticed her from a well-to-do pastor’s home to the narrow
tower-room of a miller, where the axle-beam groaned directly over her
sleeping-place; but then she did not speak of other things either. The
husband had been too poor to possess a cottage of his own and had
instead built a chimney straight through the roof of the mill. There
year after year, with her sewing in her hand, the wife had silently
continued to watch the work of the men. If at any time she was asked for
advice, she answered preferably with a nod or a shake of the head, and
she seldom went away further than a stone’s throw from the mill. In
figure she was tall and slim with delicate hands, and her face under the
starched cap, which was always of the same invariable whiteness,
reminded one of Mary Magdalen’s on the picture at the altar, though it
was more yellowed and shrunken. She never took women into her service,
and so women in particular accustomed themselves to passing her in
silence. They did not rightly know whether she was proud or meek, but
most of them thought that she might well be both. When the sexton
appeared with his beadsmen and in his best Sunday attire to solicit the
hand of this woman, who was already old and gray, she became quite
confused and abashed. She blushed to the roots of her hair and merely
shook her head.
One morning she found an infant boy on a heap of twigs by the spring,
and as no one knew anything about the parents, she took the little one
to her with great tenderness.
“Nobody can tell whether there lies in that heart good or evil seed,”
she said, “but the day may come when I am to try it. You shall be called
Johannes, because you are to become devout as an angel of God. I have
been sore afflicted, but for you I shall lay by a pretty penny, so that
your life-days may sometime counterbalance the heavy ones I have known.”
The boy grew up, and when he prepared for confirmation, he surprised
everybody by his pious and godly answers. With his glossy flaxen hair
hanging over his shoulders he afterwards sat by his foster-mother on the
mill steps in the bright midsummer evenings and read diligently in the
books that he had borrowed from the pastor of the congregation. They sat
always taciturnly and quietly, but sometimes he pointed out with his
finger some line that seemed to him more beautiful than the others and
read it softly aloud.
* * * * *
Hay-ricks and meadows were sending out their perfume of harvest and
pasture, and so too, though withered, did the clover--or
trefoil-blossoms that lay forgotten here and there between the leaves of
the book as markers. Even late at night only a single star burned, but
that was large and radiant. Everywhere people were awake and talking,
and the cottage doors stood open.
Many whispered to one another a dark rumor of how the Swedish army had
been beaten at Poltava and that now the Danes were to land and complete
the entire overthrow of Sweden.
One Sunday night a rider stopped at the stairs of the mill and asked for
lodging.
Johannes looked doubtfully at his foster-mother and asked the stranger
whether he would not rather go on up the hill to the provost’s place.
“No,” he answered, “I want first to see tonight how the people are
getting on.”
He managed to get his horse into the walled passage under the mill and
then settled down quite contentedly among the others to a plate of
beer-soup and a loaf of black bread.
He had let his hair and his goat-like beard grow, so that he looked like
a common peasant, but sometimes he pulled his mouth toward his ears and
talked harshly in the broadest Scanian, and sometimes he squeezed up his
eyes and lamented in the most sentimental Smålandish. He kept awake all
night continuing his merry discourse. Once he took a piece of charcoal
and drew a speaking likeness of Johannes on the wall. A little later he
gave Kerstin Bure shrewd advice as to how she should grease the
mill-axle. Or he would sing psalms and polka-tunes, to which he himself
set the words. In the morning he took from his traveling-sack a suit
with bright soldier’s buttons. When Johannes and the old woman peeped
wonderingly through the shutters to see whither he went, he was already
standing in the church square, and there was such a clatter and hubbub
among the populace that it echoed for miles.
“That’s Mons Bock!” clamored the crowd. “That is our valiant General
Stenbock. If we have him with us, we’ll go out and fight for our
country, every one of us, father and son, so God help us!”
“Johannes,” said Kerstin Bure then to her sixteen-year foster-son, with
a hardness in her voice that he had never heard before, “you are meant
to keep devoutly to your books and some day wear a pastor’s surplice as
my sainted father did, but not to lose your blood in worldly feuds.
Stick your tinder-box and clasp-knife in your jacket and tie your
leather coat at your belt! Go then out into the woods and keep yourself
well hid there until we have peace in the land! Before that I do not
wish to see you again. Remember that! You hear now how the men shout on
the church square, but mayhap their mouths will soon be stopped with
black earth.”
He did as she bade him and wandered off into the woods by unknown paths.
The firs became gradually more bristling and dense, so that for a long
distance he had to push through backwards with the leather coat over his
face. In the evening he came to a wide fen, and far out at the rim of a
black lake lay an island overgrown with alders.
“There I’ll build my den,” he thought. But the quagmire of the swampy
fen which floated over the twofold bottom, and the dark water where not
a glimmer of daylight broke through, sank beneath his feet, until,
exhausted and half-asleep, he sat down on a ledge.
A rustling still sounded from the ridges of the wood, but the lake lay
quiet, and the little yellow reflections of the fluffy clouds soon stood
motionless. In the infinite distance beyond the mist of the fen a
goat-bell from time to time struck a few short, unresonant strokes. Two
herd-girls blew quaveringly on their cow-horns, and on the forgotten and
dilapidated sepulchre-mound in the dip of the valley the glow-worms
kindled their lanterns in the grass.
“Are you one of those that have run away from war service?” a voice
asked him, and when he looked up, a goat-girl was standing among the
juniper bushes, knitting. She appeared to be one or two years older than
he, and her leather boots hung on her back.
“That’s right enough; but now the fen bars my way, and berries and ferns
get to be scant fare after a while.”
“It must be you don’t know the woods. Nobody suffers want there. Since
my ninth year I’ve spent every summer up here in the wilds with my
goats. Trim and cut down a couple of fir saplings and tie them to your
feet with withes, and you can go on the quagmire wherever you like.
Thatch your hut with fir bark and make yourself fishinggear.”
She carefully pulled a long basting-thread from her jacket and tied to
it a pewter pin, which she had taken from her head-dress and bent into a
hook.
“Here you have a hook and line,” she said and continued on her way,
still knitting.
That night he did not much heed her advice, but when the sun again shone
into his eyes, he pulled out his knife.
As soon as he had trimmed himself a couple of skis of the sort she had
taught him to make, he betook himself out on the fen to the island. When
he stamped on the grass there, the whole island swayed like a soft
feather-bed, but he opined that this was good, because if there was
moisture in the ground, he would not need to go far to find angleworms.
Hardly, too, had he dug under the grass-roots with his fingers, before
he found abundance. To be sure, the fishing went badly at the start, but
after he had mystically laid two blades of sedge crosswise on the water,
it became at once a different affair. As he carried a tinder-box in his
jacket, it was an easy matter to broil his savory capture.