--IX--
Years passed.
... Martin was roaming about in the twilight. The streets and squares
lay white, snow was falling softly and silently. A man went in front of
him on a zigzag course lighting a lamp here and a lamp there.
Martin went along without a purpose; he hardly knew where he went.
Suddenly he noticed that he was crying as he walked. He did not clearly
know why. He did not ordinarily find it easy to cry. Some snowflakes
must have caught in his eyelashes, and his eyes had got wet.... He
turned off into a side street and came to a bit of park, he brushed
past a couple half snowed in on a bench, and proceeded on among the
trees, where it was lonely and empty and the branches drooped heavily
under the wet snow.
... Strange! A hovel in an alley, a smoking lamp. Two naked arms which
bent and reached forward to the window, and the sound of curtains
coming down. The girl, who was humming the latest popular tune while
she slowly and unconcernedly hung up her red bodice--he hummed too so
as not to speak aloud--was she pretty or ugly? He did not know, he had
hardly set eyes on her. It was not she for whom he longed.
[Illustration: Man reading at desk]
He had sat at home in the dusk, the icy blue dusk of a March afternoon,
twisting and turning over an old poem that never would get itself
finished. Then all at once he had begun to think of a woman. He had met
her at noon as he came from his work, and he had felt the encounter as
a sudden intoxication. She was walking in the full sunlight, and many
men turned their heads after her as she went. But she seemed to notice
or suspect nothing. She was very young--eighteen or possibly twenty.
She was neither expensively nor humbly dressed, but she carried her
head carelessly and easily, perhaps too a little proudly. Slender and
straight, she went on her way, her brown hair shining in the sunlight,
and now and then she smiled to herself. He followed her at a distance;
she went up to Östermalm and vanished at last in a gateway.
So it was that she had come before his mind again in the twilight, as
he sat in his rocking-chair and hunted for rhymes; and she left him no
rest--he threw down his pen and went out. There was no longer sunshine;
it was snowing. He came to the large gray house where he had seen her
go in; he walked to and fro on the pavement directly opposite and saw
a window light up here and a window there. Who was she? He remembered
he had seen her speak to a man he knew. He went up the steps and read
the names on the doors, until at last, deciding that he was childish
and stupid, he pulled up his coat collar and went back into the snow.
He took by the arm the first girl that gave him a meaningful glance and
went home with her.
Now he was standing there in her room. He stood stiffly and silently
surveying her as she took off her clothes and chatted and hummed. He
hardly asked himself whether she was pretty. He only knew that she
might have been prettier without tempting him more and uglier without
tempting him less. She showed the marks of her calling. She was still
young, and yet one saw that she had long ago tired of choosing and
rejecting among her customers. With the same habitual motions of her
hand, the coarse hand of a working girl, she hung up her vulgar bodice
for any one who asked it of her, for lieutenant or clerk, minister of
justice or waiter, making no distinction between them unless possibly
that in her heart she preferred the waiter, since he was less haughty
than the others and understood her better.
Whence did she come? Perhaps from a back yard with an ash barrel and a
privy, perhaps from a village in the woods. The latter seemed likelier;
there was still something of the wood girl in her eyes. Glad among
other glad children, she had run bare-legged on the slopes and picked
strawberries. Early her contemporaries had taught her to bite of the
forbidden fruit. So she had come to the city and had fared as did
many others. It was perhaps not a necessity in itself; she might have
become a workman’s wife if she had wanted, but she had decided that
their lot was harder and without much thinking had gone the way that
was smoothest to her feet. With a little more intelligence and better
luck she might also have become a tradesman’s wife, such as goes to the
square with her maid and bargains for her boiled beef and horse-radish.
«Well,» she said, «aren’t you going to undress?»
He stared at her fixedly, and suddenly had no idea of the whole thing,
why he had come and what he wanted of her. He muttered something about
not feeling very well, laid several crowns on the dressing-table, and
departed. She didn’t get angry, only looked surprised and didn’t throw
any taunt down the stairs after him.
* * * * *
It snowed continuously. Would it never end, this winter? It was now
getting on to the end of March, the trees drooped with the snow and it
was bitterly cold....
Martin was weary, he sat on a bench under one of the white trees and
let the snow deposit itself in drifts on his hat and shoulders.
«What are we doing with life, we mortals?»
The life he led, the pitiful joy he sought and sometimes found, seemed
to him at that moment like the fantasy of a madhouse. Nevertheless
that life was the normal life. Most of the men he knew lived thus. He
was twenty-three. In the four or five years he had been in the game he
ought to have got used to it....
No, he didn’t understand humanity nor did he understand himself. He
often listened to the talk of his friends and acquaintances about these
things. He had noted that the most respectable of the young men, and
of the old for that matter, believed in two kinds of love, a pure kind
and a sensual kind. Young women of the better sort were to be loved
with the pure kind, but that meant betrothal and marriage, and that one
could seldom afford. As a rule, therefore, it was only girls of means
who could inspire a pure love; outside of that the feeling was more at
home in lyric poetry than in reality. The other sort, on the contrary,
the sensual, a man might and should possess about once a week. But
this side of existence was not considered to have a serious meaning;
it was not anything that could render a man happy or unhappy; it was
simply comic, the material for funny stories, an equally pleasant
and hygienic diversion when one had received his salary and drunk his
bottle of punch. But in the intervals the entire sexual life interested
but slightly the respectable and decent class of men; they found its
functions unbeautiful and disreputable, or, as they otherwise put it,
bestial, since they could not exercise them without feeling themselves
like beasts.
This was the prevalent opinion throughout the community, and such
conditions were explained in that this way of living was the healthiest
and wisest, not of course in the sermons of the clergy, the speeches
of the politicians, or the leading articles of the newspapers, but
in the enlightened judgment between man and man in all circles. It
was considered necessary in order that young men might preserve their
health and good spirits and that young women of the better classes
might preserve their virtue. The young men accordingly drank punch,
visited girls of the streets, became fat and florid, and succeeded
not only in putting up with this life as with a sort of wretched
substitute, but it appealed to them to such a degree that often even
after they were married they did not scorn to make excursions to their
old haunts, which had become so endeared. The girls of the better class
meanwhile were allowed to preserve their virtue and beyond that were
not asked for their opinion, but for some of them their precious jewel
became at last too heavy to carry....
«What have we done with our life, we mortals?
«Happiness, the joy of youth, whither has it gone? Life is regulated
for the old, therefore it is a misfortune to be young. It is regulated
for the thoughtless and stupid, for those who take the false for the
true or even prefer the false, because it is a disease to think and
feel, a childish disease which one must go through before one becomes a
man.»...
The apparition of a woman glided slowly past the bench where he sat,
and scarcely had it passed when it stood still, turned its head, and
fixed upon him two great dark eyes.
He rose, shook off the snow, and went away.
He walked quickly, for he was cold.
He thought about life and books. During his adolescence a new
literature had broken forth, which was at war with the prevalent morals
of the community and endeavored to change them. Now it had grown
silent. Little had been accomplished, almost nothing, and already
it was losing its hold. What the new writers had fought for and in
behalf of which they had taken and given such hard blows now suddenly
belonged to the «’Eighties» and as such had once for all been tried
and condemned, weighed in the balance and found too heavy. Instead the
blue flower of poetry exhaled its perfume around him as never before.
Once again the old words rang like new; earth returned to the golden
age, the woods and waters were filled afresh with centaurs and nymphs,
knights and damsels roamed into the sunset, and Song herself, with
eyes wide awake and bright after her long sleep, stood forth again in
the midst of the people and chanted as she had not done in a hundred
years. Martin loved this poetry, its rhythms and words stole into the
verses he himself sat and tinkered with in the dusk, and yet all this
was strangely foreign to him. The world was just the same all the
while, everything went its usual way, and no victory was won. Was this
the time to sing? It was true that, when he looked more closely, he
discovered ideas at the bottom of this new poetry also, and these ideas
too were in open warfare against current morality. But only a few
readers noted this and hardly any one attached any importance to it. It
was just verse.
It was verse, and as a form for ideas poetry was and remained on about
the level of the royal opera. There too the baritone might bellow
against tyrants without thereby running any risk of missing his Vasa
decoration, there too seduction scenes were played by artificial light
without any one’s taking umbrage; what in ordinary life was called by
ordinary citizens bestial was conceived of by the same people with
regard to «Faust» and «Romeo and Juliet» as poetic and pretty and
thoroughly suitable for young girls. It was the same with poetry.
Ideas, when woven into verse and beautiful words, were no longer
contraband; they were not even noticed.
Would a man never come who did not sing, but spoke, and spoke plainly!
* * * * *
He had come out on Strand Avenue. The ice on Nybro Inlet had just been
broken, a tug was now forcing its painful way along between the cakes
of ice. To the left several newly built millionaire barracks towered up
in the snowy mist, in one of which the electric lights and polished
glass prisms already gleamed from a long suite of rooms, and in a large
hall a white shimmering maze of dancing couples moved behind the muslin
curtains.
Several lonely wanderers had paused in a group as if rooted to stare
at the paradise above them. Martin also stopped a minute and proceeded
with his thoughts. Several measures of the waltz had reached his ears;
it was the «Blue Danube»; he walked on humming it and couldn’t get it
out of his head.
O Eros, Eros! The harlot’s room and the festal hall up there.... In
both temples the same god was worshiped, and in both temples he was
worshiped by the same men. But the women!
He did not dance, and yet he loved balls. He enjoyed standing in a
doorway and watching the others whirl by. What atmosphere was there
around all their festivals of youth which fascinated him and made him
meditative and sick with longing after the impossible? Look at the
women! Held close in the arms of the men, with eyes half-shut and
mouths open, the most innocent young girls flitted past in dresses
which exposed or emphasized their young panting bosoms. What were they
thinking of, what were they dreaming of? There were some no doubt who
thought of nothing, dreamed of nonsense, and had no other longing than
to stir their legs and keep in motion, regular young girls after the
hearts of their mothers and aunts. But they were surely not all so. The
daughters of men could not have changed so extraordinarily since the
not too remote times when youths and maidens carried phallic images
in procession, singing holy songs. What did they talk about, these
young girls, when they sat together and whispered in a corner? «She is
secretly engaged to him»; «He’s in love with her, but she’s fond of
someone else.» What was in the books they read? The same thing: People
who were in love with each other, and how it turned out, and who got
whom. To «get,» what did that mean? That one found out on the bridal
night.
But the years passed, and the bridal might have to wait. The young girl
got to be twenty-five, she was nearly thirty, and still she danced at
balls with half-closed eyes, but her mouth was no longer open; she
now knew that this looked unseemly, so she held it convulsively shut,
a blood-red streak. Would it never come, the great, the wonderful
experience? Her glance was that of a drowning woman. «Save me, I’m
sinking, I’m going under! Youth is so short. Look! my color is already
fading, my bosom is sinking in, and my young flower is withering!» She
tried being provocative and bold, she was afraid she had been too timid
before, perhaps that was not the right way.... But the gentlemen were
already laughing at her covertly when they drank healths over their
punch, and some of them mocked her in public. Others understood her
better and thought within themselves that she might make a good wife
and an ardent mistress. But they had no desire to marry, and to seduce
a girl of family would be a risky business. When they left the ball
they could easily and without any ado find the way to their old place,
to the room with the smoking lamp, or with a red night-lamp hanging
from the ceiling.
«What are we doing with our lives, we men, and what are we doing with
_theirs_?»
* * * * *
Martin turned back into the city.
On a street corner he met a poet, who was freezing in a thin
yellow-green ulster. He was a few years older than Martin and already a
bit famous, for he wrote with fabulous ease the loveliest verses on any
theme, mostly about girls and flowers and June nights on the lowlands
of Scania, whence he had come. He had a pale face and a thin red beard;
and when he met a fellow-artist, his great childlike eyes took on a
wild and staring expression, as if he were considering within himself:
«Shall I murder him, or shall we go in somewhere and consume alcohol?»
They went up to the «Anglais» and drank green chartreuse.
The poet talked about himself. He confided to Martin that he was a
decadent. He worshiped everything that was disintegrating, rotten at
the core, and doomed to destruction. He hated the sun and light--here
he shook a clenched fist at the gas candelabra on the ceiling--he loved
the night and sin and all alcoholic drinks of a green shade. He had
most of the well-known venereal diseases and an insane fear of crowded
squares. Nothing in the world could make him go diagonally across
Gustavus Adolphus Place. This disease gave him a very special pleasure,
for he took it as the forerunner of general paralysis. And general
paralysis was the great sleep; it was nirvana.
Martin listened absently. «Light is good,» he said to himself, «and
darkness is good too. But sometimes darkness is bad, and light too.»
«But how is it,» he asked, «that your poems are really not in any
essential way different from those which generally get the prize in the
Academy?»
At these words the poet’s glance darkened, his lips suddenly became
thin and narrow. He took a dirty sheath-knife from his pocket, pulled
it halfway out, and laid his index finger on the bare blade.
«How deep can you stand cold steel?» he asked.
«You misunderstand me entirely,» said Martin, laying his hand calmingly
on the other’s arm. «I love your poems. Only I don’t see rightly the
connection between them and your inner life as you have just pictured
it.»
The poet laughed.
«It’s amusing to hear that you love my poems,» he said. «The things
I’ve allowed to be published up to now, you see, are mere skits. Good
enough for the mob. Look here!»...
He took a newspaper clipping from his pocket, a review of his last
volume signed by a well-known critic. This authority mildly deplored
that some of the poems could not be acquitted of a certain tinge of
sensualism which gave an unpleasing effect. In others again the poet
struck purer tones, such as were fitted to give rich promise for the
future.
«Well, that was quite friendly,» observed Martin, when he had read it.
«Friendly!» The poet again made a convulsive grab in his pocket where
the knife lay. «Friendly, you say? Shouldn’t such an insect creep in
the dust before the wretchedest of my poems?»
«Oh, yes,» said Martin, «yes, naturally; but since it isn’t the custom
for older folks with younger----»
The poet was silent, took a drink, then was silent a long while.
Martin drank too. The strong green liquor burned in his palate and his
brain. Thereupon the woman of the morning was there, the one who walked
in the sunlight and smiled. Was she asleep now, did she dream, did she
smile in her dreams? Or did she twist about sleepless on her bed in
longing for a man?
Should he write to her? He could easily find out her name. No. She
would only show the letter to her friends, and they would titter and
laugh....
[Illustration: Man at table with bottles]
The café was nearly empty. In the farthest corner a regular customer
sat alone behind a newspaper. In a mirror on the opposite wall was
the vision of an old gentleman with white whiskers and a red silk
handkerchief sticking out of his breast-pocket. He was fat and red and
white, red by nature and white with powder, and as he leaned his chest
and arms against the bar, he looked like a sphinx.
The poet emitted a sigh. Martin studied him: the face of a child under
the red-bearded mask of a pirate. It occurred to him that he had
possibly hurt this man’s feelings just now, and he felt the need of
saying something agreeable.
«Do you know,» he said, «if you shaved off your beard you would
certainly look like the most profligate kind of monk?»
The poet brightened up.
«I dare say you’re right,» he said, trying to get a look at himself
in a mirror. «What’s more, I’ve written poems with a leaning toward
Catholicism. You ought to read my poems sometime, the real ones, the
ones that can’t be printed.»
«Surely,» said Martin. «Where do you live?»
The poet declared that he didn’t live anywhere. He hadn’t had any
dwelling-place for three weeks, and he didn’t need any. He wrote
his poems on the table of the café and slept with girls. In the
house of one of them he had his green-edged traveling bag with some
extra collars and the poems of Verlaine, and there too were his own
manuscripts.
Martin began to be really impressed, but he found no outlet for his
thoughts, and silence once more spread itself between the two whom
chance had driven together on a street corner.
The clock struck twelve, the gas was turned half down, and the poet,
feeling the approach of inspiration with the darkness, began to write
verses on the table.
Martin said good night.
* * * * *
Sture Square lay white and empty. The snow had ceased, the moon was
up, and it was more bitterly cold than ever. To the east a new street
without houses opened like a great hole in a wall. To the west a
snow-covered jumble of old shanties and stone gables was spread out in
the misty moonlight, and from one of the streets of sin which slunk
between them echoed a woman’s laugh and the sound of a gate being
opened and shut.
--X--
It was late when Martin came home, and he was dead tired but could
not sleep. Black butterflies fluttered before his eyes, and thoughts
and rhythms came to him as he lay and stared into the dark. He
raised himself in bed and relighted the candle on his bedside table,
where paper and pen were at hand as always. He felt no feverish
overexcitement, only a deep weariness, which pained him but did not
delude. He saw clearly where his thought wavered and needed the support
of a rhythm, a bit of melody; he changed and erased, and finally a poem
evolved.
You up yonder
Who are deaf and dumb!
You up yonder,
Who with your right hand squeeze
The fresh and sweetly-smelling fruit of Good
And with your left constrict
The poison-dripping maggot nest of Ill,
Looking upon them
With equal satisfaction!
You up yonder,
Whose glance is dim
With all the emptiness of space--
I have a prayer to you.
One prayer, but one,
Which you can never hear
And cannot fulfill:
Teach me,
Teach me to forget
I ever met your glance.
For look!
In youthful days
I myself made a god
In mine own image,
A warm and living and aggressive god,
And on a spring day I went out
To seek for him through all the world and heavens.
Not him I found,
But you.
Not life’s divinity
But death’s I found under the mask of life.
Take the memory of the sight of you
Away, O horrible One! That memory is
A hidden sickness, is a worm that gnaws
My life-tree’s root.
I know it well, with every barren year
And every day that runs in vain
It gnaws yet closer to my being’s nerve.
It gnaws and preys upon
All that in me which is of human worth,
All that which dares, all that which wills and works;
Nor does it spare
The wondrous, brittle time-piece of the soul
Which points out Good and Ill.
Speak, you up yonder,
Is it your will
To re-create me after your own image?
Was that the meaning hidden in your word:
«He who hath seen God, he must die the death»?
O horrible One,
Have you the heart to infect
Me, a poor child of men,
With your immortal vices?
--XI--
The afternoon sun fell across the writing table and gilded everything:
the inkstand, the books, and the words he wrote on the paper. The smoke
from the chimneys rose straight and tranquilly toward heaven, and in a
window just opposite a young Jewess was playing with her child.
Martin was writing to his sister:
Dear Maria:
Thanks for your letter. Mamma is poorly as usual, perhaps a little
better these last weeks. Papa keeps the same, only he gets more
silent every year. It’s very quiet here at home, for as you know
I am not one either to love idle talk. Silence is golden. Uncle
Janne, Aunt Louise, etc., are still, unfortunately, alive and in
health, though it doesn’t make much difference anyhow, since we are
not likely to be their heirs. But they are always annoying me by
asking about the prospects of my work, whether papa isn’t in line
for the Order of Vasa soon, whether it’s true that your husband
takes morphine, and so on. Otherwise there is no harm in them.
You ask whether I’m writing much just now. No, very little, but on
the other hand I have an appointment for a long job as amanuensis,
and last night I dreamed very clearly and distinctly that papa and
I got an Order of Vasa together, since the king couldn’t manage to
give us each one.
Thanks for the invitation to come to you in the summer, but it’s
not likely I can get off--my appointment will last over the summer.
Too bad your husband is nervous. Nice your little boy is well.
Remember me to all.
Your brother Martin.
He put the letter in an envelope and laid it aside.
He sat and thought about his sister.
«Is she happy?» he asked himself. And he was forced to answer: «No,
she is not happy. She does not perhaps know it herself. Six years ago
she was very happy, when she was married and became a doctor’s wife
and had her own little home in the country to look after--just what
she had most dreamed of. She hasn’t had any sudden fall from the peak
of happiness since then. She has just very quietly slipped down, as
usually happens with the years. Her husband is amiable and talented and
a clever doctor, but he offends the rich people in his district and has
most of his practice among the poor. Therefore he is sometimes hard up.
Besides, I am afraid his health is undermined and his disposition is
sometimes rather bitter. However, he was in very good humor when he
was up here last alone, without her. He amused himself as well as he
could, and I fear he was a bit unfaithful.
«A curious bird, happiness....»
During these thoughts Martin had begun again to write. He wrote slowly
and half in play, with an intention here and there yet without exactly
knowing whither he was tending.
«You do not know me. I met you one day in the sunlight. It is weeks,
yes, months since then. You went on the side of the street where the
sun shone; you went alone with head lowered and smiled to yourself.
«It was one of those days when the snow was beginning to melt on the
street and the pavement shone wet and bright. You stopped at the corner
of a street, greeted an old lady and conversed with her. The old lady
was very ugly and very stupid, and I imagine too a little cross, as
stupid people generally are. But when you looked at her and talked with
her, she at once grew less cross and less ugly.
«A little farther up the street a gentleman saluted you, and you bowed
and returned his greeting. I felt my heart become bitter with envy,
and I followed him with my glance as he went on down the street. But
one could not see it in him that he had just spoken to you. One could
rather believe he was a lieutenant who had just saluted a major.
«I have met you often since then. You do not know me, and it is not
likely that you will ever know who I am. You go in the sunlight, I go
for the most part in the shadow. I am dressed like many other men, and
I always avoid looking at you so that you see it. No, you cannot find
out who I am.
«You have a lamp with a yellow shade. Yesterday you stood long at the
window in the yellow glow, after you had lighted the lamp, looking at
the stars. You went to the window to pull down the curtains, but you
forgot about it a little while. Straight in front of your window was a
star which burned more brightly than the rest. I could not see it, for
I stood shut in by a little black gate opposite the house where you
live; but I know that on spring evenings it stands just so that you
must see it from your window. It is Venus.
«You do not know me, and I do not know you otherwise than I do the
women who sometimes give me the great joy of visiting me at night in
my dreams. It is therefore I speak to you so intimately. But among
these women you have for some time been the only one, the others have
forsaken me, nor do I feel any longing after them.
«Read this letter and think no more of it; burn it, if you will, or
hide it at the bottom of your little secret drawer, if you will. Read
it and think no more of it, go out as before in the sunlight and smile
in your own happy thoughts. But you are not to show it to your friends
and let them giggle and snicker over it. If you do that, for three
nights in a row you will not be able to sleep for bad dreams, and a
little devil from hell will sit on the edge of your bed and look at you
from evening till morning.
«But I know you will not do such a thing--you will not show it to any
one. Good night, my beloved, good night!»
Martin sat long with this letter in his hand. «What could it lead to if
I sent it?» he asked himself. «To nothing, presumably. It would set her
imagination off a bit, her young girl’s longing would perhaps have an
impulse toward the new and unknown. She might perhaps bring herself to
show the letter to her friends, seeing that faith in devils is on the
wane; but she wouldn’t go so far as to burn it. She might perhaps be
amused with it, she might even consider it her duty to feel offended.
But in reality it would in the long run cause her joy, and if in the
process of nature she was married and had children and grew old with
household cares and every year sunk deeper down in the inconsolable
monotony of existence, she would come to remember this letter and
wonder who wrote it and if perhaps it was there that the true seed of
happiness lay hid. And she would never once recall that it ever made
her angry. Nor as a matter of fact does it contain anything that could
properly hurt her. It shows her only that she is desired by a man, and
as she is twenty and from head to foot an uncommonly beautiful and
glorious creation of nature, she must already have noticed that men
desire her. And that doesn’t at all make her angry, but on the contrary
happy and joyous, and that is why she walks in the sunlight and smiles.»
Amid such thoughts he sat a long while weighing the letter in his
hand as if it had been a human destiny, till in the end he found
his hesitation ridiculous, put the letter in an envelope of thick
untransparent paper, and wrote the address in a thin and non-committal
girlish style so as not to rouse any curiosity in the young lady’s
family. Without revealing any special interest on his part he had
succeeded in learning her name. She was a Miss Harriet Skottë. Her
father had an estate in the country, in the Malar district, and she
was now spending the winter in Stockholm with some relatives to study
something or other, French or art-tapestry or something of the sort ...
in order to get engaged, to put it briefly.
Harriet Skottë. He repeated the name to himself and tried to analyze
the impression it evoked. He dwelt in particular on the forename and
murmured, «Harriet, Harriet.» But this gave him no impression of her
nature; it roused only an indefinite conception of something English
and pale and blonde, a sensation of tea fumes and benevolence and
chilly bedrooms with varnished floors as at a hospital. The surname,
again, only suggested family, an uncle who was on the Board of Trade,
and a cousin who was a lieutenant in the Army Service Corps. But if he
whispered to himself the whole name, «Harriet Skottë,» there came in a
new element which quite excluded the others, then it became something
quite different and new, then he felt as if she herself passed through
the room with her brown hair glinting in a sunbeam.
* * * * *
He started at the ringing of the hall bell; he heard the maid open the
front door and a familiar voice asking if he was at home. He stuffed
the letter into his pocket. The next instant the door opened and Henrik
Rissler stood in the doorway blinking at the sunlight, whose copper-red
rays struck horizontally across the room.
--XII--
Henrik Rissler had come down from Upsala. He had just taken his
preliminary degree and in a couple of weeks was to make a tour down
in Europe while he wrote his thesis, «On Romantic Irony.» He had no
independent means, but his uncle--a bank lawyer, politician, and
millionaire--had offered to pay for the trip. This Martin already knew
from Henrik’s letters. But before he started he was to rest a few
weeks. He was somewhat overworked, for he had studied hard so as to get
away from Upsala as soon as possible, and he had also taken extra time
to write some critical studies for a magazine and so become a little
better known among the score or so of men who interested themselves in
such things.
Martin had been expecting him for a couple of days and had a bottle of
wine and a pack of cigarettes ready.
Henrik shaded his eyes from the sun and said: «Here everything is the
same. Here time has stood still.»
«Yes, in this immediate region,» answered Martin. «Only they have built
a big factory chimney over opposite. It has been quite a diversion for
me in solitude. For a while I worked in competition with the masons,
but I was beaten. I began on a poem when they had just begun on the
chimney; now the chimney is done, but not the poem. It’s beautiful,
what’s more--the chimney, I mean. Especially in the evening as a
silhouette. The smoke no longer belches out, one forgets its purpose;
it is no longer a chimney, it is a pillar tower built by some Chaldæan
prince and priest, who mounts it when night comes on and measures the
course of the stars.»
«Yes,» said Henrik, «one forgets the purpose, then first it becomes
beautiful.»
«No,» replied Martin, «it doesn’t become beautiful because one forgets
its purpose, but because one invents for it another which has the
prestige of old and venerable poetic tradition. But outside of that,
in and for themselves, without any fancification, factory chimneys are
among the most beautiful of modern structures. They promise less than
they make good, and at least they are no masquerade figures either in
Gothic or Renaissance.»
Henrik smiled. «You’re talking in the style of the ‹’Eighties,›» he
said.
* * * * *
Henrik Rissler sat in his old place in the sofa corner, Martin sat
in the rocking-chair at the writing table. They were drinking wine
and talking about Upsala, about books and women, and about a new
philosopher by the name of Nietzsche. And as they talked, the sunbeam
in which the motes danced like red sparks grew ever narrower and more
oblique and more decidedly red.
Martin surveyed Henrik. He found him changed; his face was leaner,
stronger, and more masculine in contour. Why had he said, «Here
everything is the same, here time has stood still»? He had had an
experience, but what? He was in love presumably; he would perhaps go so
far as to get engaged--to whom? Was it his cousin Anna Rissler? She was
fond of him and he knew it. No, that couldn’t be. Was it Maria Randel,
or Sigrid Tesch?
«It’s curious,» observed Henrik. «Have you felt the same thing?--how
painful it is to search for old associations and not to find them. To
read over a book one has been fond of, or hear an opera into which one
has formerly been able to put everything imaginable and a bit more--and
sit empty-handed, wondering where it has all gone to!»
«Yes,» Martin agreed, «it’s a strange, oppressive feeling. One feels as
if it was one’s duty to stick to the past, as if one were committing
an infidelity.... And one can do nothing. Why is it really so painful?
Is it perhaps because there is no plaintiff in the suit, no clearly
formulated claim to meet? For the plaintiff is not the book or the
music which one has lost touch with, not the mood which shrinks away;
the plaintiff is one’s old self, and that is dead and buried, it is
supplanted and refuted by the new, it has no plea to make and yet
it does make a sort of plea. Therein lies the paradox, and there is
nothing as vexatious as a paradox, when it is not comic.»
Henrik took up the thread.
«Yes, you are right; it is between the old and the new self that the
battle is, and as long as there is a new which is the stronger, one can
always master the phantoms. There is a continuous growth. The old goes,
the new comes--or the old goes, that’s really the one certain thing,
for how long can one be sure whether the new will come in its place?
Suppose the supply should stop some day, suppose nothing under the sun
should be new any more, and one only became poorer with every year and
every day that passed!»
«Yes,» said Martin, «that sort of thing happens sometimes. And there
are cases then in which a man digs up the oldest, the deadest, and most
withered thing in his past and begins to worship it anew without seeing
the caricature. That’s nearly the worst of all. Better the old saying:
poor but proud.»
They sat silent a few minutes. The sun had gone, and still it was not
twilight yet. It was almost brighter in the room than just before;
everything in it had merely become suddenly pale.
Henrik broke the silence.
«Yes,» he said, «it’s a melancholy feeling to grow out of oneself and
one’s old associations--but what’s it matter so long as one grows? And
what is melancholy, anyhow, if it isn’t what the rowdy said of the
toothbrush, a new kind of amusement invented by the upper classes?
But the melancholy is only there when it’s a matter of associations
and music and ideas. It was really something else I’ve been thinking
of all the time. I’ve been thinking of love and women. If one comes
into that province, it isn’t only just melancholy any longer; no, one
can’t get off so cheaply. A man is fond of a woman. He wants the whole
of eternity to be in that feeling. And yet he can’t escape reflecting
that this emotion must be subordinate to the same law of growth as
everything else in the world, that some day he will weary of what he
loves just as one wearies of the moonlight music in ‹Faust.› I have
not had many love affairs, but, believe me, I have never even in my
imagination begun the game otherwise than with the thought: may she be
the first to tire, and not I!»
«I’m afraid that prayer will not be often uttered,» said Martin. «To
be sure both a lover and a married man may be betrayed, but it rarely
happens that they wish to be.»
«Still I’m ashamed of the prayer, for I know it comes straight from
my heart’s great cowardice. How far must we not have come from the
primitive simple and straightforward conception of these things to
think it is happier to be betrayed than to betray! And yet that’s how
I feel. What does love signify to me; what does it ever mean to a man?
Why should there be anything tragic in the fact that a man is betrayed
in love? If he takes it tragically he merely becomes comic. And if on
the discovery that he is a cuckold he breaks off reading a good book,
he deserves to be one. But women--it’s a different thing with them.»
Henrik’s glance was fixed on vacancy.
«Deserted women,» he said--«there’s something special about them. One
can’t escape lightly from the thought of them. No, if they scold and
fuss and make a row, it’s easier at once; then the whole thing becomes
burlesque, one shakes it off, and is free. Then one asks oneself, ‹How
did I ever come to love such a creature?› One easily persuades oneself
that one has never loved her, and so she’s out of the story. But the
others--it seems the most painful thing of all to me to imagine her
whom I love withered and pale, discarded, put in the shadow side of
life, while I myself live on.... It is a paradox, I realize--it can
never happen; one cannot at the same time act so and feel it so. And
yet ... I met an old woman just now, here on the street, right outside
your door. She was old and very pale and a little comic. She was quite
shabbily dressed, too--one of the poor who are too proud to beg. One
often sees such old women; there was nothing remarkable about her,
nothing that distinguished her from any others of her kind, except that
all at once, when I came close to her, she struck me as so like---- No,
I can’t tell you straight out. There’s a young girl I’m very fond of.
I’m so fond of her that we’re going to be married, perhaps very soon.
It was she that the old woman was like, despite the difference in age
and all the rest--it was one of those indefinite resemblances that one
thinks one sees the first moment, and the next it’s gone without one’s
knowing in what it consists. But that moment was enough for me; a chill
went through me, a shudder as if I had seen something terrible, and it
seemed to me only all the worse that everything else was as usual: the
sun was shining and people were on the street.... The girl I care for
stood before me, she passed me, withered, discarded, a little comic.
It came over me that not even the thought that I myself was dead and
lying under the earth could be any consolation to me in such a case;
the only conception that could bring any relief was that I was living
as wretched and exhausted as she.»
They sat quiet a long while.
«Tell me,» Martin finally asked, «who is she, the girl you are fond of?
That is, if it’s no secret. Do I know her?»
«Yes,» said Henrik, in a subdued voice, «you know her, and I can tell
you. It is Sigrid Tesch.»
Sigrid Tesch. Martin saw before him a young and supple figure, with
dark abundant hair and delicate regular features. He had met her a
couple of times quite cursorily. He knew she had made an impression on
Henrik, and in his own twilight thoughts she had sometimes passed by
with a pallid dream smile.
So it was she then, Sigrid Tesch, who was to be Henrik’s bride.
«Yes,» said Henrik, «isn’t it inexplicable that one can dare go into
such a thing as love?... And yet....»
«Yes,» said Martin, «and yet....»
They both smiled.
Henrik Rissler got up.
«It is dusk,» he said; «we can hardly see the glasses. Will you go out
with me? It’s wonderful outside tonight. Oh, you want to write----
Well, we’ll see each other again soon. Good-by!»
--XIII--
It was dusk now, almost dark, and Martin was still sitting in his
rocking-chair at the table and could not get up energy to light the
lamp. There was a little wine left in the bottle; he poured it into his
glass and drank. He had raised the window to let the smoke drift out,
and through the trampling of feet which rose from below like the sound
of a hundred ticking clocks he heard the house door open and close
again and steps going off down the street--they were Henrik’s. Martin
thought about his love and what he had said about it, and he was at
once struck with the fact that at the mere touch of this bit of reality
his own love affair evaporated and was gone like mist and dream.
Harriet Skottë.... He asked himself: «If I should read in the paper
tomorrow that she was engaged or married, or that she was dead--what
would that signify to me? Nothing, no reality lost, no expectation gone
to shipwreck--just a mood burst, which would soon have burst anyhow.»
He took from his pocket the letter he had written, tore it open, and
read it again. «I’ll burn it,» he thought--«but why burn it? I may be
able to use it sometime in a story.»
He tossed it into a table drawer among other manuscripts. Then he sank
again into reverie.
* * * * *
Suddenly his mother stood in the doorway. She held a lamp in her hand
and was leaning forward, looking at him.
«You’re sitting in the dark,» she said. «Papa has gone out. May I sit
with you here a while?»
Martin nodded. She set the lamp on the table, fetched a basket with
her sewing, and sat down to sew.
She sat silent, bent over her work. At length she raised her eyes,
large with tears and sleeplessness.
[Illustration: Woman at table with book]
«Tell me, Martin,» she said; «you mustn’t be cross, but one day when
you were out I couldn’t help pulling out a drawer of your table and
glancing at your papers. Otherwise I should never know what you’re
thinking about. And what I got hold of made me so worried that I had
to sit down and cry. I didn’t understand it, I don’t know if it was
supposed to be verse or what it was, but I thought it was only full
of terrible blasphemies. I got so frightened, I almost thought for
a moment that you were out of your head. I know I don’t understand
anything, but so much I can still see, that you’ll never get anywhere
with writing that way. You can write very finely, too, if you want to.»
Martin was silent. What should he answer? He divined, or at least
supposed, that his mother had really wished to say something quite
different, and that her saying he wouldn’t get on in the world was
merely a forced expedient which she caught at when thoughts and words
deserted her. She had of course felt and suspected that the poem she
had found in the drawer was meant to be taken quite differently from
the way she now feigned to think, she wanted him to explain himself,
to talk to her about his thoughts. She was pounding at the door, «Let
me in! don’t make me stand outside; I’m cold and it’s so lonely!» And
yet he didn’t open the door, he couldn’t; he hadn’t fastened it, it had
locked itself.
What ought he to answer her? Her words had filled him with a deep
discouragement. If he had any ambition, it was to write so that each
and all who really cared to could understand him. He had no taste for
any literary freemasonry; he did not believe in a literature for the
_élite_, nor had he failed to observe how often it happened that no
one wanted to be of the _élite_. Now it suddenly became clear to him
how hopeless was his ideal: there was no art for all, there were no
thoughts for all; on the contrary the simplest ideas in the clearest
language were but seldom understood by others than those who were
familiar beforehand with just that type of thought. How should he be
able to speak with her about his thoughts, when her vocabulary, as the
monotony of the years had developed it, did not even suffice to express
what she herself thought and felt at the bottom of her heart? The god
with whom his poem dealt was of course Spinoza’s god, the World Soul;
but this god was merely an intellectual experiment, whereas hers--his
mother’s--was at least a product of the imagination and as such had
a bit more life and more blood. How should he explain that what she
called blasphemies did not apply to her god? She would have answered
that there was only one god. He knew all she would answer and say;
therefore he remained silent and looked out of the window, listening to
the Saturday tread of tired feet on the pavement, and the rain which
began to fall against the windowpanes.
And as to what she had said about his future, what could he say? To
that there was but one answer: to be successful, to become famous. And
that answer he could not give. «If I win recognition some day,» he
thought to himself, «a recognition such as would gratify her, it will
be when she is no longer alive. So it always is. Why should I hope for
an exception for her and me?» What was he to do? Ought he to put his
arms around her neck, ought he to stroke her hair and kiss her? No,
that wouldn’t seem natural. He didn’t care for that sort of deception
and she didn’t either; he knew her; she wouldn’t be satisfied with
that. She had asked, and it was an answer she awaited. He could answer
nothing, and he was silent.
He was silent and felt at the same time how the silence burned in her
breast, and though he could say nothing he sought instead with his
glance to meet her eyes, those eyes which used to smile so bright and
blue when they looked into his. It still happened sometimes in the
midst of dinner or in the evening at the tea-table that she looked at
him and nodded and smiled brightly as before, as mothers nod and smile
to their little children before they are able to talk. Perhaps she had
the feeling that time had gone in a circle, and that this smile was the
only form of expression she still had in her power when she wished to
communicate with her children. It was just so that he wished she could
have looked at him and nodded and smiled, with a smile far beyond all
the unimportant things which separated them.
But she did not smile now; she sat silent with hands crossed on her
knees, and her eyes, generally so near to weeping, now stared tearless
into the shadows as if they sought and asked, «Are all mothers as
unhappy as I? As lonely? As deserted by their children?»
The lamp flame fluttered in the night wind. She rose and said good
night, took the lamp, and went out.
--XIV--
Martin still sat a long while at the window.
«Here time has stood still,» Henrik Rissler had said. «Yes, he was
right. Here it stood still, time. It is by changes that one measures
the course of time; I have nothing to measure it with. I shouldn’t even
know it was Saturday today if I didn’t hear the tramping down there.»
An old story came to his mind. There was once a sinner who died one
evening in his bed. Next morning he awoke in hell, rubbed his eyes, and
called, «What’s the time?» But at his side stood the devil laughing
and holding up before him a clock that had no hands. Time was over and
eternity had set in.
«Eternity; no hurry any more....
«Other people have day and night, workday and holiday, Christmas and
Easter. For me it all flows into one. Am I then already living in
eternity?»
And he thought on: «Tomorrow is Sunday. What does that mean for me? It
means that tomorrow I am free from my ostensible work, and that I thus
feel twice as strongly the demand of that which should be my real work.
But if the weather is fine, I shall naturally go out for a walk....
So, anyhow, it won’t be a real Sunday no matter what I do. What a
strange sort of work I have taken upon me! Wouldn’t it be better to
give it up while there is still time, to submit to the rules that hold
for other men? One is never done with this, there is never a feeling of
quiet and rest. Many a free Monday, but never a real Sunday, never any
more!
«My ostensible and my real work--how long shall I be able to keep up
this illusion? The truth is I’m in a good way to get a permanent job,
that in eight or ten years I could become a regular clerk, and in forty
years would get my discharge with a pension. My poor mother would be
able to spare herself a deal of trouble if she saw all that clearly as
I do now. But she imagines in the innocence of her heart that what I
write on a few scraps of paper at night will hinder my advancement, for
she has no conception of the boundless indifference of men of ideas.
To hurt my prospects I should be forced to write personal abuse about
my superiors, and why should I do that? They are good-natured men and
have got me gratuities and commissions although others deserved them
better. They have certainly taken an interest in me. I am not the
sort of fellow to put a torpedo under the ark; they have felt that
instinctively, and they are presumably right.»
He felt that he would eventually be lost in the multitude. He could
not escape the thought that he was at bottom like all the rest; and
whether this was his rightful fate, or whether he was too exceptional
to be effective among exceptions, he felt only that routine held him
every day more tightly a prisoner and that he was going to be lost in
the crowd. And the other thing--his poetry; what was that and whither
could it lead? Once when he had needed money he had collected a bundle
of his poems and gone around to the publishers. A couple of them had
wanted to print the volume but none had been willing to pay anything.
«No,» he had answered very seriously, «do not count on my ambition!»
When he had come home he had looked through these verses again; and
again, as so many times before, he had found them uninspired and empty.
Most of them were written so as to be sold at once to a magazine and
showed that they were so written. And he said to himself, «How absurd
it is for a man to make a business of ideas when he has no sure means
of subsistence! As clever as the way the minister at a funeral sermon
transforms the dead man’s means of livelihood into a mission in life.
But existence knows how briskly and mercilessly to transform a mission
in life into a means of livelihood for a man with no income. Yet
supposing this should be a real means of livelihood--but no, it won’t
be; distaste and weariness will come, one will tire of the whole thing
and sink back, down into the crowd.
«Down into the crowd; one will do as the others do, there will at least
be no more need of conjuring tricks, one will get back his sense of
time, one will have Sundays and weekdays, work and rest, real rest....»
* * * * *
The night air streamed in cold through the window, he shivered but
couldn’t make himself raise his arms and shut the sash. The rain fell
steadily, and, as often happened when he was very tired, his thoughts
began to go into meter and rhyme:
I sit alone in the darkness
And hear the falling rain,
I hear the drops come plashing
Against the windowpane.
A grief on my heart lies heavy,
My labored breath comes fast.
Drop after drop my youthtime
Is trickling, trickling past.