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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78363 ***
+
+
+
+
+                         MARTIN BIRCK’S YOUTH ❧
+
+
+
+
+                          MARTIN BIRCK’S YOUTH
+                          BY HJALMAR SÖDERBERG
+                       TRANSLATED FROM THE SWEDISH
+                           BY CHARLES WHARTON
+                          STORK ❧ WITH DRAWINGS
+                          BY THEODORE NADEJEN ❧
+
+                 [Illustration: Bird on stylized tree]
+
+                      HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+                       NEW YORK AND LONDON MCMXXX
+
+
+
+
+                                   B-E
+                  MARTIN  BIRCK’S  YOUTH  ·  COPYRIGHT
+                  1930, BY HARPER & BROTHERS · PRINTED
+                  IN THE U. S. A.      _FIRST EDITION_
+
+
+
+
+                                   TO
+                             A. G. H. SPIERS
+                             CRITICAL FRIEND
+                             FRIENDLY CRITIC
+                   THIS VOLUME IS CORDIALLY DEDICATED
+                            BY THE TRANSLATOR
+
+
+
+
+                  [Illustration: Abstract decoration]
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+_It is a sad thought that everyone cannot enjoy Söderberg, that this
+master of delicate and incisive realism, this prince of humorists,
+is--for Anglo-Saxons, at least--an acquired taste. But it is
+well to face at the outset the fact that Söderberg is a European
+Continental, an Anatole France of Sweden. To those who believe that
+a man is unvirile or at least anæmic if he refuses to believe in
+human perfectibility this attitude toward life will seem barren and
+depressing, one to encourage discouragement. How much pleasanter to
+feel with Pippa, not only at 7_ +A.M.+ _on a May morning, but at all
+hours and seasons, that «all’s right with the world»! To insinuate the
+contrary is to give sanction to those doubts which, if they overtake
+even the most confident of us at unguarded moments, should all the more
+be repressed. What is culture if it is not sweetness and light? Listen
+to Söderberg: «Why all this optimism when not one of the old problems
+is solved?» And again, one of his characters affirms, «I believe in the
+lust of the flesh and the incurable loneliness of the soul.»_
+
+_We read fiction for pleasure. What does this new Swedish novelist
+offer in compensation for a somewhat despondent view of life? He
+himself rather hesitates to tell us and in this very hesitation we
+may, if the faculty be in us, discern one of his chief attractions.
+Söderberg is reticent because he wishes to present the truth as he sees
+it without exaggeration and without prejudice. He colors his picture
+neither with the golden glow of the untroubled believer nor with the
+red zeal of the revolutionary. He is honest to such a degree that he
+will not stress his own honesty. On the contrary, he doubts his very
+doubt: «How could I, a boy of sixteen, be right and all my elders
+and betters wrong?» And again in_ +Martin Birck+, _«he was not quite
+certain that truth in itself could produce happiness, but history
+had taught him that illusion created unhappiness and crime.» And yet
+all the more from this unobtrusiveness we divine the intellectual
+honesty of the skeptic, which bursts out only once in the present
+novel: «Would a man never come who did not sing, but spoke, and spoke
+plainly!» Such a man has the right to «paint the thing as he sees it,»
+to revalue the time-honored beliefs and customs of the past in the
+light of his own experience._
+
+_We may, I think, trust in Söderberg’s fidelity to his vision as
+in that of few living writers. He collects his data carefully and
+transmits them simply. In that there is always stimulus to a reader who
+appreciates how difficult it is to do. But he might do all this and be
+no more than a good photographer._
+
+_As we follow the everyday run of events in_ +Martin Birck+, _we may at
+first be impressed with their perfect verisimilitude and yet incline to
+class the author as unoriginal. In that respect, though probably in no
+other, the prose of Söderberg resembles the poetry of Wordsworth. Few
+readers will progress more than a page or two without that sense of the
+significant in the commonplace which is the very soul of originality.
+Söderberg has followed the famous counsel of Flaubert to De Maupassant:
+«Look at an object until you have seen in it everything that anyone
+else can see, and then look until you perceive what no one else has
+seen!» Rarely has any prose been fuller of implications--emotional,
+psychological, moral--than Söderberg’s. To re-read him is invariably
+to be surprised at all one has missed before. One passes through life
+with him as one might walk through a meadow with a great naturalist
+or stroll through a city at night with Whistler. The trivial is
+clothed with meaning, the habitual is touched with magic. The world of
+Söderberg lives; it lives in beauty._
+
+_And as one grows more and more conscious of the author’s pregnance
+in matter, one is equally delighted with the perfect consonance of
+his manner. He gives not only the thing in itself, but the feel of
+the thing, the overtone. His curious felicity is never startling or
+precious, it is simply adequate. How far this may be recaptured in
+translation may of course be an open question. Here at least is an
+attempt from the short story_ +Margot+:
+
+  _It was a cool night in the early part of October. The moon was up;
+  a cold, moist wind was blowing. The big buildings on Blasieholm
+  formed a dark mass, whose broken and irregular edge seemed to
+  be catching at the wisps of cloud that drove forward against a
+  deep-blue background. The still, heavy water of Nybro Inlet
+  mirrored a broad glittering moonpath in oily rings, and along the
+  wharves the lumber sloops raised a thin and motionless forest
+  of masts and tackle. In the upper air was haste and tumult; the
+  clouds hunted each other from west to east, till over the woods
+  of Djurgården they congested into a low black wall. It was as if
+  Heaven were breaking camp for a journey, for a flight._
+
+_The reader of_ +Martin Birck+ _will find any number of similar
+passages, in description, character-drawing and the power of the author
+to express his own reactions on life and art_.
+
+_What manner of man is this quiet interpreter of the life about him?
+Hjalmar Söderberg was born in Stockholm, 1869. The outward tenor of
+his way has been uneventful. After trying journalism in a provincial
+town he tired of «serving caviare to the Bœotians» and returned to
+his native city, the background of nearly all his work. He first
+achieved distinction in the «Storiettes,» miniature stories usually
+told in the first person and based on some casual incident of daily
+life. In this form he is unsurpassed._ +Martin Birck+, _his first
+novel, published in 1907, was partly inspired by «Niels Lyhne,» the
+work of his elder Danish contemporary, J. P. Jacobsen, but was mainly
+autobiographical. Söderberg was also influenced by the modern French
+novelists, especially Flaubert, Maupassant and Anatole France. The last
+named he translated. He wrote two other novels, «Dr. Glas» and «The
+Serious Game,» and two plays, «Gertrud» and «The Hour of Fate,» besides
+numerous collections of short stories. His last long book is «Jehovah’s
+Fire,» an historico-religious narrative. Some early poems and a small
+sheaf of criticism complete the tally of his rather moderate output. Of
+recent years he has been living in Copenhagen. He has never married._
+
+_How little this dry recital of facts has to do with the real case in
+point! The genius of Söderberg is inherent in the temperament of the
+man. In appearance he is homely, stoutish, and suave, a bit Bohemian
+but decidedly a gentleman. Quiet, observant, unpretentious, and rather
+indolent, he gives an impression of infinite leisure and tolerance
+which is largely borne out by his writing. His mind is a rich,
+seemingly passive soil, in which small events take root and grow, as it
+were, without an effort on his part. Therein lies the unique charm of
+his stories; their unforced, organic quality._
+
+_But in the simplicity of Söderberg there is infinite subtlety. He lets
+life speak through him because he realizes that in the last analysis
+nothing speaks as persuasively as life. In his presentation there is
+a skill beyond praise. With all his naturalism and tranquillity of
+style, he gives us great moments, moments of profound insight, of
+wistful loveliness, of quaint and surprising humor. After all, things
+do not choose themselves or arrange themselves in right relation on
+the canvas; they only seem to do so. Without obtruding his personality
+Söderberg speaks to the mind and emotions of his audience in no
+uncertain terms._
+
+_What does he give us finally? First, perhaps, the delight of seeing
+nature and humanity clearly and the greater delight of entering
+imaginatively into the essence of both. His truth has the beauty of
+understanding. We find that life does not need to be idealized to be
+beautiful; it needs only to be realized. And as a corollary he gives us
+a sympathy in this manifestation which is not unlike that of Whitman,
+for it is the sympathy of acceptance. There is a tone of sadness,
+sometimes of almost tragic depth, in the knowledge of «what man has
+made of man,» and with it a smile of forgiveness. What we understand we
+pardon. Men and women are lovable in spite of, largely no doubt because
+of, their mistakes._
+
+_But also men and women are irresistibly funny. Söderberg has almost
+exactly the mood of Jaques in «As You Like It.» But whereas Jaques is
+dry, Söderberg is sly, with an ingenuous slyness that never, as with
+Sterne, slips off into a leer. How he enjoys letting his people amuse
+us, in watching with us their self-important gestures, the eternal
+passions that fade away in a month or a year, their curious delusions
+about fame and money and respectability! If these people could see
+themselves! And as we look, we may perhaps be a little mortified to
+see_ our_selves. How foolishly we have wasted our energies and annoyed
+those about us, for what? Perhaps we shall be a little more lenient to
+the faults of others from now on. The laughter which Söderberg evokes
+is thoughtful laughter._
+
+_Are we then given no positive impulse, is there no meaning in life,
+nothing worth striving for? «Perhaps not,» says Söderberg. And yet,
+pessimist though he is, he has a reticent pride of his own. He cannot,
+we feel, tell a lie, cannot force anyone in his stories to do or think
+anything that is not in character. Furthermore, he adumbrates through
+the philosophy of Martin the ideal of writing «so that each and all who
+really cared to could understand him.» And, like most of Söderberg’s
+simple statements, that means considerably more than appears on the
+surface._
+
+_Enough, perhaps more than enough, has been said to indicate the
+mood for best enjoying_ +Martin Birck+. _To call further attention
+to details would only tend to spoil the pleasure of those attempered
+to appreciate it. I must return to the original statement that the
+reader’s reaction to it will be peculiarly personal. For myself, I
+differ almost completely from the author in his conclusions about life,
+I object strongly to his rather supine attitude, yet I admire and love
+him. I find him as brilliant as the modern French masters, and much
+more kindly. He has given me more than have nine-tenths of the worthy
+authors with whom I agree. There is in him a strict sense of truth, a
+tenderness, a humor which put him definitely on the side of the angels.
+He will annoy, will scandalize, many excellent people, but I am afraid
+I am not sorry that he should. He has been called the_ enfant terrible
+_of Swedish literature. Perhaps we have been taking him too seriously;
+no doubt he himself will think so. After all, there is something
+perennially fascinating about a naughty child._
+
+                                                              _C. W. S._
+
+
+
+
+THE OLD STREET ❧
+
+
+
+
+--I--
+
+
+Martin Birck was a little child, who lay in his bed and dreamed.
+
+It was twilight of a summer evening, a green and tranquil twilight,
+and Martin went holding his mother’s hand through a big and marvelous
+garden where the shadows lay dark in the recesses of the walks. On both
+sides grew strange blue and red flowers, swaying back and forth in the
+wind on their slender stalks. He went along holding his mother’s hand,
+looking at the flowers in wonder and thinking of nothing. «You must
+pick only the blue ones; the red ones are poisonous,» said his mother.
+Then he let go her hand and stopped to pick a flower for her; it was
+a big blue flower he wanted to pick, as it nodded heavily, poised on
+its stem. Such a marvelous flower! He looked at it and smelled it.
+And again he looked at it with big astonished eyes; it wasn’t blue,
+after all, but red. It was quite red! And such an ugly, poisonous red!
+He threw the naughty flower on the ground and trampled on it as on
+a dangerous animal. But then, when he turned around, his mother was
+gone. «Mamma,» he cried, «where are you? Where are you? Why are you
+hiding from me?» Martin ran a little way down the walk, but he saw no
+one and he was near to weeping. The walk was silent and empty, and it
+was getting darker and darker. At last he heard a voice quite near:
+«Here I am, Martin. Don’t you see me?» But Martin saw nothing. «Here
+I am all the time. Why don’t you come?» Now Martin understood: behind
+the lilac bush, that was where the voice came from. Why hadn’t he
+realized that at once? He ran there and peeped; he was sure his mother
+had hidden there. But behind the bush stood Franz from the Long Row,
+making an ugly face with his thick, raw-looking lips, till he finished
+by sticking out his tongue as far as he could. And such a tongue as
+he had; it got longer and longer; there was no end to it; and it was
+covered with little yellowish-green blisters.
+
+Franz was a little rowdy who lived in the «Long Row» slantwise across
+the street. The Sunday before he had spat on Martin’s new brown jacket
+and called him «stuck-up.»
+
+Martin wanted to run away, but stood as if rooted to the earth. He
+felt his legs grow numb beneath him. Then the garden and the flowers
+and the trees had vanished and he was standing alone with Franz in a
+dark corner of the yard at home by the ash barrel. He tried to scream,
+but his throat was constricted....
+
+
+
+
+--II--
+
+
+But when he woke, his mother was standing by the bed with a clean white
+shirt in her hand and saying, «Up with you, little sleepyhead; Maria
+is off to school already. Don’t you remember that the pear tree in the
+yard is to be stripped today? You must hurry if you want to be there.»
+
+Martin’s mother had blue eyes and brown hair, and at that time the
+glance of her eyes was still bright and smiling. She laid the shirt on
+the bed, nodded to him, and went out.
+
+Maria was Martin’s big sister. She was nine. She went to school and
+already knew what many things were in French.
+
+But Martin still had slumber in his eyes and the medley of the dream in
+his head, so that he couldn’t bring himself to get up.
+
+The curtain was drawn back, and the sun shone straight into the room.
+The door to the kitchen stood ajar. Lotta was laughing at the kitchen
+window while she chatted with some one; it was sure to be Heggbom, the
+porter. Finally Heggbom began to sing down in the yard with his rummy
+voice.
+
+  «If I had King Solomon’s treasure chest
+      With money in heaps and masses,
+  I’d off to Turkey and never I’d rest
+      Till I’d bought me a hundred lasses.»
+
+«What would you do with them all,» inquired Lotta; «you that can’t
+manage even your own wife?»
+
+Martin couldn’t hear what Heggbom answered, but Lotta began to laugh
+with all her lungs. «Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?» she said.
+
+Now the porter’s wife had come into the yard, it sounded as if she was
+throwing out a tub of dish-water. With that she began to scold Heggbom,
+and Lotta as well. But Lotta only laughed and slammed the window.
+
+Martin lay half awake, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. There was
+a crack that was just like Mrs. Heggbom if one looked at it right.
+
+The clock struck nine in the neighboring church, and when it had
+stopped striking, the clock in the hall began. Martin jumped out of bed
+and ran to the window to see if the pears were still on the tree.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration: Children in tree]
+
+The pear tree in the yard was beloved by the children and cats. It was
+old and large, and many of its boughs were already dry and dead, but
+the others still furnished blossoms and greenery every spring and fruit
+every autumn.
+
+Heggbom’s boys were sitting up in the tree, throwing down pears after
+having first stuffed their pockets full, while below the other children
+fought for every pear that fell from the tree. In the midst of the
+troop stood Mrs. Lundgren, broad of build and loud of voice, trying
+to enforce a fair distribution, but no one paid any attention to her.
+A little way off stood little Ida Dupont, with great eyes, her hands
+behind her back, not venturing into the turmoil. Mrs. Lundgren did not
+get any pears for her because she was ill-disposed toward Mr. Dupont,
+who was a violinist in the royal orchestra.
+
+Martin became eager; he threw on his clothes in a hurry and came down
+by the steps.
+
+Lotta screamed after him, «Aren’t you going to wash and comb your hair
+before----»
+
+But Martin was in the yard by this time. Mrs. Lundgren at once took him
+under her protection.
+
+«Throw down a pear to Martin, John. Hold up your cap, little boy, and
+you shall have a pear.»
+
+A pear fell into the cap. But now Martin couldn’t find his penknife to
+peel the pear.
+
+«Give me the pear; I’ll peel it for you,» said Mrs. Lundgren.
+
+With that she took the pear, bit into it with her big yellow teeth,
+and tore off a piece of the skin. Martin opened his eyes very wide and
+grew red in the face. Now he didn’t want to have any pear at all.
+
+Mr. Dupont lay at his window in his shirt sleeves, smoking a pipe,
+with a red skull-cap on his head. He now leaned out and laughed. Mrs.
+Lundgren got angry.
+
+«That’s a spoiled child,» she said.
+
+John now triumphantly held up the last pear, and the children hurrahed
+and shouted, but he stuffed it into his trousers pocket. But then
+Willie found still another, and this was the very last. He caught sight
+of Ida Dupont standing with tears in her eyes over by the wall, and
+at that he gallantly tossed his pear into her apron. Then there was
+another hurrah; the pear tree was stripped.
+
+Now Mrs. Heggbom came out:
+
+«Lord in heaven what a clatter, and Heggbom lying at his death! Down
+out of the tree with you, you little ragamuffins!»
+
+Heggbom had been sick in bed awhile ago, and his wife’s imagination
+often turned back to that comparatively happy time.
+
+The boys had come down from the tree. Their mother took John by
+the hair and Willie by the ear to lead them in. But Mrs. Lundgren
+felt somewhat huffed; she had to a certain extent presided over
+the tumult. Furthermore, she enjoyed scolding and therefore did not
+miss the opportunity of showing Mrs. Heggbom with some sharpness the
+unsuitability of making such a disturbance. The latter let go her boys
+so as to set her arms akimbo, and there was a big set-to. Listeners
+streamed up, and all the kitchen windows were opened wide.
+
+At last a voice broke through the quarreling: «Sh! The Secretary!»
+
+Everything became quiet; Secretary Oldhusen had the largest floor
+and was the finest tenant of the house. He was dressed in a long
+tight-fitting frock coat and carried under his arm a worn leather
+portfolio. When he had come down the steps he stood still and took a
+pinch of snuff. Thereupon he walked slowly out through the gate with
+the preoccupied and troubled mien of a statesman.
+
+Martin and Ida slipped out into the street hand in hand. They ventured
+on for a few steps beyond the gate, then they stood in the street and
+blinked at the sun.
+
+The street was lined with wooden houses and tile roofs and green
+trees. The house where Martin lived was the only large stone house on
+the street. Long Row, diagonally across from it, lay in shadow; a
+low, dirt-gray range of houses. Only really poor people lived there,
+Martin’s mother said. Only scum, said Mrs. Lundgren. At the dye-house a
+little farther down the street there was no hurrying; the dyer stood at
+his gate in slippers and white linen jacket and chatted with his wife
+in the warehouse. Even outside the corner tavern things were quiet. A
+brewery wagon had stopped in front of it, and the horse stood with his
+forefeet tied, eating oats out of a nosebag that hung on his muzzle.
+
+The clock in the near-by church struck ten.
+
+Ida pointed down the street. «There comes the old goat woman.»
+
+The goat woman came with her two goats; one she led with a cord, the
+other was free. The Secretary’s little granddaughter had whooping-cough
+and drank goat’s milk.
+
+«Yes, and there comes the ragman.»
+
+The ragman sidled in through the gate with his pack on his back and his
+greasy stick. People said he had seen better days.
+
+Two drunken men came out of the tavern and reeled along the street
+arm in arm. A policeman in white linen trousers walked up and down, a
+copy of the _Fatherland_ sticking out of his hip pocket. A flock of
+chickens trailed out from the yard of Long Row, the cock at their head.
+The policeman stopped, took half a roll out of his pocket, and began to
+feed them.
+
+«What shall we do?» asked Ida.
+
+«I don’t know,» replied Martin.
+
+He looked very much at a loss.
+
+«Would you like to have my pear?»
+
+Ida took the pear out of her pocket and held it under Martin’s nose. It
+looked very tempting.
+
+«We can share,» proposed Martin.
+
+«Yes, that’s so, we can share.»
+
+«But I have no knife to cut it with.»
+
+«That doesn’t matter. You bite first and then I will.»
+
+Martin bit, and Ida bit. Martin forgot he had wanted the pear peeled.
+
+Now somebody called for Martin, and the next moment grandmother came
+out and took him by the hand.
+
+«What in Heaven’s name are you thinking of today? Aren’t you going to
+comb your hair and wash and eat your breakfast? The mischief’s in the
+boy.»
+
+Grandmother was pretending to be cross, but Martin only laughed.
+
+In the gateway they met Heggbom; he was walking a bit unsteadily. He
+avoided them by a long tack and removed his cap very politely while he
+spluttered away at his song:
+
+  «I’d off to Turkey and never I’d rest
+  Till I’d bought me a hundred lasses.»
+
+The yard had grown quiet. Mrs. Heggbom’s fat red cat lay on the ash
+barrel purring with half-closed eyes, and below the rats stole in and
+out.
+
+
+
+
+--III--
+
+
+On a gray October morning Martin received permission from his mother to
+go down and play with Ida Dupont.
+
+Mr. Dupont had two small rooms, one flight up. At this time of day he
+was away at rehearsal, so Martin and Ida were alone.
+
+It was a dark and somber day. The inner room lay in semi-twilight, with
+a high Venetian blind in front of the window. When one pushed aside a
+corner of the blind, one could see between two gray house gables a part
+of the great black church cupola. «Bing bong!» went the bells.
+
+Ida showed Martin a peep-show box with tinted pictures. There were
+white castles and gardens with colored lanterns in long gleaming rows,
+yellow and red and blue. There were strange cities with churches and
+bridges, and steamboats and big ships on a wide river. And there were
+halls illuminated with radiant candelabra, but what looked like lights
+were just little holes made with pins. It all looked so big and alive
+when one saw it in the box. It almost moved; there was surely something
+magical about it.
+
+«I got that from mamma,» declared Ida.
+
+«But where is your mamma?»
+
+«She’s away.»
+
+Martin looked surprised.
+
+«How--away?»
+
+«She has gone off with a strange gentleman. But sometimes she writes me
+letters that papa reads to me, and sometimes I get pretty things from
+her that she sends.»
+
+Martin became very inquisitive. He wanted to learn more but didn’t know
+just how he ought to ask.
+
+However, Ida now caught Martin by both shoulders and looked very
+impressive.
+
+«Do you know what we’ll do now?» she asked. «We’ll dress up.»
+
+She pulled out a bureau drawer and began to take out red bodices of
+satin, silk, and rep with a multitude of ribbons and rosettes; silk
+gloves, silk stockings, and long veils of lace--pink, blue, and white.
+
+«I got this from mamma, too, when she was in the ballet.»
+
+She took a thin, light blue veil with silver spangles and draped it
+around Martin’s head. Then he was given a red bodice, a shawl of silver
+gauze, and a white skirt.
+
+«My, but you look funny!» said Ida. «Just like a girl.»
+
+Martin looked at himself in the glass and they both roared with
+laughter.
+
+«Come here,» said Ida, «and I’ll put mustaches on you.»
+
+Martin didn’t think mustaches would fit, if he was to be a girl. But
+Ida didn’t mind about that; she blackened a cork over a candle and
+traced big black mustaches on Martin, then she put black eyebrows on
+herself. After that they looked into the mirror again and laughed.
+
+«It’s so handsome to have black eyebrows,» said Ida. «Don’t you think
+I’m handsome?»
+
+«Uhm,» said Martin.
+
+Ida was full of resources.
+
+«If you’ll be terribly nice, we’ll have a banquet.»
+
+She went to a cupboard and hunted out a half-filled bottle of wine and
+a couple of green glasses. Then she laid the cloth on a toilet table
+and filled the glasses.
+
+Martin’s eyes grew big.
+
+«Does your papa let you?»
+
+«Oh, yes. He lets me do whatever I like. My papa is nice. Is your papa
+nice?»
+
+«Yes,» answered Martin.
+
+They clinked glasses and drank. It was a sweet and pleasant wine, and
+its dark red shone splendidly in the green glasses.
+
+Outside it had begun to snow. There were great heavy flakes; the window
+sill was already white. It was the first snowfall, and the church bells
+rang in the black cupola: «Bing bong, bing bong!» Martin and Ida knelt
+on a chair with their arms around each other’s necks and their noses
+pressed against the pane.
+
+But Ida poured out more wine and clinked glasses with Martin. Then she
+took down an old violin from the wall and began to play, and while she
+played she danced and swayed, wearing a white veil. It sounded very
+queer the way Ida played the violin. Martin held his ears, laughed,
+sung, and screamed. But then Martin began to notice a creepy feeling
+down his back, and he recalled that his mother had said Ida Dupont had
+fleas.
+
+... Martin was in the sleeping alcove, peeping about. Farthest away in
+the semi-darkness was an image of the madonna behind two half-burned
+wax candles, and below hung a crucifix.
+
+Martin stared in astonishment.
+
+«What’s that?» he asked.
+
+Ida became very solemn and answered in a low voice, nearly whispering,
+«That is our religion.»
+
+Mr. Dupont was a Catholic.
+
+«Wait,» said Ida, «sit over there and be quiet, and I’ll teach you our
+religion.»
+
+Ida swathed herself in pink tulle with gold spangles. Then she advanced
+and lighted the candles under the madonna, two calm bright flames. On
+a little stand below the crucifix she lighted a pastille of incense.
+In long blue clouds the incense curled from under the curtain of the
+alcove, and the air grew heavy with a strong spicy fragrance.
+
+The madonna glowed like a theatre queen with red, blue, and gold, and
+the stars on her mantle blinked and sparkled in the light of the wax
+candles.
+
+Martin shivered with delight.
+
+But Ida fell on her knees before the madonna. Her thick, dark-red
+plaits glowed like bright copper in the candlelight. She muttered
+something which Martin did not understand, and made strange gestures
+with her hands.
+
+«What’s that?» inquired Martin; «why do you act so?»
+
+«Tst! That is our religion.»
+
+And Ida stayed on in the alcove. Her large black eyes had a sparkling
+glow. But Martin had an odd feeling of heaviness in the head.
+
+«Come here and join in,» bade Ida. «Don’t you think it’s beautiful?»
+
+Martin sat down on the edge of the bed and tried to imitate Ida’s
+gestures. But soon he began to nod. His head was so heavy, so heavy.
+
+When Mr. Dupont came home, the two children were lying asleep on the
+bed. The wax candles had burned out.
+
+
+
+
+--IV--
+
+
+Autumn advanced over the earth, and in the city where Martin lived
+the houses were gray and black with rain and smoke, and the days grew
+shorter.
+
+But when the afternoon came and the dusk fell, Martin Birck’s father
+often sat by the fire and looked at the embers. He was no longer young.
+He had a smooth-shaven face with sharply marked features, like an
+actor’s or a priest’s; and he had a way of laughing to himself without
+saying anything, which inspired respect and a certain feeling of
+insecurity. But when he laughed in this way his laugh was not taken for
+weakness or imbecility by his fellows, for there was nothing satiric in
+his temperament; he was merely laughing at an anecdote he had read in
+the morning paper, or at a couple of dogs that had barked at the lions
+around Charles XIII’s statue when he had passed through the square at
+noon on his way home from the office. For Martin Birck’s father was
+a government clerk. Although his salary was not large and he had no
+private means, he knew how to arrange things so that he and his family
+could lead a comparatively carefree existence, for his taste was
+given only to innocent and simple pleasures, and no feeling of vanity
+drove him to seek association with people who were above him in rank
+or fortune. He was the son of a mechanic, and when he chanced to think
+about his lot in life, he did not compare it with that of his superiors
+or his wealthy comrades but recalled instead the poor home from which
+he had come. He decided then that he was lucky and only wished that
+the luck he had should never be dimmed. He was fond of his wife and
+children and loved nothing in the world as much as his home. When he
+was free from his official duties he liked to work with his hands. He
+mended broken furniture; he could in an emergency even repair the old
+kitchen clock, which had flowers painted on its face and great brass
+weights on chains. He also manufactured funny and ingenious playthings
+for his children and neat little ornaments for his wife on her
+birthday. Among these was a little temple of white cardboard. It was
+adorned with narrow gold borders, and behind a semicircle of slender
+columns was a mirror, which seemed to double the number of the pillars.
+A spiral staircase led to the top of the temple, which was surrounded
+by a balustrade of marbled paper, the staircase being also of cardboard
+covered with marble; but in the bottom stair was a little drawer which
+could be pulled out. In this drawer Martin’s mother found every year on
+her birthday a folded banknote or a little piece of jewelry.
+
+He also loved music and song. He liked to sing «Gluntar» with an old
+student comrade, Uncle Abraham, who sometimes came to visit him, and he
+could improvise on the piano and play by ear various pieces from his
+favorite operas.
+
+But he seldom read anything except his paper.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Martin Birck’s mother, when twilight fell, often sat at the piano and
+sang to her own accompaniment. She had the sweetest of voices. The
+songs she sang were such as no one sings any more. At these times
+Martin and Maria would stand behind her stool and listen entranced;
+sometimes they tried to join in. There was a song about a soldier
+treasuring a canteen from which he had given a dying prince a drink
+on the field of battle. «’Twas from that His Highness drank,» was the
+refrain. And there was another song about a shepherdess who was tending
+her flock in a defile among the Alps. Suddenly she heard the roar
+of an avalanche and hurried to her charges: «Run fast, run fast, my
+lambs!» As Martin’s mother sang, her hands glided over the yellowed
+keys of the instrument. The strings had a brittle, glassy sound, and
+the pedals sighed and groaned. A string was broken in the bass, and it
+would buzz now and again.
+
+[Illustration: Woman with flowers]
+
+There was a sense of loneliness when she had stopped singing.
+
+Martin was drifting here and there. The room seemed to grow larger and
+more empty when twilight came. Finally he turned to grandmother, who
+was sitting by the window reading the Stockholm _Journal_.
+
+«Tell us a story, please, grandmother,» Martin begged.
+
+But grandmother didn’t know any new stories, and the old ones Martin
+had heard many times before. Grandmother continued to read the paper
+with her glasses far down on her nose.
+
+«Lord deliver us,» she suddenly exclaimed, looking up from the paper,
+«did you see there’s a Miss Oldhusen has died?»
+
+«No, is she dead?» remarked Martin’s father.
+
+«Do you suppose she was a sister of the Secretary?»
+
+«Goodness, no; she was his aunt,» said grandmother. «Her name was
+Pella, Pella Oldhusen. I remember her very well, I met her at Vaxholm.
+A plaguy smart and amusing woman she was, but she was a kleptomaniac.
+Her acquaintances used to say, ‹Be careful, my dear, and don’t leave
+anything around loose this evening; Pella Oldhusen’s coming!› There was
+a girl she took up. When the girl was to be got ready for her first
+communion, Miss Oldhusen stole her old housekeeper’s linen underskirts
+that hung in the same wardrobe with her own clothes and had them made
+up for the girl. It’s God’s own truth; I heard it from a lady that
+knew all about her and the whole family. ‹Look here, Miss Oldhusen,›
+the housekeeper said to her, for she had been with her many years
+and knew her peculiarities; ‹look here, Miss Oldhusen, there’s been
+thieves in the wardrobe! And the mischief’s in it, they’ve stolen all
+my underskirts, but not yours, though they were hanging side by side.›
+‹Could anyone imagine such rascals?› said Pella. ‹That’s frightfully
+annoying, but what can I do about it?› Just the same she gave the
+housekeeper money for new linen a while afterward, for she was well off
+and not stingy neither; but the girl went to the blessed Lord’s Supper
+in the stolen underskirts.»
+
+Martin and Maria listened with wide-open mouths. Grandmother had told a
+story, after all. Of such stories she knew plenty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Father had lighted a cigar and pushed his chair nearer the fire. He now
+motioned to Martin and Maria: «Come, children, now we’ll play.»
+
+The blaze had almost burned out. Father broke apart two or three
+empty match boxes and built out of the fragments a house away deep
+in the porcelain stove. He put in a lot of matches as pillars and
+beams and lastly twisted up a bit of stiff paper; that was a tower. At
+the top of the twist he cut a hole for a chimney. All this was now a
+stately castle like the old Stockholm castles in Dahlberg’s _Swedish
+Monuments_. When it was done, father set fire to all the corners.
+
+It hissed and sputtered and burned.
+
+«Look--just look how it’s burning!--now the farthest corner is
+catching--now the eastern gate’s on fire, now it’s falling!--and the
+tower’s burning, the tower’s tumbling----»
+
+«Now it’s over.»
+
+«Again, papa,» begged Martin. «Oh, again! Just once more!»
+
+«No, not just once more,» said father; «it’s no fun the second time.»
+
+Martin begged and implored. But father went over to the piano and
+stroked his wife’s hair.
+
+Martin remained sitting in front of the fire. His cheeks burned but
+he couldn’t tear himself away. It flamed and glowed so finely away in
+there. It glimmered and glowed and burned.
+
+Finally grandmother came, shut the damper, and put down the slats. Then
+Martin went to the window.
+
+The sun was gone long ago. It had cleared a while, but murky cloud
+masses were driving along in broken lines over the thin, glassy blue of
+the sky. Long Row lay in deep twilight. The lindens and cherry trees
+of the garden were stripped of leaves, and here and there a light was
+already gleaming in a window from out the dark net of boughs. Down on
+the street the lamplighter went about his task; he was old and bent,
+and had a leather cap which came far down over his forehead. Now he
+came to the lamp just in front of the window on the opposite side of
+the street; when he had lighted it, the whole room brightened. The
+white lace curtains outlined their broken pattern on the ceiling and
+walls, while the calla lilies and fuchsias painted fantastic shadows.
+
+It grew darker and darker.
+
+One could see so far up above--far off over the low buildings of the
+old suburb with its wooden houses and gardens. One could see Humlegård
+Park with the roof of the rotunda between the old naked lindens. And
+farthest off in the west rose a gray outline, the Observatory on its
+hill.
+
+The deep and empty blue of the October heavens became still more deep
+and still more empty. Toward the west it was suffused with a red that
+looked dirty with mist and soot.
+
+Martin traced outlines with his finger on the pane, which had begun to
+be damp.
+
+«Will it soon be Christmas, grandma?»
+
+«Oh, not for a good bit, child.»
+
+Martin stood a long while with his nose pressed against the pane
+staring at the sky, a melancholy twilight sky with clouds of pale red
+and gray.
+
+
+
+
+--V--
+
+
+But when the lamp was lighted and they sat around the table, each with
+his own work or book or paper, Martin went off and sat in a corner. For
+he had suddenly become sad without knowing why. There he sat in the
+dark, staring in at the circle of yellow light in which the others sat
+and talked, while he felt himself outside, abandoned and forgotten.
+
+It did not help that Maria hunted out an old volume of _Near and Far_
+to show him Garibaldi and the war in Poland and Emperor Napoleon III
+with his pointed mustaches; he had seen them all many times. Nor did
+it help that she gave him a piece of paper and taught him to fold it
+into the shape of a salt-cellar, a crow, or a catamaran; for, though he
+did not know it, Martin only longed for some one to say or do something
+that would make him cry. It was therefore he sat moody and silent,
+listening to the rain that whipped against the window, for it had begun
+to rain again, and the wind shook the glass.
+
+What was that? Did he suddenly hear father say to mother: «Perhaps
+you’re right that we ought to try to sell the piano and buy a pianino
+on instalment. It goes out of tune in a couple of weeks, and a pianino
+would be prettier.»
+
+Martin gave a start at the words «sell the piano.» He had no clear idea
+of what a pianino was, but he didn’t believe it could be a real piano;
+he pictured it rather as something that was worked with a handle. He
+didn’t believe any other instrument could sound as beautiful as their
+piano. He loved every dent and every crack in the red mahogany frame,
+for he himself had made most of them, and he remembered almost every
+key from its special color. Sell the piano! To his ears it sounded like
+something impossible. It was almost as if he had heard his parents
+calmly sitting and talking about selling grandmother and buying an
+aunt instead.
+
+Martin began to cry before he knew it.
+
+«Mamma,» said Maria, «Martin’s crying.»
+
+«What are you crying for, Martin?» his mother asked.
+
+Martin only sobbed.
+
+«He’s tired and sleepy,» declared grandmother. «He’d better go to bed.»
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+While Martin, still sobbing, made the rounds to say good night, Lotta
+came in with the tea-tray. She had a very solemn expression as she
+said, «I’m sorry to have to tell you that Heggbom is dead.»
+
+Everything became silent in the room. Martin stopped crying.
+
+Grandmother clasped her hands together: «Well, and has he really passed
+away? Has it come that suddenly?... Glory be! and has he passed away?
+Ah, ’twas the brandy!... But it was for the best that he should die,
+though ’twill be hard for the missus; he was the porter, anyway, and
+maintained his wife and children.»
+
+«He died just at seven,» said Lotta.
+
+But when no one said anything she went out into the kitchen again.
+
+«It might be a good idea to send out a list to the neighbors and start
+a little subscription,» said mother.
+
+Martin was sent to bed. His mother sat at the side of his bed and said
+prayers with him. He was let off with «God Who hast us in Thy care,»
+because he was so tired. Otherwise he used to say «Our Father» and
+«Lord, let Thy blessing rest upon us» besides.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Martin lay awake a long time listening to the rain as it plashed
+against the window, for he was not at all sleepy; he had only said
+so to get out of the long prayers that he didn’t understand. It
+is impossible for a little child to associate any idea with such
+expressions as «hallowed be Thy name» or «Thy kingdom come.» He lay
+thinking about Heggbom and wondering if he could get to heaven. He
+always smelled of brandy.
+
+Martin was afraid of the dark. When Lotta came in with a lighted candle
+to fix something in the room, he asked her to let the candle stay.
+
+«You must sleep, Martin,» said Lotta. «Heggbom will come and bite you
+if you don’t.»
+
+With that she went out and took the candle.
+
+Martin began to cry afresh. The wind whistled in the window chinks,
+every now and then a gate was shut with a bang, and a dog howled
+outside. Before mother drew the curtains Martin thought there was a red
+glow in the sky. Perhaps there was a fire in South Stockholm....
+
+There was turmoil and clamor down on the street. Drunken men coming out
+of the tavern--blows and screams. Heavy steps on the pavement, some one
+running and some one pursuing--and a cry of «Police, police!»
+
+Martin drew the covers over his head and cried himself to sleep.
+
+
+
+
+--VI--
+
+
+White winter came with sleigh bells and snow and ice-flowers on the
+windowpane. «They are the dead summer flowers come back again,» said
+Martin’s mother. Evergreen forests out in the country came from the
+darkness and solitude into the city streets and squares, and when the
+Christmas bells rang in the holy day, there stood in Martin’s home a
+dark and timid fir which smelt of the woods, till evening came and it
+stood a-glitter with candles, white candles and colored candles, and
+was covered with winter apples and sugar-plums with mottoes which were
+so stupid that even Martin and Maria could see how stupid they were.
+All the glory of Christmas passed--it was like turning the page of a
+picture-book--and the star of New Year’s Eve was burning across the
+white roofs, and people said to each other, «Good night, and thanks for
+the year!» With a shivering sensation Martin thought of the line of
+gray winter days that were waiting, to which he could see no ending,
+for it was interminably long till summer, and still longer till next
+Christmas.
+
+New Year’s morning he was waked while it was still dark to go to early
+service. Half asleep he scrambled through the snow by the side of his
+parents, and as they came around the corner, there stood the church
+like a giant lantern shining out across the white square where people
+were crawling in across the snow from all directions. Within the church
+was the organ’s roar and singing and many shining candles, and Martin
+felt happy and good and thought this was just the right way to begin
+the new year; and when the minister began to preach, he went straight
+to sleep. But when he woke up, the pale hue of dawn was shining in
+through the windows in the cupola and his mother roused him with, «Now
+we’ll go home and drink our coffee.»
+
+So then they went home, their hearts full of the most beautiful
+intentions, for Martin understood without telling that it was this sort
+of thing the minister had preached about. Later in the morning Martin
+and Maria were sent around on the New Year’s visits to Uncle Jan and
+Aunt Louisa and other uncles and aunts, where they were given cakes and
+wine and sugar-plums from the Christmas trees. But at Uncle Abraham’s
+there was no Christmas tree, for he was a widower and had no children
+but lived alone with an old housekeeper. Uncle Abraham was a doctor and
+had often cured Martin and Maria of measles and scarlatina and pains
+in the chest. He had a black beard and a long crooked nose, for he was
+a Jew. He had also a parrot that could swear in French, and a black
+tomcat. The cat was named Kolmodin and he was the cleverest cat in the
+world, for when he was outside the office door and wanted to get in,
+he didn’t mew as other cats do, but got up on his hind feet, caught his
+claws in the bell-cord, and pulled it hard. This year when Martin and
+Maria came to wish Uncle Abraham a Happy New Year, he was sitting alone
+with his bottle of wine on the table playing chess with himself.
+
+The room was large and half dark and full of books. Outside the snow
+was falling in great flakes. Uncle Abraham stuffed their pockets full
+of goodies, made the parrot swear in French, and was very cordial;
+but he didn’t say much, and in front of the fire which glowed in the
+porcelain stove sat the cat Kolmodin staring gloomily at his master.
+Martin and Maria stood silent and looked at each other with a feeling
+of oppression. For they had more than once heard their parents say that
+Uncle Abraham was not a happy man and that he never was really cheerful.
+
+
+
+
+--VII--
+
+
+So now it was the new year. The almanac which Martin had given his
+father for Christmas had a red cover, whereas the old one had been
+blue. Martin also found to his surprise and disappointment that this
+was the only difference he could see between the new year and the old,
+that the days passed as they had passed before with ringing of bells
+and snow and a somber sky, with weariness of the old games and the old
+stories, and with the longing to be big. He longed for that time but
+feared it too. For his mother had often pointed at the ragman who had
+seen better days and said that if Martin wouldn’t eat his porridge or
+his beer-soup and otherwise be a good and obedient boy, he would come
+to be just such a ragman when he was big. When he heard his mother
+talk so, he would feel a tightening of the chest and would see himself
+slinking in through the gate at dusk with a pack on his back and poking
+in the ash barrel with a black stick, while father and mother and
+sister and grandmother were sitting together around the lamp as before.
+For it never occurred to him to think that his home could be broken up
+and dispersed.
+
+[Illustration: Boy reading at table]
+
+Snow fell, a great deal of snow. The drifts grew, and it became
+sparklingly cold. Martin had to keep indoors with his alphabet book and
+multiplication tables, with his color-box and jumping-jacks and all
+splendid things--already faded--which Christmas had left behind. Among
+the jumping-jacks there was one called the Red Turk which he was fonder
+of than the others, because Uncle Abraham, who had given it to him, had
+said it was the jolliest jumping-jack in all the world. «You see,» he
+had said one evening, «in itself it is neither amusing nor remarkable
+that an old pasteboard man kicks about when one pulls the strings. But
+the Red Turk is no common pasteboard man; he can think and choose the
+same as we. And when you jerk the strings and he begins to prance, he
+says to himself: ‹I am a being with free will, I kick just as I want
+to and exclusively for my own entertainment. Hoho! there’s nothing
+so delightful as to kick.› But when you stop jerking the string, he
+decides that he is tired and says to himself: ‹To the deuce with the
+kicking! The finest thing there is is to hang on a hook on the wall
+and stay entirely still.› Yes, he is the jolliest jumping-jack in the
+world.»
+
+Martin didn’t understand much of this, but he understood that the Red
+Turk was amusing and set greater store by him than ever.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So the days passed, and with Twelfth Night began small family parties
+with stripping of Christmas trees and shadow games and doll theaters
+and magic lanterns with colored pictures on a ghostly white sheet. On
+the way home the stars sparkled, and father pointed to the heaven and
+said, «That’s the Milky Way, and there is the Dipper.»
+
+
+
+
+--VIII--
+
+
+But one morning when Martin awoke he saw that the heavens shone with
+a brighter blue than they had for a long time and that there was a
+dripping from the eaves and the naked branches of the pear tree. And
+while he was sitting up in bed looking out at the shining blue, Maria
+came in with a branch that seemed to blossom in a hundred colors; but
+it was not flowers--it was tinted feathers. She flicked him with the
+branch and danced and sang that it was Shrove Tuesday and she had a
+holiday from school, hurrah! And there were to be buns with almond
+icing for dinner.
+
+Then they took the feathers off the branch and dressed up in them and
+played Indians and white men, but they were both Indians.
+
+But mother took the switch and set it in the window in a jug filled
+with water in the full sunlight. The room faced the east and this
+was the morning sun. And lo and behold! it wasn’t many days before
+brown-and-greenish buds came out here and there on the twigs, they
+swelled and grew larger, until one day they had broken out and changed
+into frail light-green leaves; the whole branch had become verdant, and
+it was spring.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+One afternoon a beam of sunlight fell into the hall which faced the
+west.
+
+«Look at the sun, children,» said mother. «That’s our first afternoon
+sun this year.»
+
+The sunbeam fell on the polished glass of the candelabra, where it
+broke and strewed rainbow-colored patches all over the room on the
+furniture and wall paper. Just then father passed through the hall and
+set the three-sided bits of glass in motion with a slight blow of his
+hand. There was a tumultuous dance of the colored patches around the
+walls, a dance as of fluttering butterflies. Martin and Maria began a
+chase after them. They ran till they were flushed and hot, striking
+their hands against the walls, and when they saw a patch on their hand
+instead of on the wall paper, they screamed with delight, «Now I’ve got
+it!»
+
+But in the next second it glided away, the sunbeam paled, and the
+butterflies, weary of fluttering and shining, departed--Martin saw the
+last of them expire on his hand.
+
+But it wasn’t spring yet after all.
+
+The snow fell again, wet snow that melted at once and was dirty at
+once; again the bells rang in the black cupola, and it was Good
+Friday. Martin and Maria were in church, but they might not sit with
+their parents, for their parents sat far away in the choir in a
+multitude of solemn-looking people dressed in black. They were dressed
+in black themselves, father in a frock coat with a white cravat, and
+everything was black: the red on the pulpit and altar was gone, and
+there was black instead; the priests had black capes, a black cross
+rose menacingly from the leaden-hued cloud of the altar-piece far away
+in the dusk of the choir, and black-gray sky lay above all, staring
+in through the belfry windows of the cupola. Martin could not go to
+sleep as usual, because everything was so uncanny: the choir moaned and
+lamented, the minister looked sinister and forbidding and talked about
+blood, and a dog howled out in the churchyard....
+
+Martin was delighted with all this, although he didn’t realize it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Spring at last, real spring.... It came first when the Royal Family
+drove out to the big park with their plumed and golden equipage. How
+the whole day shone, how radiant it was with blue and sunshine and
+spring around the chimneys and roofs, around the weathercock on the
+church tower! In Martin’s street the lindens were already out, and over
+the leaning fences hovered clouds of white blossom, cherry blossom,
+and hawthorn. On the square and along the Avenue the people thronged,
+the whole city was out in bright and gay-colored costumes, and in
+front of the Life Guards’ barracks stood the light blue guardsmen,
+whom Martin loved and worshiped, on duty with sabers drawn. The Royal
+Family drove past in a cloud of plumes and gold, the crowd cheered and
+Martin cheered, and then everybody went out to the park to drink fruit
+juices and mineral water at Bellmansruh. All around whined violins
+and street-organs, and Martin felt completely happy. But on the way
+back they stopped a moment to look at the Punch and Judy theater. The
+landscape was already beginning to darken, but people still flocked
+around the puppet theater where Punch was just going to beat his
+wife to death. Martin pressed close to his mother. He saw mouths
+open in a broad laugh around him in the dusk; he understood nothing,
+but the sound of the cudgel on the doll’s head frightened him--were
+people laughing at that bad man there beating his wife? Then came the
+creditor, and him too Punch beat to death. The policeman and the devil
+he treated similarly, till finally Death lured him into his cauldron,
+and that was the end. Martin couldn’t laugh or weep either; he only
+stared abashed and terrified into this new world, which was so unlike
+his own. On the way home he was cold and tired. The sun was gone, it
+grew darker and darker; the king had long since driven home to his
+castle, and drunken men scuffled and bawled around him. The anemones
+which Martin had picked at the edge of the wood were withered, and he
+threw them away to be trampled into the mire.
+
+But when he was home at last and it was night and Martin lay in his bed
+asleep, he dreamed that father hit mother on the head with a big cudgel.
+
+
+
+
+--IX--
+
+
+Summer skies and summer sun, a white house with green trees....
+
+Martin’s parents had rented several low-ceiled rooms with rickety white
+furniture and the bluest window-blinds in the world for the small
+square windows. Close to these windows passed the state highroad.
+Here wagoners and wayfarers from the islands of the Malar went by
+continually to and from the city, all stopping to pay the bridge toll,
+for the white house belonged to the bridge-tender and stood just at the
+abutment of Nockeby bridge. The bridge-tender sat every evening on his
+porch, which was twined about with hop vines, drinking toddy, holding
+out his money-box to the passers-by, chatting and telling yarns, for
+he had been a sea captain and voyaged to many strange lands. But now
+he was a little old white-haired man, who had for many years had the
+tenancy of the bridge and had become a well-to-do citizen.
+
+On the evening of the first day, when the packing boxes, trunks,
+and clothes-baskets were still standing higgledy-piggledy in the
+room,--which still looked a little strange, though every wardrobe and
+chair, every flower in the wall paper seemed to say, «We shall soon get
+acquainted,»--and while the evening meal with butter and cheese and
+some small broiled fish was spread by the window, Martin sat silent
+on the corner of a chest surveying the strange and new picture: the
+gray highroad with telegraph poles in which the wind sang, and the
+dark shadowy figures of the horses and peasants outlined against the
+greenish-blue western sky. Obliquely across the way a little to one
+side was a slope with a clump of oaks, whose verdure stood out strong
+and heavy in the summer twilight. Among these oaks was one that was
+naked and black and could not put out leaves like the others, and in
+its branches the crows had built a nest.
+
+Martin could not take his eyes from this black tree with the crow’s
+nest between the branches. He thought he knew this tree, that he had
+seen it before, or heard a story about it.
+
+And he dreamed of it that night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Summer skies, summer days. Green fields, green trees....
+
+The fields were full of flowers, and Martin and Maria picked them and
+tied them up in bouquets for their mother. And Maria said to Martin:
+«Look out for snakes! If you step on a snake, he’ll think you did it
+on purpose, and then he’ll bite you.» So Martin trod as carefully as
+he could in the high grass. She taught him too that it was a great sin
+to pick the white strawberry blossoms, because it was from them the
+strawberries grew. They agreed that the first one who saw a strawberry
+blossom should say, «Free for that one!» And the one who had said it
+should then have the right to pick it when it was ripe. But when they
+came to the slope with the oaks, it was all white with blossoms under
+the trees. Maria, who was the first to see it, cried, «Free for the
+whole lot!» But when she saw that Martin did not look pleased, she
+immediately proposed that they should divide the treasure, so they drew
+an imaginary line from one tree to another and in this way divided
+the whole slope into two parts. To the right of the line was Maria’s
+strawberry field and to the left was Martin’s. After that they sat down
+in the shade of an oak and arranged their flowers as they thought best,
+and Maria taught Martin to stick in some fine heart-shaped grass among
+the buttercups and ox-eye daisies and to tie up the bouquets with long
+straws. But Martin soon grew tired with his flowers, for he had forgot
+he had picked them to give to his mother. He let them lie in the grass
+and lay down on his back among them to look at the clouds that were
+drifting across the blue heavens high above his head. They were like
+white dogs, small shaggy white dogs. Perhaps they were white dogs. When
+people die, they go to heaven; but dogs, who have no regular soul,
+can’t very well get so high up. They can jump around outside and play
+with each other. But their masters must come out to them sometimes, and
+then the little dogs leap up on their masters and lick them and are
+ever so happy....
+
+White clouds, summer clouds.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But the finest thing of all was the long bridge and the lake and all
+the steamboats that blew their whistles when they were still far off so
+that the bridge should open and let them through. Martin soon taught
+himself to know them all: the _Fyris_, the _Garibaldi_, the _Bragë_,
+which was never in a hurry; the lovely blue _Tynnelsö_, and the brown
+_Enköping_, which was called the _Coffee-pot_, because it sputtered
+like boiling coffee. Each boat had for him its particular expression,
+so that he could distinguish them one from another a long way off. They
+helped him to keep account of the time too. When the _Tynnelsö_ was
+passing through the bridge, it was time to go home and have breakfast;
+and when the _Runa_ blew with its hoarse throat, the _Bragë_ was not
+far away, and it was in the _Bragë_ that papa came from the city. There
+were tow-boats too with their long lines of barges; these barges often
+got stuck in the gap of the bridge, and nothing in the world was so
+much fun as to hear the bargemen swear. But on days when the lake was
+green, with white foam, and the waves plashed high up over the bridge,
+no steamboats could vie with the coasting sloops for first place in
+Martin’s heart. In every skipper he saw a hero who defied wind and
+wave to reach some strange, unknown port, for it never occurred to him
+to think that they only sailed to Stockholm to sell the wood, hay, or
+pottery they had on board. These cargoes, however, did not quite please
+him, for he could not help their suggesting against his will some dark
+suspicion of an ulterior motive in the skipper, and in the depths of
+his heart he liked best the sloops that came empty from the city. Then
+too these danced most boldly over the waves, and they steered toward
+regions where Martin had never been, far beyond Tyska Botten and
+Blackeberg--which were the boundary of the known world.
+
+It was there too that the sun went down every evening in a red and
+glittering land of promise. Martin was entirely certain it was just
+there the sun went down, right behind the cape, and not anywhere else.
+He could see it all so plainly. He did not, however, imagine that
+the people living over there could see the sun at close range or that
+they need be afraid of its falling on their heads. If another boy had
+come to him and said such a thing, Martin would have thought him very
+stupid. For it is just the same with children as with grown-ups: they
+often form the strangest conceptions of the world; but if any one shows
+them the consequences of their ideas, they say he is very stupid, or
+that it is improper to joke about serious things.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Summertime, strawberry time.
+
+At that period summer was different from now. There was a joy that
+filled the days and evenings, pressing even into one’s nightly dreams;
+and morning was joy personified. But one morning Martin awoke earlier
+than usual, and when he heard a little bird twittering in the privet
+hedge before his window and saw the sun was shining, he sat up in bed
+and wanted to dress and go out. Then his mother came in and said he was
+to lie still a little while yet, because it was his birthday, and Maria
+was working at something outside which he mustn’t see before it was
+ready. She kissed him and said that now he was seven he ought to be
+really industrious and good in the summer, so that he wouldn’t need to
+be ashamed in the autumn when he was to begin school. But when Martin
+heard the word «school,» he forgot the bird twittering on the hedge and
+the sun that was shining, and his throat felt choked as if he was going
+to cry; but he controlled himself and didn’t cry. He didn’t know very
+clearly what «school» meant, but it sounded very harsh and hard.
+
+To be sure his mother had school for him and Maria, but that was only
+for a short while every day down in the garden, in the lilac arbor,
+where butterflies flitted, yellow and white and blue, and bees hummed,
+while his mother told them stories about Joseph in Egypt and about
+kings and prophets, and taught them to make letters after a model.
+He comprehended that real school must be something quite different.
+But while his heart was troubled over having to start school in the
+autumn, they all came in and congratulated him on his birthday: papa
+and grandmother and Maria, and Maria put on an affected manner and said
+with a bow, «I have the honor to congratulate----» But Martin became
+bashful and blushed and turned his face to the wall.
+
+Then they left him alone. But it wasn’t long before grandmother stuck
+in her head and called that the king was coming riding with fifteen
+generals to congratulate Martin, and at the same moment he heard a
+rumbling over the bridge as if there was thunder. He jumped out of
+bed and threw on his clothes, but the noise came nearer, there was a
+cloud of dust over the road, horses’ hoofs rang on the ground and the
+bridge, and there were lightnings of drawn swords. When he came out
+on the porch, the foremost riders had already passed, but Martin’s
+mother consoled him with the fact that the king had not been with
+them. Instead it had been almost all his army, which was on its way
+to the region of Drottningsholm for maneuvers. There were hussars and
+dragoons and all the artillery from Stockholm, and the artillerists
+were shaking like sacks of potatoes on their caissons and were gray and
+black with dust and dirt. But Martin admired them all the more in that
+condition and wondered within himself if it wouldn’t be better to be an
+artillerist than a coasting skipper.
+
+The martial array passed and was gone, a fresh wind came from the lake
+and took with it the odor of dirt and sweat which remained, and when
+Martin turned around, there stood beside the breakfast table a little
+table set especially for him; Maria had decorated it with flowers and
+green leaves. Then he got bashful and blushed again, but he was very
+happy too, for on the middle of the table stood a cake which his mother
+had baked for him, a big dish full of wild strawberries which Maria had
+picked under the oaks, a twenty-five-öre piece from papa, and a package
+of stockings which mother had knitted. Of all these things Martin cared
+most for the twenty-five-öre piece. For he had come to realize that a
+pair of stockings was just a pair of stockings, and a cake was a cake,
+but a twenty-five-öre piece was an indefinite number of fulfilled
+wishes in any direction whatever up to a certain limit, and experience
+had not yet taught him how narrow was that limit.
+
+Martin went around and thanked everybody, and tasted the cake and the
+berries, and saw that the stockings were handsome with red borders, and
+put the twenty-five-öre piece in a match box, which was his savings
+bank. In it up to now there had been a couple of old copper coins
+and some small pebbles which he had come across in the sand and kept
+because they were so pretty.
+
+Then the _Bragë_ blew at Tysk Botten, and papa had to be off to the
+city, but Martin was allowed to go with mamma and grandmother and
+Maria to Drottningsholm. There stood the king’s white summer palace,
+mirrored in the bright inlet. The trees in the park were bigger than
+any other trees, and the shade under them was deep and cool. And over
+the dark waters of the ponds and canals the white swans glided with
+their stiffly outstretched necks, and Martin imagined that they never
+troubled themselves about anything else in the world than their own
+white dreams.
+
+But grandmother had a French roll with her, which she broke into crumbs
+and fed to them as one feeds chickens.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Summer days, pleasure days, cornflowers in the yellow rye....
+
+It was near harvest time, and Martin was walking along the road with
+his mother. Maria was on the other side, and now and then she would
+pick a cornflower from out of the rye. Mother had a pink dress and a
+straw hat with a wide brim, and she was talking with them about mankind
+and the world and God.
+
+[Illustration: Rural path]
+
+«Look, Martin,» she said, «there are the heavy and the light ears of
+grain that we read about today in the arbor. You remember the full ear
+that bowed itself so deeply to the earth because it had so many grains
+to carry. The grains are ground into meal in the mill, and the meal is
+baked into bread, and the bread is good to eat when any one is hungry.
+But the empty ear is good for nothing, the farmer throws it away or
+gives it to his horse to chew, and even the horse doesn’t get any
+fatter from it. And yet it raises itself so proudly aloft and looks
+down on the other ears which stand and bend around it.»
+
+With that mother broke off the proud light ear and showed Martin that
+it was quite empty.
+
+«Such are many among men,» she said. «You’ll come to see that when
+you’re big. You will also see people who go about hanging their heads
+to make others think they belong to the full ears. But they are just
+the emptiest of all.
+
+«But you must also remember, children, that it is not your part to
+judge, either now or when you grow up, whether any one belongs to the
+full or the empty ears. Such a thing no man can rightly know about
+another. That only God knows.»
+
+When mother talked to Martin about God, he felt at the same time solemn
+and a little embarrassed, somewhat as a little dog might feel when one
+tries to talk to him as to a person. For when he heard his mother tell
+about paradise and Noah’s ark, he could follow along very well--he
+saw it all so clearly before his eyes, the apple tree and the serpent
+and all the animals in the ark. But at the word «God» he could not
+picture anything definite, either an old man or a middle-aged man with
+a black beard. At the very top of the blue dome in the church cupola
+was a great painted eye, and mother had said this was a symbol of God.
+But this solitary eye seemed to Martin so uncanny and sad. He hardly
+dared look at it, and it did not at all help him to comprehend what
+God really looked like. He had also had to learn by heart the Ten
+Commandments, which God had written for Moses on Mt. Sinai. But they
+seemed only to strengthen his secret suspicion that God was something
+that only concerned the grown-ups. It never could be to Martin that God
+spoke when he said, «Thou shalt have no other gods but me.» Martin knew
+neither what an idol looked like nor what one could do to worship it.
+That he should honor his parents came of itself. He felt no temptation
+to murder or to steal or to covet his neighbor’s maid-servant, his ox,
+or his ass. And he had no idea how he could commit adultery; but he
+resolved he would try to guard against it anyway, to be on the safe
+side.
+
+«God knows everything, both the present and the future. He Himself
+has ordained it all. And when you pray to God, Martin, you must not
+believe that you with your prayers can in the slightest alter His will.
+But still God wishes men to pray to Him, and therefore you must do it.
+You must never give up saying your evening prayer before you go to
+sleep, no matter how big and wise you get. But when you become big and
+have to look out for yourself in the world, you must never forget that
+you must depend first and foremost on yourself. God helps only him who
+helps himself. And if it ever happens in life that there is something
+you desire deeply, so that you think you can never be happy again
+unless you get it--then you must not pray to God to give it to you. Try
+rather to get it for yourself; but if that is impossible, then pray Him
+for strength to renounce your wish. He does not like other kinds of
+prayer.»
+
+So Martin Birck’s mother spoke as they walked along. And the summer
+wind whispered around them and passed on over the field, and the grain
+waved.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The bridge-tender, old Moberg, had an assistant by the name of Johan.
+Johan was fourteen or fifteen and soon became Martin’s best friend.
+He made bows and arrows and bark boats for Martin, and Martin helped
+him to wind up the drawbridge. In the evening, when he was free, he
+used also to play hide and seek and «There’s no robbers in the woods»
+with Martin and Maria and a few other children. But it was neither on
+account of the bark boats nor the games that Martin was so fond of
+Johan and admired him so extraordinarily. It was because Johan always
+had so many wonderful things to tell about, things that papa and mamma
+and grandmother never told about. It was especially in the dusk that
+Johan was wont to be so communicative, when Martin and he sat on a beam
+by the opening in the bridge and waited for the approaching steamboat,
+whose lanterns would sooner or later pop out from behind the cape,
+first the green and then the red. At such times Johan might tell of
+this, that, or the other thing. One time it would be about old Moberg,
+who used to see tiny little devils jumping up and down, up and down,
+in his toddy glass; it was about them he talked when he sat muttering
+to himself and stirring his glass. But the minister at Lovö was still
+worse. Why, he was a friend of Old Spotty himself, the whole parish
+knew that. Anybody could see that for himself if he thought about it;
+how otherwise could he get up in the pulpit and preach the way he did
+for a whole hour; where did he get all his words from? Furthermore
+Johan had had to go to him one time on an errand and had been in his
+room and had seen with his own eyes that it was chock-full of books
+from floor to ceiling. Oh, yes, he was in with the Old Boy sure
+enough!--Or Johan would tell about a man who had been murdered on the
+highroad three years back, quite near, and would describe the place
+exactly: «It was just there where the wood is so thick on one side,
+and on the other is a willow alongside of a telegraph pole. It was an
+evening in November that it happened, and now if anybody goes by at the
+right time, he can hear the most terrible groaning in the ditch---- But
+they never got the fellow that did it.»
+
+When Martin heard such things, he squeezed close to Johan’s arm, and he
+felt lighter at heart when the steamboat’s lanterns shone out of the
+dark and came nearer, when he heard the thump-thump of the engine and
+the captain’s orders, and they had to hurry to wind up the drawbridge.
+When they went home across the bridge, they were both excited with
+thoughts of ghosts and murders, and Johan said to Martin, «Listen, he’s
+after us!»
+
+Martin didn’t know whether _he_ was the murderer or the murdered, but
+he fancied he heard steps on the bridge and didn’t dare to look around.
+Johan, however, who had a cheerful disposition, drove off his fear by
+striking up a jolly song. He sang to the tune of «There was an old
+woman by Konham Square»:
+
+  «I go to my death wherever I go, killivillivippombom!»
+
+And Martin joined in and sang along with him.
+
+But when they got to the bridge-tender’s house, Johan was silent while
+Martin sang at the top of his voice:
+
+  «I go to my death wherever I go, killivillivippombom!»
+
+The bridge-tender, old Moberg, was sitting on his porch, which was
+embowered in hop vines, drinking toddy with two farmers in the light
+of a round Japanese lantern. He was an old man who drank toddy every
+evening, and people said he couldn’t last much longer. But he was most
+unwilling to die. If he heard any one speak of illness or death, it
+was to him as if he had heard something indecent, or indeed it was
+much worse, for indecent talk rather raised his spirits than offended
+his ears. But when he saw Martin coming along the road and heard him
+singing a funeral hymn to the tune of an insolent street song, he got
+up and advanced along the road with tottering steps till he halted in
+front of Martin. Martin stopped too and was silent directly. He looked
+around for Johan, but Johan had vanished.
+
+Old Moberg had become blue in the face, as he said in a trembling
+voice: «And this child is supposed to come of respectable people! These
+are strange times, I may say.»
+
+Thereupon he went into the house, without either drinking his toddy or
+saying good night to the farmers, and went to bed.
+
+But Martin was left alone on the road, and everything around him had
+become silent all of a sudden. He heard only the sound of the farmers’
+sticks as they went off in the dark without speaking.
+
+Martin’s parents, however, had heard the whole affair from the veranda
+on the side of the house.
+
+«Martin, come in!»
+
+Martin was as red as his collar was white. Now he’d have to give an
+account of who had taught him to sing such things. But he said he had
+thought of it himself. Father explained to Martin how dreadfully he had
+behaved, and Martin cried and was sent to bed. His mother cried too
+when she said prayers with him. She was frightened and wrought up. For
+children’s offenses, like those of adults, are judged more according to
+the scandal they have aroused than according to their inner nature, and
+Martin’s misdeed had caused a terrible scandal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The most beautiful days of summer were gone. In the daytime there was
+rain and wind, and the lake turned green. And at dusk the crows flapped
+around the slope with the oaks and the naked tree.
+
+When it rained, Martin was set to read «The Bee and the Dove» and «The
+Toad and the Ox.» He read too «Tiny’s Trip to Dreamtown.»
+
+  «Little gold fishes in goodly row
+  Swim through the silver sea there.
+  Tiny is off to Dreamtown, ho!
+  Ere it is night he’ll be there.
+
+  «Soon, soon
+  Close to the moon
+  He sees its outline fleeting.
+  Bright, bright
+  Many a light
+  Sends him a kindly greeting.
+
+  «On glides the ship, it nears the land.
+  Lamps are a-gleam so pretty
+  Down at the edge of the murmuring strand,
+  Bells ring out from the city.»
+
+The city! Tears came into Martin’s eyes. He had often thought of the
+city in the past days and had wondered if everything was the same at
+home. For in winter Martin longed for the green grass of summer and the
+strawberries in the woods, but when a flock of summer days had gone by
+and the green was no longer fresh and the wild roses in the meadows
+were gray with the dust of the highroad, he dreamed once more of the
+city’s gleaming rows of lamps, of Christmas and snow, and of the gray
+winter twilight in front of the lighted fire.
+
+
+
+
+--X--
+
+
+The wheel of the year had gone around, and it was again autumn.
+
+In the city there was much that was new. Long Row was gone with its
+gardens and sheds; in its place a great brick building rose aloft,
+growing higher every day, obscuring both the lindens of Humlegård
+Park and the Observatory on its hill. Everywhere people were pulling
+down and building up, and dynamite blasts resounded every day in
+the district, which was now no longer to be called Ladgardsland but
+Östermalm. And Mrs. Heggbom had become a lady. If anybody called her
+by her former title, she would answer politely but decidedly, «Not any
+more!»
+
+Martin went to school, but it was a modest little school and not nearly
+so terrible as he had thought. One had only to learn one’s lessons, and
+everything went well. And Martin felt with pride that his knowledge of
+the world was enlarged with every day. Space and time daily extended
+their boundaries before his eyes; the world was much bigger than he
+had dreamed and so old that his head grew giddy at the multitude of
+the years. If one looked ahead, time had no limits--it ran out into a
+dizzying blue infinity; but if one traced it back, one at least found
+far back in the darkness a beginning, a place where one had to stop:
+six thousand years before the birth of Our Saviour it was that God had
+created the world. That stood clear and plain in Martin’s Biblical
+History, on the first page.
+
+In six days He had made it. But the teacher said that days were longer
+at that time.
+
+But if possibly the days of the creation had been a little longer than
+ordinary days, it was just the opposite with Methusalem’s nine hundred
+and sixty-nine years. «At that time, you see, they didn’t reckon the
+years as long as now,» the teacher said.
+
+There was so much new to learn and digest; school had in reality none
+of those terrors with which Martin had arrayed it in his imagination.
+
+But on the other hand the way to and from school was filled with
+all sorts of perils and adventures. Those ill-disposed beings who
+were called rowdies and who called Martin and his comrades stuck-ups
+might be in ambush around any corner. The worst of these rowdies were
+the fierce and formidable «marsh rowdies,» who would now and then
+leave their gloomy habitation in the tract between the Humlegård and
+Roslagstorg, the «Marsh,» to go on the war path. Their weapons were
+said to be lead balls on the end of short ropes. But more than these
+marsh rowdies, whom Martin had never seen and of whose existence he
+was not entirely sure, he feared the horrible Franz, who used to live
+in the Long Row and still resided in the same street. For this rowdy
+directed all his energies and intelligence toward embittering Martin’s
+life by day and even pursued him into his nocturnal dreams.
+
+But one day when Martin was on his way for morning recess, he found
+two of his comrades in a fight with Franz at a street corner; in fact
+they had already overcome him, thrown him down, and were pummeling him
+with their fists. At this time Martin had begun to read Indian books,
+so that he at once saw in Franz a parallel to the noble redskin and did
+not want to miss so favorable a chance of making him his ally against
+other rowdies. He therefore advanced and represented to his comrades
+how cowardly it was to fight two against one, said that Franz lived in
+his street and was a very decent rowdy, and proposed that they let him
+go in peace. While he thus drew the attention of his comrades, Franz
+managed to get up and run away.
+
+In return Martin got all the licking intended for Franz. Furthermore
+he had to endure the scorn of his comrades for being the friend of a
+rowdy. And the next time he met Franz on the street in front of the
+dyer’s gate, the latter tripped him so that he fell into the gutter,
+then gave him a bloody nose, tore his books apart, swore at him
+frightfully, and ran off.
+
+He had not understood that he was supposed to be a noble redskin. But
+this Franz was not a rowdy of the usual sort; he was a thoroughly awful
+rowdy.
+
+
+
+
+--XI--
+
+
+Martin entered the high school.
+
+Here everything was strange and cold. Gray walls, long corridors. The
+school yard was like the desert of Sahara. When the bell rang for the
+first recess, Martin slipped off by himself so as to escape his new
+comrades. But the next recess they gathered around him in a ring,
+surveying him for a while in silence, till finally a little red-haired
+boy with a broad pate opened his mouth to ask, «What sort of devil are
+you?»
+
+At these words Martin had a dark premonition that a new stage of his
+life was beginning. He had been as happy as a plant in the earth, as
+is every little child with kind parents and a good home. Now the doors
+were opened upon an entirely new world, a world where one could not
+get on by the same simple means that his father and mother had shown
+him: _i.e._, by being polite and friendly towards all he met and never
+taking advantage of others. Here the thing was to decide quickly and
+firmly in what case one should use one’s fists, in what one should
+take to one’s heels, and under what circumstances one could benefit by
+cunning and deceit. It was not long, either, before Martin got the way
+of things. He suddenly remembered various curses and ugly words that
+he had heard from the bridge-tender’s assistant in the country, and he
+missed no opportunity of fitting them in here and there in conversation
+with his associates wherever he thought they would go. In this way
+he became sooner acquainted with the other boys, and they in return
+enlightened him in much that a newcomer might find useful: _e.g._,
+which of the teachers flogged and which only gave bad marks; that the
+worst of all was Director Sundell, who had mirrors in his spectacles so
+that he saw what was done behind his back and always wore galoshes so
+that he couldn’t be heard in the corridors; that «Sausages» was decent,
+though he marked hard, but that «The Flea» was a damned sneak.
+
+
+
+
+--XII--
+
+
+So year was added to year, and the new buried the old, while Martin
+was slowly initiated into the twofold art of life, to learn and to
+forget. For as the gambler in order to keep on till the last coin has
+run through his trembling fingers must forget his losses in the hope of
+future gains, so humanity, the gambler by compulsion, finds that the
+greatest art is to forget and that upon this depends everything.
+
+Martin forgot. The Red Turk, who had long since wearied of jumping,
+was as much forgotten as if he had never been. And Uncle Abraham, who
+had given him to Martin and who had hanged himself with a stove-cord
+one rainy day, when he didn’t find it worth the trouble to live any
+more, was soon forgotten as well, though he now and again came up in
+Martin’s dreams as a dark and disturbing riddle. But while the boy was
+forgetting, he learned. A third of the truth was transmitted by the
+teachers, and another third was given by his comrades, who soon helped
+him to lift the veil under which was hidden the Sixth Commandment and
+everything pertaining to it. They made free use of the Scriptures in
+their researches. They explained precisely what it was that Absolom did
+with his father’s concubines on the roof of the palace before all the
+people, and they reveled with Ezekiel over the abysmal sin of Ahala
+and Ahaliba. But although both of these thirds were given him with an
+admixture of errors and lies, and although the final third--which was
+perhaps the most important and which it was his task to search out for
+himself sometime--had not yet begun to occupy him; yet nevertheless
+every day widened the chinks experience tore through the spiderweb
+tissue of legend and dream with which friendly hands had fenced in his
+childhood, and more and more often through the cracks gaped the great
+empty void which is called the world.
+
+
+
+
+THE WHITE CAP ❧
+
+
+
+
+--I--
+
+
+When Martin Birck had got the white cap, his first errand was to go
+into a cigar booth to buy a cane of cinnamon wood and a package of
+cigarettes. The young girl who stood in the shop had black eyes and a
+thick bang. Her exterior corresponded but imperfectly with the ideal of
+his dreams, which belonged to a more blonde and Gretchen-like sphere;
+but when she congratulated him pleasantly on his white cap and at the
+same time regarded him with a look full of kindliness, despite the fact
+that he had never before been in her shop, he suddenly felt all warm
+about the heart, caught her dirty hand, which lay outstretched across
+the counter display of Cameo and Duke of Durham, and tenderly kissed
+it. However, he repented almost at once. He had no doubt behaved badly.
+He did not, to be sure, imagine that the young girl was completely
+innocent--she had no doubt a lover, possibly several; but that was no
+reason why any one at all had the right to come in from the street
+and kiss her hand just like that. He was embarrassed and didn’t know
+what to say or do, till he finally plucked up courage to select a cane,
+light a cigarette, and go out.
+
+[Illustration: Village street]
+
+Queen Street was still wet after the last shower, little ladies with
+jogging bustles lifted their skirts to jump over puddles, which
+mirrored the blue above; stylish gentlemen with thin angular legs
+and canes like Martin’s swung their top-hats in pompous salutation,
+revealing in the act heads so close-clipped that the scalp shone
+through. Over the roofs and chimneys of the gray houses the restless
+white spring clouds hurried in fluttering haste, and far down at the
+bottom of the street the sunlight quivered between churches and towers.
+
+Martin stopped in front of every store window to see the reflection of
+his white cap. He could not understand how he had become a student.
+Up to the last he had believed he would be flunked. His surprise was
+the more joyous when he received his student certificate the same as
+the others, and especially when he came to the closing lines, «In
+consideration whereof the aforesaid M. Birck has been adjudged worthy
+to receive the certificate: _Graduated with honor_.» These words caused
+his heart to swell with deep gratitude toward his corps of teachers,
+for although he considered himself fairly proficient, it was far beyond
+his expectations to find this idea shared by his instructors. During
+the last terms he had seldom known his lessons. Often he had not
+even been able to bring himself to read them over in the ten-minute
+intermission before classes or to slip a couple of loose leaves from
+his textbook into his Bible so as to study them during morning prayers,
+while the lector in theology stood on the platform and talked bosh--a
+resource which ordinarily even the most frivolous of his comrades
+would not fail to use. He would, however, have liked to gratify his
+parents with good marks, although for his own part he had not any great
+ambition in that direction; but during the last years there had come
+over him a dull apathy for everything connected with school, against
+which he could do nothing. It was so hard for him to take it in full
+earnest. Whenever, contrary to his custom, he had distinguished himself
+in this or that subject, he was almost ashamed within himself, as if
+he had done something stupid. As often as he was supposed to dig down
+into the paltry details in which textbooks delight, he felt himself as
+ridiculous as the man who, when his house was on fire, saved the poker.
+
+Now that the poker was saved, however, he was so overjoyed that he
+could have sung; he felt that he was happy and free, as he hastened
+home with his white cap, home to the blossoming street of his
+childhood. But the street was no longer the same as before. From a
+single plot the cherry tree still stretched its branches out over a
+mossy board fence; everything else was great red brick buildings and
+small commonplace meeting-houses. The rowdy Franz could no longer
+disturb what idyllic atmosphere was still left, for he had grown up and
+become big, and had now been for some time behind the bars of Langholm
+jail.
+
+
+
+
+--II--
+
+
+Home was quieter and more empty than before. Maria, Martin’s sister,
+had been married a year ago to a doctor who lived far away in the
+country, and grandmother was no longer there.
+
+In the evening Martin and his companions were to have a supper at
+Hasselbacken. Martin’s father gave him five crowns to offer to the joy
+of youth, and his mother took him aside and said: «Martin, Martin,
+you must promise me to be careful tonight and not be led into any
+foolishness. Don’t make a point of emptying your glass every time any
+one drinks a toast with you, or you’ll lose your head. The best thing
+would be just to pretend you drank. And I must tell you, Martin, that
+there is a class of dreadful women who do nothing else but try to lead
+young men to their destruction. You must beware of them especially.
+Dear Martin, if I only knew you had given yourself to the Lord and
+had your thoughts fixed on Him, I shouldn’t be anxious about you; but
+I know you don’t do that. Their very breath is poisonous; if you only
+stand on the street and talk to such a woman, you may catch the most
+frightful diseases that no doctor in the world can cure.»
+
+«Mother dear,» said Martin, «you’re always getting off on that.»
+
+He took up his white cap, said good-by and went.
+
+His mother followed him with troubled eyes, and when he was gone, sat
+down in a dark corner and wept. For she knew she was going to lose him
+as mothers always lose their sons.
+
+
+
+
+--III--
+
+
+Martin thought of his mother as he went along the Avenue on the way to
+the Park. How could the relations between them have become what they
+were? To her he was still a little child. When he first began to speak
+to her of his religious doubts, she pretended to believe that it was
+something he had got from outside, from bad comrades or some wicked
+book. Later things reached such a point that he could no longer talk
+to her about anything but the most ordinary subjects--about shirts
+and socks and buttons to be sewed on. If their conversation ever took
+a serious turn, they treated each other mutually as little children.
+Thus, without his meaning it or noticing it before it was too late,
+he got a condescending tone that hurt her, so that after such a
+conversation a thorn remained in the heart of each.
+
+She often lay awake at night weeping and sorrowing over his unbelief.
+She herself, however, was of the earth in her thoughts, her hopes,
+and the whole of her being. She believed in hell of course, because
+she believed in the Bible; but she could never seriously imagine that
+her son or any one at all whom she knew and associated with would go
+to such a horrible place. It was not therefore on account of his soul
+that she grieved most but for his future here on earth, since she had
+observed that things did not ordinarily go well in the world with those
+who contemned God and religion. Some of them got into prison, others
+left their country to go among strangers, and all aroused distrust and
+ill-will among respectable folk. She feared that her son might come to
+be one of these, and it was this idea which kept her awake at night and
+left her with swollen eyes. She had no more precious dream than that
+he should be «like other folk,» as most people are, if possible better
+and above all happier, but still on the whole as they were. She could
+imagine that her son might become a poet, she could even wish it, for
+she loved poetry; the tears came into her eyes when he read her some of
+his poems; but she pictured it that he would sit at some office work on
+weekdays, and only on Sundays or in his free hours write some verses
+about sunsets, which he would send in to the Swedish Academy and get
+a prize, so that he would become at the same time a great poet and a
+respected business man with an assured income. She believed in full
+seriousness that he would be more highly thought of among poets if he
+was in an office and had a title than if he just wrote. That was how it
+had been with all the real poets. Tegnér was a bishop, and even Bellman
+had at least had a position in the lottery bureau. As an example that
+Martin should especially take to follow, she used to mention a poet
+whom she had known when she was young, who was now an auditor in the
+Court of Exchequer and wrote verses about everything that was grand
+and beautiful, about the sea and the sun and the king, and had been
+decorated with the Order of Vasa. Such a life she considered noble and
+to be emulated, and when her dreams of her son’s future were at their
+highest, it was something of this sort she imagined.
+
+But Martin dreamed other dreams. He wanted to be a poet. He would write
+a book; a novel or a lyric sequence, or best of all a drama of ideas
+in the same verse form as «Brand» or «Peer Gynt.» He would devote his
+life to searching for the truth and giving to mankind what he found
+or thought he had found of it. He would also become famous, a great
+man; he would earn a lot of money, he would buy a little house for his
+father and a new silk dress for his mother--her old one was worn and
+faded. He would be envied by men and sought after by women, but of all
+the women in the world he should not love more than one, and that one a
+woman who loved another man. This unhappy love should give his thoughts
+depth and bitterness and his poems wings. But he had a dark feeling
+that while he sought for truth he should only find truths, and that
+while he gave them to men in verse more wonderful than any music or in
+a clear and cold prose with words like sharp teeth, he would despise
+himself for reaping honor and gold for the morsels he had found by
+accident while he was seeking for something else. This self-contempt
+would eat into his soul and make of him an empty husk. But he would
+not let the world note anything; he would paint his cheeks, pencil his
+eyebrows and hold up his head, and at the very moment when he himself
+most deeply despised his poetry and set it below the humblest manual
+labor, he would inspire men most and be elected to the Swedish Academy
+to succeed Wirsén. With a countenance immobile as a mask he would give
+the usual flowery oration on his predecessor. Never again after that
+would he set pen to paper. In a strangely colorful and disordered
+life he would seek to deaden his despair. No sin should be unknown to
+him; in broad daylight he would drive in an open carriage through the
+streets with harlots and buffoons, and he would pass the nights in
+drinking and play. Till one gloomy October night he wearied of his mad
+and empty life, made a fire in his stove and burned his papers, emptied
+a glass of dark red wine spiced with a strange herb, and went to sleep
+to awake no more....
+
+Or perhaps it was unnecessary that his life should end so tragically.
+When he thought it over more carefully, this seemed to him even a
+trifle banal. He might just as well move to a small town, to Strengness
+or Grenna. There he could live alone with a parrot and a black cat. He
+might also have an aquarium with goldfish. Behind closed shutters he
+would dream away the day, but when night came he would light candles in
+all the rooms and pace back and forth, back and forth, meditating on
+the vanity of life. And when the townfolk passed his house on the way
+home from their evening toddy at the rathskeller, they would stop to
+point at his window and say: «There lives Martin Birck. He has taught
+like a sage and lived like a fool, and he is very unhappy.»
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All this and a lot more Martin Birck thought as he went out the Avenue
+across the park on the way to Hasselbacken.
+
+
+
+
+--IV--
+
+
+The orchestra struck up the opening bars of «Mefistofele.»
+
+Martin was sitting out by the balcony railing with Henrik Rissler. They
+listened to the music, looked out across the terraces, and said little.
+Henrik Rissler had a smooth white forehead and calm limpid eyes. His
+glance was long and questing; it seemed to slip over the objects
+nearest it in order more quickly to reach those farther off. He was the
+only one of Martin’s comrades who had sought his company outside of
+school. They used to go to each other’s homes in the afternoon to talk
+and smoke cigarettes, and once in a while they had gone on long walks
+together, often in rain, snow, or wind, out to the park or through the
+suburbs, talking the while of everything that concerns young men, of
+girls and God and the immortality of the soul. Or they would go into
+the gas-lighted streets with the sensation of throwing themselves into
+the turmoil of the world, would stand in front of etchings in book-shop
+windows, where they admired beyond everything a lithograph entitled
+«Don Juan in Hades» with a motto from Baudelaire:
+
+  The hero all the while, half leaning on his sword,
+  Gazed at the vessel’s wake and deigned not to look up.
+
+This picture excited their imagination, their hearts beat more quickly
+when in the current of humanity they brushed elbows with a pretty girl,
+and they believed they were living through an entire adventure every
+time an old painted professional threw them an ardent glance.
+
+But the original cause of their friendship was that they had both read
+Jacobsen’s novel, _Niels Lyhne_, and loved it more than other books.
+
+Inside the house the others were talking and laughing around the
+punch-bowls, forming themselves into groups and coteries. Most of them
+grouped themselves after their old custom according to social and
+intellectual similarities and differences, which even on the school
+benches had united some and separated them from others; Gabel and
+Billfelt, Jansson and Moberg, Planius and Tullman. Others went about
+somewhat morosely and talked about all keeping together.
+
+Josef Marin rapped on a bowl and called for a toast «to the ontological
+proof.» It was drunk with rather half-hearted acclaim. Everyone was so
+tired of school matters that it didn’t seem worth the trouble even to
+make fun of them.
+
+Josef Marin was to be a clergyman, but he was still not quite settled
+in his faith.
+
+The music played student songs, «Stand Strong!» and «Here’s to Happy
+Student Days!» Dusk began to fall over the tops of the trees, over
+the roofs and chimneys of the city and the heights of the southern
+mountains, the pallid dusk of spring twilight, which rarefies and
+uplifts all things, making them hover with the unreality of a dream
+world. The crowd, who were clinking glasses and drinking down on the
+terrace and who a little while ago could still be clearly divided into
+their component parts as lieutenants and students, guardsmen and girls,
+and townsfolk with their wives and children, had now melted together
+in the dusk into an indefinite mass. As though by an inexplicable
+caprice the murmur suddenly became silent, so that for the moment one
+could hear the plash of the water in the fountain and the last sleepy
+bird-notes from the trees. And in the west already flamed a solitary
+and mighty star.
+
+«Look at Venus,» said Henrik; «how she glitters!»
+
+Martin sat contemplatively drawing on the table, and the strokes under
+his hand formed themselves into a woman’s arms and breast.
+
+«Tell me,» he asked suddenly--he felt that he was blushing--«tell
+me, do you think it’s possible for a man to live chaste till real
+happiness in love comes to him? That’s surely what one would wish. To
+be with women whom one has no feeling for, who belong to another class,
+who have dirty linen and use ugly words and only think about being
+paid--that must be loathsome.»
+
+Henrik Rissler too became a little red.
+
+«It’s possible,» he said; «yes, for some it’s always possible. People
+are so different. But I know this much of myself, that it will hardly
+be possible for me. Then at least the great love mustn’t keep me
+waiting much longer.»
+
+They sat silent and gazed at the star, which glittered ever more
+brightly in the darkening blue.
+
+«Venus,» Martin murmured, «Venus. She’s a great and beautiful star. But
+I don’t see why she should have a name. Anyhow, she doesn’t come when
+she’s invoked.»
+
+Martin suddenly heard a strange voice behind his chair.
+
+«Very true,» said the voice, «very true. She doesn’t come when she’s
+invoked. An equally mournful and accurate observation!»
+
+Martin turned in surprise. The stranger was a man carelessly dressed,
+with a student cap, a pale narrow face and black mustaches which hung
+down over his mouth so that it wasn’t easy to see whether he smiled or
+was serious. His face looked oldish for the white cap, and it was not
+entirely clean.
+
+One of Martin’s companions stood beside him and made the introduction,
+«Doctor Markel.»
+
+Doctor Markel had come there with an older brother of Billfelt’s. They
+had come from Upsala that day, eaten dinner at Hasselbacken, and then
+invited themselves to share the student supper. The elder Billfelt
+was giving a talk inside at the moment. Martin heard something about
+«Upsala» and «alma mater.»
+
+Doctor Markel sat down beside Henrik and Martin without further
+ceremony.
+
+«Two young poets, eh?» he asked. «I venture to assume so, since the
+gentlemen sit here by themselves apart from the vulgar throng and talk
+about the stars. May I ask what your attitude toward life is? Do you
+believe in God?»
+
+Henrik Rissler looked at the stranger in surprise, and Martin shook his
+head.
+
+Doctor Markel looked entirely serious, except that there was a slight
+mist over his eyes, which were large and mournful.
+
+Some of the others had come up and were now listening to the
+conversation. Planius and Tullman presented the same docile
+countenances with which they had listened in class to the exposition of
+the instructor. Gabel simpered sarcastically with his fine aristocratic
+face, and behind him Josef Marin pressed up. Josef Marin was short
+and slight; he looked pale and overworked. The two or three glasses
+of punch he had drunk had already made him a bit convivial; but now
+when he heard a serious question proposed and could not see that there
+was any joke behind it, he broke in with all the earnestness he could
+summon up at the moment: «I believe in God. But I don’t conceive Him as
+a personal being.»
+
+Doctor Markel seemed pleasantly surprised.
+
+«Oh, you are a pantheist, charming! That’s what you must be too»--he
+turned to Martin--«you who are studying to be a poet. For poets and
+those who want to seduce girls--and that all poets wish--I cannot
+sufficiently recommend the pantheistic conception. Nothing can be
+more suited for turning the head of a young girl than the pantheistic
+rhapsodizing with which Faust answers Gretchen’s simple question, ‹Do
+you believe in God?› If he had answered as simply and unaffectedly as
+she asked, ‹No, my child, I don’t believe in God,› you may be sure
+the girl would have crossed herself, run home to her quiet chamber,
+and turned the key twice in the lock. Instead he answers that he both
+believes and disbelieves--which gives the impression of deep spiritual
+conflict--and that God is really a name for the feeling that two lovers
+have when they lie in the same bed. This he says with much feeling and
+in beautiful language, so that it does not shock her modesty; on the
+contrary, she thinks he talks like a priest, and the rest we know----
+And for a poet---- But first allow me as an elder student....»
+
+With easy familiarity Doctor Markel drank brotherhood with all who were
+within range and then continued:
+
+«For a poet, pantheism is a pure godsend, a regular gold-mine. If
+he is a churchman, he will be given the Order of Charles XIII and
+a good income, but will only be read by missies and be ridiculed by
+the liberal papers, which have the largest circulation. If he is an
+atheist, he will be considered a shallow and superficial fellow, a
+poor sort, and he will have a hard time to borrow money. No, a poet
+should believe in God, but in a god who is out of the ordinary run,
+something not yet existent, never before shown in any circus, that
+one can never really get hold of, for then the game would be up. The
+pantheistic god is exactly the raw material needed for such a being.
+That is the ideal for a god. Each and every one can carve him to his
+own taste, he is never without humor, he never punishes and of course
+never rewards either, he takes the whole show easily, which comes from
+the fact that he lacks a small characteristic that even the simplest
+of the town rowdies possesses to some extent: namely, personality.
+That’s just the choice thing about him. To a personal god one must
+stand in a personal relation; that is, one must become a religionist.
+To be a religionist is excellent if one has just come out of Langholm
+jail and needs to be rehabilitated in society. Otherwise it is
+unnecessary. You see my drift, gentlemen: to stick to a personal god
+entails a lot of unnecessary trouble, to be without a god entirely is
+ticklish. Therefore one must have an impersonal god. Such a god sets
+the imagination going and comes out finely in poetry without in return
+entailing any obligation. With such a god one will be regarded by
+cultured circles as a person of noble and enlightened thought and may
+become pretty nearly anything from an archbishop to the editor of a
+radical newspaper.
+
+«In formal style this god may be called the Allfather, in common speech
+the Lord. As a matter of fact he doesn’t need any name, it is with him
+as with that star off there: no matter how one calls him, he won’t
+come.»
+
+The gesture with which Doctor Markel sought and, as it were, beckoned
+to the star met only a dark and sullen firmament, for great clouds had
+gathered, the star was gone, it had grown dusky as an autumn evening,
+and some big raindrops now began to fall on the railing.
+
+Doctor Markel’s lecture was not well received. Josef Marin, who had
+been drinking more punch meanwhile and had become even paler than
+before, muttered something to the effect that he ought to have a smack
+on the jaw. The others got up in groups and discussed whether they
+should go home.
+
+The elder Billfelt took in the situation, rang for the waiter and
+ordered champagne. He raised his glass and returned thanks in
+well-rounded periods for the cordiality with which he and his friend,
+Doctor Markel, representatives of Upsala and alma mater, had been
+received by the future alumni. He then paid for the champagne and went
+off with Markel.
+
+«Your brother is a gentleman,» said Gabel to Billfelt.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It rained as if the heavens were opened. They crowded into a street car
+to go into the city and have coffee. Most of them voted to go to the
+Hamburg Bourse.
+
+Martin, who had always believed the Hamburg Bourse was a place where
+the German merchants of Stockholm assembled to do business, found
+himself to his surprise entering a café that seemed to irradiate a
+fabulous magnificence. Here and there on the couches sat some of his
+former teachers and a lot of oldsters who lifted their glasses and
+nodded genially.
+
+Coffee and liqueurs were brought in. There was talk of future plans.
+Most of them were to study law and expected to spend the summer in
+reading up. Enthusiasm rose, and rash promises were made to keep in
+touch and not forget each other. At one end of the table Gabel and
+Billfelt swore eternal friendship; at the other Jansson expatiated on
+his feeling for Moberg. It was only with difficulty that Josef Marin
+could be restrained from prophesying. When Josef Marin prophesied he
+would read out long rigmaroles of stuff, marriage announcements from
+the _Daily News_ mixed with bits from Tegnér’s _Svea_ and Norbeck’s
+_Theology_, all recited in the solemn monotone with which he imagined
+Elisha had chastised Ahab, and Ezekiel foretold the destruction of
+Israel and Judah. It was one o’clock, getting on towards two, and
+various members of the party had already said good night and gone off,
+especially those who seriously meant to read up for law. The crowd
+was thinning, the electric light had long ago been turned off, only a
+couple of gas jets were still burning, and the waiters stood with the
+air of martyrs as they yearned for sleep and _pourboire_. There was
+nothing to do but break up.
+
+Outside, the glimmer of dawn had already begun to spread over the
+streets and squares. It was no longer raining, but the air felt moist
+and cold and misty, and through the mist the clock-face of Jacobs
+church shone like a moon in a comic paper.
+
+It was hard to separate, and the company walked some distance down
+along the car tracks past the opera house. Out of Lagerlunden came a
+group of poets and journalists, and Martin looked at them reverently,
+wondering whether it would ever be vouchsafed him to become one of
+them. The student caps gleamed white in the night, whereupon moths came
+fluttering from right and left, slipping their arms under those of the
+young men and tempting them with promises of the greatest happiness
+in life, until amid convivial mirth and harmless joking they arrived
+at Charles XII’s Square, for Josef Marin had the fixed idea that he
+must prophesy before Charles XII. But while he was prophesying, Gabel
+caught the prettiest girl around the waist and began to waltz with her
+around the statue, Moberg followed and trod a measure with an elderly
+bacchante, and Martin stood with a pounding heart staring at a pale
+little piece of mischief with eyes as black as charcoal and wondered if
+he dared go up to her. But while he was wondering, Planius put an arm
+around her waist and scampered off, and Martin stood alone and watched
+them whirl about in the mist, pair after pair. But the morning breeze
+from the south now began to clear the mist, driving it across the river
+like white smoke, and the cross on St. Katarina’s cupola burned like
+the morning star in the first rays of the dawn.
+
+A policeman loomed up from down by the docks and gradually came nearer,
+one of the girls set up a cry of warning, and the crowd dispersed in
+all directions. A stout nymph took Martin by the arm and went along
+with him.
+
+«I must hold your arm, ducky,» she said, «or the cop will pull me in.
+Besides, you might like to come home with me, eh? I’ve a right nice
+place, you’ll see. I have a big lovely bed and sheets I embroidered
+myself. I sit and embroider mornings mostly. One must have some fun for
+oneself, and I can’t stand playing cards with mamma day out and day in
+like the other girls, and they swear and carry on and act vulgar. I
+don’t care about that sort of thing; I like nice agreeable boys like
+you. If you’re real nice and come to me and come often, I’ll embroider
+you a nightshirt for a keepsake----Oh, you haven’t any money! The
+hell, you say; that’s another pair of galoshes! Then you must come
+again when you have some. Just ask for Hulda. But tell me, is it true
+there’s a girl at Upsala that’s called Charles XII?»
+
+[Illustration: Two people by streetlight]
+
+«Not that I know,» answered Martin.
+
+«Well, good-by then»....
+
+It was not quite true that Martin had no money; he still had a few
+crowns left from the honorarium for a poem published in the _Home
+Friend_ and had only made the excuse so as not to hurt Hulda’s feelings.
+
+
+
+
+--V--
+
+
+Martin lay awake a long time, unable to sleep. It was the little pale
+girl with the black eyes that left him no rest. She had stood there so
+pale and still and lonely; she had not taken any one’s arm or laughed
+or chattered like the others. She had surely been seduced and deserted;
+she perhaps had a little child that would freeze or starve to death if
+she didn’t get it food and clothes by selling her body. How he would
+kiss her if he had her in his arms now, how he would caress her and
+give her the tenderest names, so as to make her forget who she was, a
+common street-walker, and who he was, a chance customer like all the
+rest! With whom was she now? With Planius, maybe. What could Planius
+be to her? He was no better looking than Martin and he was as stupid
+as a codfish. He had been one of the worst grinds and had only had a
+plain «graduated» on his certificate. Why should she pick out just him?
+But she, to be sure, had made no choice; she had just taken the first
+that came along. Martin understood this and found it quite natural. She
+had given away her heart and soul and had no longer anything to give
+but her body, so why should she deny that to any one when it was her
+profession to sell it and when she had already got as deep in the mire
+as a human being can get? Yet still, if Martin could meet her and she
+could get to know him, perhaps she might become fond of him and begin a
+new life. For her he would give up everything--all his dreams of poetic
+fame and his future; he would choose some profession in which he could
+immediately earn her and his upkeep; they would be married and live
+far away from men in a little house by a lake deep in the woods. They
+would row among the rushes in a little boat and dream away the hours,
+they would land on an island and be together there all night, while the
+stars burned above their heads. He would kiss away all sorrow, all dark
+memories from her brow, and would be as fond of her little child as if
+it was his own....
+
+But while Martin let his fancy wander thus, he knew quite clearly at
+the same time that under all these reveries lay nothing but desire--a
+young man’s hunger for a woman’s white body. And the further on into
+the night this lasted, while he lay awake and stared at the gray dawn
+light trickling in through the blinds, the more bitterly he regretted
+that he had said no to the other girl, the fat one.
+
+
+
+
+--VI--
+
+
+When one asks a young man who has just passed his school examinations,
+«What do you intend to be?» he cannot answer, «A poet.» People would
+turn away their heads and put their hands over their mouths. He may
+answer, a lawyer or a painter or a musician, for a man can train
+himself for all these fields at some public institution, and even
+in one’s apprenticeship one has a modest place in the community, a
+profession to follow, one already _is_ something; a student at the
+university, or a pupil in the art school or the conservatory. It is not
+much, but still it is always a sop to throw to indiscreet questioners,
+and a conceivable future to point to in the case of these more kindly
+disposed. But he who is to become a poet is nothing but a mockery
+before God and man until he is recognized and famous. He must therefore
+during all his long prentice years hang a false sign over his door and
+pretend to be busy at something that people consider respectable.
+
+This Martin realized, he found it perfectly natural and not to be
+altered, and so when his father asked him what he was to be, he
+answered not that he meant to become a poet but that he should like to
+work as an extra in a government office. His father was pleased with
+this answer, perceiving in it a sign that his son would be as sensible
+and happy as himself. He had feared that Martin might want to go to
+Upsala and study æsthetics and he felt within himself that he could
+not have refused, but he trembled at all the outlay and trouble there
+would be for a poor father of a family to keep a son at the university.
+He was therefore delighted with the reply and had nothing to remark
+except that Martin ought to try to enter not one office but as many as
+possible. That evening he invited his son to go to Blanch’s café to
+hear the music and drink toddy.
+
+But the very next day he put the affair in motion, speaking with his
+acquaintances in various departments and helping Martin to write
+applications.
+
+
+
+
+--VII--
+
+
+Martin had to attend upon the chief of the bureau to which he most
+desired to submit his services at eight o’clock in the morning in a
+frock coat and white necktie. Cold and hungry, for he had not had
+time to eat, he went up the steps of a quiet house in a fashionable
+street and rang at the door of the general director. An attendant in
+gold braid announced him and opened the door of a dark private room
+with curtains only half up. Various articles of dress lay scattered
+about here and there on the chairs, a great green laticlave hung on
+the mirror, and at the threshold stood a chamber-pot, which he nearly
+tripped over but checked himself in time and stood there making an
+awkward bow. In the middle of the room stood a venerable old man in a
+purple-red satin dressing-gown, gesticulating with a razor, his chin
+covered with lather. Then out of the red satin and the white lather
+proceeded a voice, which said: «You have a fine student certificate,
+young gentleman, but don’t forget that honesty and diligence are and
+will continue to be the highest requisites in government service. You
+are accepted and may report tomorrow to begin your duties, if there is
+anything to do. Above everything, be honest! Good-by.»
+
+Martin assumed that this discourteous injunction was in accord with
+ancient custom and refused to be daunted. He went to the office of the
+department, where he was given a place at a table and a thick ledger
+to inspect. He added up column after column. If the figures came out
+right, his duty was to put ticks in the margin; if they did not, he was
+to make notes of the fact. But they always did come out right. Martin
+gradually came to the conviction that there were never any mistakes in
+these accounts, and when this conviction became rooted in him, he gave
+up adding entirely and merely put in ticks. Sometimes he looked up from
+his real or pretended work and listened to the buzzing of the flies
+or the rain plashing on the windowpanes, or to the conversation and
+grumbling of the older men, or to a blind man playing a flute in the
+yard.
+
+And he said to himself, «So this is life.»
+
+
+
+
+--VIII--
+
+
+But for Martin this was not life. For him it was a retreat, an asylum
+in which he had sought repose for a time, which he hoped to make short.
+
+He read and thought. In books and in his own thoughts he searched for
+what one so often seeks in youth in order to forget in age that one
+has ever bothered about it: a faith to live by, a star to steer by, a
+concord in things, a meaning, and a goal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Martin had been a Christian up to his sixteenth year. It is natural
+for a child to believe what his elders say is true. He had believed
+everything and had not doubted, and on Sundays he had gone to church
+with his parents. If the preacher was a good talker and a charlatan,
+he felt edified and moved and wished he could become such a preacher;
+but if it was an honest unassuming minister who preached as well as he
+could without making any fuss or gesticulations, he generally went to
+sleep.
+
+But when he was sixteen he was confirmed. Up to then religion had been
+a detail of school work set side by side with other details; now it
+became all of a sudden the one essential, that which daily demanded
+his time and consideration. The question could not be appeased by
+the thought: «This is just a matter of the emotions,» since it was
+customary to weep when one «went forward.» It freely developed the
+claim to be the highest of all, the dominant force in life, the one
+thing that mattered. And Martin could not escape the discovery that
+if religion was the truth, then it was right in this claim, the claim
+to be above everything else, and he must devote all his powers and
+his whole soul to it; he must become religious. But if it was not the
+truth, then he must seek the truth wherever he could find it; he must
+become a free-thinker. The course between, the Christianity of use and
+custom such as is professed and believed in by the multitude, was to
+him mere thoughtlessness and conventionality. This was an evasion which
+seemed natural to him in most of his comrades, but it never occurred to
+him to think that this was open to him. He stood at the parting of the
+ways and had to choose.
+
+But one night when he lay awake pondering over this, unable to sleep,
+while the moon shone straight into his room and the thoughts crowded
+into his head, suddenly it stood clear to him that he did not believe.
+It seemed to him that he had long realized the Christian religion was
+something that no one could really believe if he wished to be honest
+with himself. It became evident to him that the problem as to the
+truth of Christianity was something which he had already gone past and
+that it was actually a quite different problem which now disturbed
+him: how was it possible that the others could believe in this when
+he could not? By «the others» he meant not only his comrades--for
+they did not seem to concern themselves any further in such matters,
+and he knew besides that one could get them to believe in a little of
+everything--but his parents, his teachers, all the grown-ups, who must
+know more of life and the world than he did. How was it possible that
+he, Martin Birck, who wasn’t sixteen yet and lay in a little iron bed
+in the home of his parents, could think differently about the highest
+and most important things than did old and experienced people, and how
+could he be right and they wrong? This seemed to him almost as wildly
+absurd as the faith he had just rejected. Here he was completely at a
+loss; he couldn’t come to any solution. He got up out of bed and went
+to the window. Snow was glittering white on the roofs, it was dark
+in the houses, and the street lay empty. The moon stood high in the
+heavens, but it was a gray-white winter moon, small and frost-bitten
+and infinitely far away, and in the moon-haze the stars twinkled
+sleepily and dully. Martin stood tracing with his finger on the pane.
+«Give me a sign, God!» he whispered. Then he stood long at the window,
+getting chilly and staring at the moon; he saw it glide in and become
+hidden behind a black factory chimney and he saw it creep out again on
+the other side. But he received no sign.
+
+In the depths of his heart he did not wish for a sign either, for he
+felt that a conviction was something that one could not and should not
+have as a gift by means of a miracle. To seek for truth and be honest
+with oneself in the search, that was the one clue he could find.
+
+Martin supposed that confirmation and the first communion were duties
+prescribed by law which he could not evade. His father had no different
+conception, or if he had he did not say so, for he reverenced the
+proverb: Speech is silver, silence is golden. Martin therefore went to
+communion with the other neophytes. It was a spring day with sun and
+tender green in the old trees of the churchyard, and when Martin heard
+the bells roar and sing and the organ begin the processional hymn, his
+eyes filled with tears and he grieved in his heart that he was not as
+the others and could not believe and feel as they did. And when he saw
+the church full of serious folk and heard the voice of the preacher
+enjoining the young people from the pulpit to hold fast to the faith of
+their fathers, he felt unrest and confusion through his inmost soul,
+and again the question came to trouble him: «How is it possible that
+all these can believe, and not I? It’s mad to think that I alone can
+be right against all these and against all the dead who sleep in their
+graves out there, who lived and died in the faith I reject. It’s mad,
+it’s mad! I must conquer my reason and teach myself to believe.» But
+when he came to the actual ceremonies and saw the ministers in their
+surplices going back and forth before the altar, while they dispensed
+the bread and wine and carried napkins over their arms like waiters,
+he felt faint and disgusted and could not understand that he had let
+himself be fooled into such mummery. And although he knew or believed
+that these ministers who shuffled about there in the gloom were in
+everyday life about as honest as most people, they seemed to him at
+that moment shameless hypocrites.
+
+Belief in a God and in a life after this was what Martin had left at
+this time of his childhood faith. But his god was no longer a fatherly
+god who listened to prayers and nodded approval if they were needful
+and intelligent, or shook his head if they were childish and stupid.
+His god had become cold as ice and remote as the moon he had stood
+staring at on the winter’s night, and Martin ceased saying his evening
+prayer, for he did not believe there was anyone who heard it. Then
+finally came the day when Martin realized that what he had been calling
+god these last days was something with which no human being could come
+into any relation either of love or obedience or opposition, something
+which could only have the name of god by a wanton play of words and a
+misuse of the incompleteness of language.
+
+And when he examined his belief in immortality, he soon found that he
+had got far away from the blue heaven of his childhood. He had observed
+that all who on any ground other than that of revelation preserved
+their belief in a life after this also assumed a life before this,
+and he found such an assumption both natural and logical. Only that
+is eternal which has always existed. What has come into being will
+sometime cease to be: such was the law for everything existent. But
+Martin had no memory of any earlier existence, nor had he either read
+or heard tell of any one who had with any gleam of probability given it
+out that he remembered any such state. There were, to be sure, people
+who asserted that they recalled their preëxistence, but they regularly
+maintained that they had been some historic personage of whom they
+had read in books during their present life: _e.g._, Julius Caesar or
+Gregory VII. Only rarely could any one remember having been a slave or
+a waiter or a shop-clerk. This circumstance appeared peculiar. In any
+event it was clear that the great majority of people, and Martin among
+them, had not the slightest recollection of any previous existence.
+He concluded from this that neither in a future life would he be
+able to remember anything of the present, that indeed he would not
+be able to verify his own identity; and he found that if one called
+such an existence immortality, it was again--as in the question of
+God--a weakness of thought, a play with the imperfection of language,
+and nothing else. And it struck him as even more bizarre to give
+such a name to the passage of the dead body into living nature, into
+plants and animals and air and water. He had no mind for such kinds of
+word-play.
+
+Things went on in this way so that Martin set out in life without any
+other belief than that he would grow up, get old and die like a tree in
+the ground, as his forefathers had done, and that the green earth which
+he saw with his eyes was his only home in the world and the only space
+in which it was given him to live and act. And among the many dreams
+he composed about his life was that in which he was to become like
+a great and beautiful tree by the wayside with rich foliage, giving
+coolness and shelter to many. He wished to create happiness and beauty
+around him and to clear away illusions; he meant to speak and write so
+that all would have to perceive at once that he was right. To be sure
+he was not quite certain that truth in itself could produce happiness,
+but history had taught him that illusion created unhappiness and crime.
+Like pestilences the various religions had passed over the world, and
+he was astounded when he thought of all the desolation with which
+Christianity had marked its way through times and peoples. But he
+believed in full confidence that its days were reckoned, that he lived
+at the dawn of a new time, and he wanted to play his part in thought
+and poetry toward breaking the road for what was to come.
+
+At the time when Martin believed and thought thus it still occurred
+to him that life, no matter how short and unstable it was, had
+nevertheless a sort of meaning. He felt himself to be in a state of
+development and growth; every day new truths arose before his mind
+and new beauty before his senses during his long lonely wanderings
+to the edge of the city or in the woods when spring had begun. And
+spring.... At that time spring was still a real spring--not a disease,
+an intoxication, a fever in the blood, in which all old half-forgotten
+yearning and regret rises to the surface and says: «Look, here I am!
+Do you recognize me? I have slept long but I am not dead.» Nothing
+of that sort, but an awakening, a morning, a murmur in the air,
+and a resounding song. And at that time the thousand unsatisfied
+desires which he bore within him were like so many shimmering hopes
+and half-uttered promises, for no long years of emptiness and
+disappointment had yet managed to sharpen them into cutting knives
+which wounded and tore at the soul. And if he did not believe that
+all these obligations, or even most of them, would be redeemed by
+life, they were still like bribing possibilities, like a lever for
+dreams without goal or bounds; and even at the moment when the book
+he held in his hand or the experience he had had in the course of the
+day whispered warnings in his ear and advised him not to believe in
+happiness, these dreams were woven into a longing without bitterness
+and a melancholy as luminous as a spring twilight.
+
+Nevertheless these warnings came ever more closely together, and ever
+more often it happened that in the midst of the dreams youthful blood
+conjured up he caught himself listening to the other voice, the voice
+that welled up from the depths of the oldest times and was echoed in
+the newest books of the day, the strange voice that none of the hundred
+new gospels which periodically as equinoctial storms had blown through
+the minds of men could silence for more than a brief moment, the voice
+which said: «All is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun.»
+Why was he alive, and what was the meaning of it all? He did not cease
+to ask himself these questions, for he still continuously demanded of
+the life which he saw with his eyes that there should be something
+behind it, something which could be called life’s meaning. For most
+of the happiness which he saw men possess and that which he saw them
+strive for seemed to him like the fairy gold in the story, to be
+withered leaves, or it appeared to him like nice playthings, something
+not to be taken seriously. If he turned his gaze to his own life as
+he lived it from day to day, he could not escape the thought that in
+itself it was miserable and empty and that its only worth lay in the
+uncertain hope that it would not remain as it was. But what he hoped
+for was not something that one could approach step by step with work
+and patience and a hundred small sacrifices--competence and respect
+and that sort of thing--what he hoped for was something indefinite and
+indescribable: a sunrise, a break-up of the ice, an awakening from a
+painful and purposeless dream.
+
+For it was like a painful and purposeless dream that his life appeared
+when he looked at it with waking eyes and found it filled with shabby
+joy, with vulgar sorrow and ignoble anxiety. Now and then he wrote
+some poems and stories to earn a little money and to prove how far
+his words could follow his thoughts, but with every new year all he
+had written in the old seemed to him childish and worthless, and he
+felt that nothing would amount to anything which could not fill him
+completely with the joy of creation. Beyond this he fulfilled almost
+automatically the sum of actions, or more properly gestures, which
+usually characterize a young man in a government office or to which
+other circumstances may lead. He went to his work as late in the day as
+possible and left as early as propriety allowed. He made acquaintance
+with his fellow employees and shared in their amusements. He drank
+punch, ate suppers, and visited cheap girls of the streets; he loved
+music and often sat at the opera among the blackamoors and musical
+enthusiasts of the upper gallery, and he sang quartettes and took his
+reward in double file when an old school superintendent hung the gilded
+tin funnel on a rose-colored ribbon around his neck with paternal hands.
+
+And he said to himself: «No, I’m dreaming. This is not life.»
+
+
+
+
+--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.
+
+
+
+
+THE WINTER NIGHT ❧
+
+
+
+
+--I--
+
+
+Over Martin’s table in the office an electric light with a green shade
+swung, like a pendulum, gently to and fro on its silken cord. It
+had been set in motion just a moment ago when he had lighted it. He
+stretched out his hand to stop it, but instead waited the time when
+the swinging should subside and die down until it was imperceptible.
+Lamps were likewise screwed up over the other tables, six shining
+green triangles swung to and fro in the semi-darkness of the room, and
+lean writers’ hands fumbled at the windows after the curtain cords to
+pull them down and shut out the snow and the winter dusk. Martin loved
+these green lamps, which gave out no heat or bad odor, and whose glow
+had the pure and cold sheen of jewels; and he longed for the day when
+electric light should be cheap enough to make its way down even into
+the homes of the poor. And just here in this big low old room with
+whitewashed walls, because the house was old and had a groined gateway
+and low small-paned windows in the entrance hall where his office was,
+these green lamps seemed to him to fit in even better; he saw in this
+a symbol of continuous development, an unbroken chain of hands and
+wills, from those which had wearied long since to those which were now
+in embryo, the new inwoven with the old. Where all is old there enters
+an atmosphere of wretchedness and decay, and where all is new only that
+can thrive and feel at home which is itself new from top to toe, from
+pocketbook to soul.
+
+And Martin was not new, his clothes were not new, nor were his
+thoughts. He thought and knew nothing great other than that which
+others had taught him--various old gentlemen in England and France who
+were now for the most part dead. If these thoughts still brought him
+any joy, it was mainly because the times had seemingly forgotten them
+long ago, as if they had been written in running water. Other winds
+were blowing now, winds before which he preferred to draw up his collar
+over his ears; everything came back and all the corpses peeped out, but
+he did not care to see them.
+
+The lamp had ceased to swing over his desk, and he returned to his
+accounting. He no longer contented himself with putting down ticks;
+he carefully scanned every item and added up every column. His first
+youthful antipathy to a mechanical task was long since conquered, and
+he had gradually come to learn that these figures were not, as he had
+first believed, entirely free from the imperfections which are inherent
+in everything human. On the contrary they were often encumbered with
+inaccuracies and mistakes; and when he now and again discovered such
+mistakes, he was glad at heart but felt at the same time a faint
+sensation of sorrow. He was glad because he had occasion to show his
+great zeal and because he could count upon his rightful percentage of
+the sum which his alertness had saved the state treasury; and he felt
+the dark memory of ancient sorrow when he recalled that he had desired
+a quite different sort of joy from life. Sometimes, too, he thought of
+the poor officials down at Landskrona, Ohus, or Haparanda, who had made
+the wrong calculations, perhaps under the influence of last night’s
+toddy, and who would now have to pay the difference. But this thought
+left him cold, for the years had taught him he must set limits to his
+sympathies.
+
+It was warm in the room, the remains of a great birchwood fire glowed
+in the porcelain stove, for there was no inducement to spare the
+government’s wood in these times when one had to skimp one’s fuel at
+home. Von Heringslake, the chief clerk, who had an income of forty-six
+hundred crowns and performed his duties with the pleasant ease which
+comes with an independence, sat squatted in front of the stove and
+roasted apples over the embers. On his bald pate--which his mortal
+enemy, Auditor Camin, asserted was the result of early dissipations but
+which in reality shone with the innocence of early childhood--glinted
+the triangular reflection of a green lamp. The fragrance of roasted
+apples spread and stung Martin’s nostrils, and he was bitterly annoyed
+that he had not in all ways the same views concerning this and the
+future life as Heringslake, for then he would surely have been offered
+an apple. From Auditor Camin’s place sounded for the hundredth time
+the old pronouncement, «The country will never be right till we make
+the farmers pay for shooting licenses.» And down at the bottom table
+off by the door, where it was draughty and there was a wet odor of
+umbrellas and overcoats, the youngest generation was eagerly at work
+putting in ticks and trying at the same time to recount in whispers the
+orgies of last night and the number of punch bottles emptied.
+
+Martin was still young, for in government service one ages slowly,
+but he was no longer one of the youngest and did not have to sit in
+the draught of the door. He had drunk brotherhood with most of his
+immediate superiors and in his turn did not neglect the duty of laying
+aside formalities with those who were younger than he. These ceremonies
+were wont to be performed at a general banquet in December. This was
+to occur in a few days, and the list of subscriptions was now being
+circulated in the department, but Martin did not sign it. He had other
+uses for his money, and there was only one of the newcomers with whom
+he would have cared to drink brotherhood, a young man who had a place
+just opposite him at the same table and in whom there was something
+familiar and appealing to his sympathy: namely, an absent and dreamy
+glance and the mechanical gesture with which he set down the ticks.
+Martin often used to talk to him about the way of the world and was
+pleased when he sometimes received intelligent answers.
+
+As he handed over the subscription list without writing on it himself,
+the other looked up and asked in a tone which seemed to convey a touch
+of disappointment, «Aren’t you coming to the banquet?»
+
+«No,» answered Martin, «I have another engagement. But we who are above
+conventional forms can assume that we have drunk brotherhood just the
+same.»
+
+The other blushed a little, and they shook hands across the table.
+
+«Tell me,» the younger man asked after a while, «why does Auditor Camin
+want to charge the farmers for shooting licenses?»
+
+«I don’t really believe he wants that,» Martin replied. «He knows that
+shooting licenses for the farmers would raise the price of necessities
+even more than taxes. He is only repeating an old saw that he heard
+in his youth when he was an assistant. It has stuck to him because it
+expresses a collective antipathy, a class hatred; and commonplace
+men always need to hate and love collectively. Look out for that, it
+is one of the surest signs of an inferior point of view. He likes
+women, officials, leading actors, and West Gothlanders, because he is
+a West Gothlander himself; and he hates farmers, Jews, Northlanders,
+and journalists. It is true that the farmers are a bit stingy in
+recognizing the services which he and the rest of us perform for our
+country, and that is why he hates them. But in that they observe
+the same principle as all employers of labor: to pay as little as
+competition will allow. If there was a shortage in clerks, they would
+pay more.»
+
+Von Heringslake, who had by now eaten his roasted apples and resumed
+his place at the table next to Martin, turned on his chair and surveyed
+him mournfully.
+
+«You have no heart,» he said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was after three o’clock; here and there the men were gathering up
+their papers and going off. Martin got up, took his coat and hat, put
+out his green lamp, and departed. He had crape on his hat, for his
+mother was dead.
+
+
+
+
+--II--
+
+
+He turned into Long Western Street. On snowy days such as this he
+nearly always took that street, because in the narrow winding rift
+between the tall old houses one was as if half indoors, in the lee of
+the worst wind gusts.
+
+«Winter, cold.... Strange there are people who assert that they like
+this weather. Heringslake, who has a heart in his breast and loves his
+native land, regards cold as preferable to heat. But when it’s cold,
+he always puts on furs. The conception of hell as a very warm place
+clearly originated in the torrid zone. If a northerner had invented
+it, it would have been contrariwise a fearful place for draughts,
+the breeding ground of influenza and chronic snuffles. But such as
+the climate is, I have got used to it, and it has possibly done me
+excellent service of which I myself am not aware. Provisions are laid
+on ice in order to keep; everything is preserved longer in cold. Why
+not human beings as well? I once longed to be consumed in the flame of
+a great passion. It never came, whether because I was not deserving
+of so great an honor, or whatever the reason may have been. But now,
+afterwards, I have begun to misdoubt that such a conflagration may
+rather be a bonfire to amuse the spectators than any real enjoyment for
+the chief actor. Fire is, in any case, distinctly not my element. If a
+real spring sun were ever to come into my life, I should go rotten at
+once from being unused to the climate.»
+
+He stopped a moment in front of a jeweler’s window. Most of the pieces
+were distinguished by a commonplaceness which left him no regret that
+he could not purchase any. Once, indeed, it was just a year ago to the
+day, he had bought a little ring with a green emerald. She to whom it
+had been given still wore it and never wanted to wear any other ring.
+She said she shouldn’t ever want to wear a plain gold ring. Well, in
+any case he couldn’t offer her such a specimen....
+
+«I’m ungrateful,» he said to himself, «now that at last a little
+sunlight has come into my life, more maybe than comes into most. But I
+have been frozen too long; I haven’t been able to thaw out yet.»
+
+He had come out on Mint Square, the northerly gale blew his eyes shut
+with the snow, and he felt his way along, half blind, toward North
+Bridge. He had to stop again to get breath at Looström’s bookstore,
+where the celebrities of the day were exhibited in the window: Crispi,
+King Milan, and Taine, while between an Excellency and a forger he
+discovered a face that looked familiar. It was a Swedish poet, the
+decadent who had expounded his ideas of life at the «Anglais» over
+the green chartreuse. He was not there because he was a great man but
+because he was dead.
+
+Martin went on toward home.
+
+«At last a man who has reached his goal! His goal was a bit unusual,
+and he did not reach it quite as he imagined; he never got the general
+paralysis of his dream, for he died simply and modestly of consumption.
+But I don’t suppose he was so particular as to details; as a matter of
+fact he only wanted to succumb, no matter how. Perhaps he was right;
+that’s the sort of goal one ought to set for oneself if he hopes to
+reach it in his lifetime. It is true one might also propose to oneself
+to be a millionaire or a bishop or a member of the legislature, and
+that goal too one can usually reach if he really wants to. Those who
+know how to concentrate their will with sufficient intensity on a
+single object are so extremely few that the competition is by no means
+prohibitive. Everybody wants to be rich, but most men wish at the same
+time to live as if they were rich already; they want to take things
+easy, to have a nap after dinner, drink champagne with the girlies and
+so on, and so they never get rich, never even become bishops or members
+of the legislature. He who wants to stop on the road every now and then
+and enjoy life a bit before he reaches his objective will never reach
+it; and the others, the indefatigable pilgrims, the men of will who
+arrive--what have they left afterwards when they get there?
+
+«On the other hand it is possibly superfluous to expend any particular
+effort on the objective: to succumb. That is a goal which can certainly
+be attained at a cheaper price; it even comes near of itself, slowly
+and surely. The best thing is perhaps that which the other dead man
+over there in the bookshop window loved so much while he lived: a big
+tree and tranquil thoughts. For it is not quite true, what Messer Guido
+Cavalcanti said when he felt death approaching, that it is as vain to
+think as to act. In one way it is no doubt true: namely, that the
+final result will always be the same black pit, and as a meditation on
+death Messer Guido’s words have their value. But looked at from another
+point of view, it is clear that he who enjoys thinking is always in
+this world of incalculables in a slightly better position than a man
+of action. Because for him the minute has its worth in and for itself,
+independent of the uncertainties of the future. He who wishes to
+become a Knight of the Order of the Seraphim or a pope and gives up
+everything, the pleasures both of thought and of love, to attain that
+object--and the first sacrifice at least is inevitable--and then gets a
+fishbone in his throat and dies before he has reached it, his life is a
+nullity, an intention without performance. But he whose standard lies
+in thought may have his life cut off at any point and it will be like
+the snake of popular superstition, it will still live, it will have its
+value even as a fragment; nay, it has never, properly speaking, assumed
+that it wished to be anything but a fragment. For he who is measured by
+the standard of thought can never set himself any human goal, or if he
+does, this will be arbitrary and inessential, and it is a matter of no
+significance whether he reaches it or not.»
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Martin had got up to Östermalm and was almost home; he was hungry and
+was eager for his dinner, yet he stopped at a street corner and looked
+up toward a window high up in a fourth story.
+
+Yes, there was a light there; she was home then. He knew that already,
+anyhow, and he knew besides that she expected him after dinner. In the
+evening they were to go to a theater together; they were to sit in a
+stage box behind a screen where nobody could see them.
+
+He had taken a mistress. Chance had brought them together. She worked
+in a life insurance office in the morning counting money. She worked
+for her living. She had, to be sure, an old father somewhere off in the
+country, a pensioned forester who wrote her letters three times a year;
+but she was self-supporting and depended upon no one. Like other young
+girls she had dreamed of a happiness which should be correct, and had
+guarded her jewel in the hope of being married. She had had her fancies
+and been in love with men who had not even noticed it. But these small
+flames had gone out when they had no fuel, and if a man not too
+ridiculous or repulsive had wished to offer her his hand, she could
+easily have persuaded herself that she loved him. But she had seen
+the years run away; she had danced in the winter and bicycled in the
+summer, and many men had let her divine by their looks and veiled words
+that they would gladly possess her; but no one had wanted to marry her,
+for she had no dowry and did not belong to a family with influence. The
+more economical and diffident of the men, moreover, were frightened by
+her elegance, for she had a sure and delicate taste and two industrious
+hands, and many a night she sat up by her lamp and sewed cheap remnants
+and old shreds into dresses, which later gave to inexperienced eyes the
+impression of having cost a great deal, or to the more skeptical-minded
+even suggested a doubt of her virtue. She was not, however, beautiful
+enough for the men whose feelings were governed by their vanity, nor
+did her nature have anything of the sweet and docile quality fitted
+to attract men who wished to be lords in their own home, men who had
+simply tired of bachelor life and therefore looked about for a nice
+and charming and modest and obedient wife.
+
+Both her own character and her outer circumstances were such that she
+had no great prospect of being loved for any other reason than love,
+and she had gradually begun to suspect that this feeling, of which so
+much was said and written, was really scorned and put to one side so
+that it was extremely rare. She had thought over all this, she had felt
+the minutes running through her fingers like sand, and had decided
+that the years to come would be still more wretched and worthless than
+those before and that the jewel she guarded was losing its value every
+day. Most of all she had been frightened at how quickly women age who
+live without men, except those who are so fortunate as not to feel any
+strong desire or lack. But she was not of these; no, she was a real
+woman and she knew she was. The desire which in her first youth had
+only been a sweet and indefinite longing, a dream of happiness of a
+strange and unknown sort, now burned in her veins like poison; and her
+first timid girlish fancy, which had hardly dared to look beyond a kiss
+in the twilight between bushes of roses, had developed with years into
+a hobgoblin much worse than those used in children’s picture-books to
+frighten naughty boys. Her glance became wistful and yearning, and she
+tried to bring herself to a decision.
+
+She had almost given up hope of a husband; it was a lover she was
+seeking, and even him she sought for long in vain. It was not that
+there was a lack of men who would take her out to dance; there were
+on the contrary many, and she could make a choice. She looked around
+in her circle; she flirted right and left. She grew less afraid about
+her reputation than before and went to secret rendezvous with men who
+had been attentive to her some evening at a ball. But they remained
+strange to her, and every time an understanding was in the air, she was
+overcome with shame and became suddenly icy with fear and repugnance.
+For every time when the critical moment came, she read in the man’s
+eyes the ineradicable crudity of his heart. She read it as plainly as
+if it had stood written on white paper that what was for her a wholly
+new experience in life--perhaps ruin, perhaps salvation--was for him an
+amorous adventure. She read that what she was about to do was in his
+eyes merely a _faux pas_, which he could overlook only in so far as it
+gave him pleasure; and she read that not only did he intend to give her
+up very soon, but that he also meant to salve his conduct beforehand by
+showing her his contempt. She saw all this and tired of the game before
+it had begun, asking herself if she might not just as well follow the
+path of virtue, which in any case was clearly the most convenient, and
+wither into old age without will and without hope.
+
+But when she met Martin all this became different, and when she gave
+herself to him she felt no more fear, because she saw that he had
+understood her, that his thoughts were not like those of the others,
+and she felt that he loved her. With him she felt no shame, nor did
+she feign any, for she had already sinned so much in her thoughts that
+the reality seemed to her innocent and pure. She was no longer young;
+she was getting on toward thirty, just as he was. Her complexion had
+already been marked by the early frost, and vanished illusions had made
+her bitter at heart and crude of speech. But the bitter heart beat warm
+and fast when it rested on his, and the ugly words did not make her
+mouth less sweet to kiss.
+
+
+
+
+--III--
+
+
+Martin sat alone with his father at the dinner table within the same
+circle of yellow light which had enclosed the sleepy winter evenings
+of his childhood. Martin Birck and his father had seldom anything to
+say to each other. They thought differently about everything except the
+taxes on food-stuffs. This lack of agreement did not, however, cause
+them any sorrow; they attached no importance to it. They both knew that
+different generations think differently, and they found this natural.
+Nor did they find silence anything painful or oppressive; it was just
+the self-evident expression of the fact that nothing had happened which
+could give rise to an exchange of opinions. When they chatted together
+it was mostly about the improvement of government work and about new
+houses. For Martin’s father was interested in his city. On Sundays he
+often went for long walks to distant parts of the city and saw how
+new suburbs shot up out of the earth. He thought of how Stockholm had
+developed since his youth, and he found all the new houses handsome,
+especially if they were large and imposing with many windows and small
+towers at the corners. And when Martin heard his father speak of all
+these ugly houses and call them handsome, he thought of how unjust life
+was, since it remorselessly closed the way to the inner regions of
+beauty for the best and most useful members of the community. For the
+way thither went through melancholy, there was no other, and it was not
+idly that the Greek musician answered Alexander, «May the gods never
+make you so unhappy, my lord, that you may learn to understand music
+better than I.» Martin’s father had had a youth too full of worry and
+a manhood too full of strenuous responsibility to know anything of the
+mental depression with which life punishes those who think more about
+beautiful and ugly and good and evil than they do about their daily
+bread.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On this day, as usual, Martin’s father discoursed about one thing and
+another over his coffee and cigar. He spoke of a men’s dinner he had
+attended the day before, where he had felt embarrassed on account of
+his Vasa decoration; for he had gone with the large official medal,
+which was the only one he had, whereas the other men had had the small
+miniatures.
+
+«So,» he finished, «I looked like the biggest fool of the company.»
+
+«Yes,» observed Martin, «appearances were clearly against you. But in
+reality the miniature medals of the others gave the clearest proof that
+their foolishness was greater, since because of their decoration they
+went to more expense than was strictly necessary.»
+
+«Yes,» his father answered, «I thought of that too, but I felt awkward,
+anyhow.»
+
+The conversation died down. Martin was thinking of various stories
+about decorations which he had heard, such as that about a man who had
+been given the Vasa medal because he had sent flowers to the royal
+hospital on the days when the queen was to visit it, and about one who
+got the North Star because he had bought a house. But it never occurred
+to him to tell these, because when he thought the matter over he could
+see that these stories, which he found so amusing, might not have
+quite the same effect on the elder man, who had earned his decoration
+by forty years of ill-paid work in the government service and could
+therefore hardly fail to think of it without some respect, although in
+conversation he might make fun of it.
+
+Silence spread out around them; the father smoked his cigar and looked
+out into the dark, and Martin sat in thought. He thought of the history
+of his home, how it, like other homes, had come into existence, grown
+and blossomed, and how afterwards the bonds had one after another been
+broken: his sister married, his mother dead. The best time, the blossom
+time, was mostly that when the children had just grown up and the
+elders were not really old. It was true he had heard old women say that
+the happiest time was when the children were small. Yes, that might
+well be--for the mothers. But he remembered the years when his sister
+had just grown up and was about to be married. Then everything was glad
+in the home; they had youth, friends, music. The piano, which now was
+dumb, still held the waltzes and opera selections of the bygone years;
+and often when he lay awake at night, he could still hear the Norwegian
+songs they sang then: «He Leaned above the Garden Bench» and «I Ask
+Thee Not for Roses from thy Breast.» In these songs still lived a part
+of his youth, and they now seemed full of all the strange melancholy
+of the past. Then suddenly the house had became silent, more silent
+with every year, till one day the father sat alone with the son in an
+empty and shattered home.
+
+Looking at his father, he asked himself, «What can I be to him?»
+«Infinitely little,» he had to answer, «almost nothing.» She whom he
+had loved from his youth up now lay under the earth, under a little
+snow-covered gray stone, and could not warm his age. The fire on the
+hearth was ready to die out. _He_ was the one whose duty it was to
+kindle the new flame. He felt it was this which, in the normal course
+of things, the elders of the family had the right to expect of the
+young: to see the chain carried on, a new home, and grandchildren to
+rock on their knees. It was so that nature had arranged, she tried
+everywhere to hide the dead with new young life, as we ourselves cover
+corpses under flowers. Dissolution was thus more easily approached; the
+way went downward, to be sure, but one took it amid play and prattle,
+as when one started the journey. But to that great and simple craving
+he could answer nothing. It was true he could do several things: he
+did not think there was any sort of beauty in the world that was
+foreign to him, or any thought or shade of a thought that he could
+not follow, and furthermore he could look over government ledgers and
+inscribe signs in the margins, and drink a good deal of whisky without
+losing control of his mind, and perhaps a few other small matters. But
+he could not build a home. Not a chance, not a possibility of it. An
+artisan, a day laborer could do it, but not he. He could not conjure
+forth the four thousand crowns a year that a poor family of the middle
+class needed to live. If he could ever get to that point, as he well
+might with years, he would be old, his father dead, and she whom he
+loved--what would have become of her?
+
+But it was true, he realized, that the old man did not, at least not
+consciously, make any such demand on him. On the contrary his father
+understood clearly how impossible it was. He had no hope of seeing a
+continuation of his line, of being able to grow old in an environment
+of futurity and promise and new scions. But Martin realized that just
+this, the fact that he could have no such hope, weighed upon him like
+a dark sorrow and made his twilight even more gray and empty. He had
+had grief enough without that. He had received small pleasure from
+his daughter’s marriage. Her little boy was dead, and she had lately
+written home that she wanted a divorce from her husband.
+
+«The fire is dying on the hearth. Who is to kindle the new flame?»
+
+His father went into his room for his after-dinner nap.
+
+It was five, and Martin dressed to go to her who was waiting for
+him. He put on an evening suit despite the fact that they were to be
+alone and unseen. He had promised her that, for it was their bridal
+anniversary.
+
+
+
+
+--IV--
+
+
+She stood at her dressing table, where two narrow candles burned before
+the mirror. She had just arranged her rich brown hair, and before she
+finished her toilet she touched her face with a powder puff to subdue
+the color. He sat behind her in a corner of the sofa, but their glances
+met in the mirror and were fixed on each other in a long smile. The
+trembling of the candle flames and the distance, which the mirror
+lengthened, made this smile dark and mysterious. And far within the
+dusky depth behind the glass danced a green spark from the emerald on
+her finger.
+
+«Shall you be ready soon?» he asked. «It’s half-past seven. I’m afraid
+we shall miss the ghost.»
+
+[Illustration: Man in evening suit]
+
+It was Hamlet they were to see.
+
+She turned and stroked his cheek with the powder puff, so that he
+became as white as a Pierrot.
+
+«Silly Pierrette,» he said, wiping off the powder with her
+handkerchief, «don’t you see I’m pale enough as it is?»
+
+She leaned down, pressed his head to her breast, and kissed his hair.
+
+«I am so happy,» she whispered, «because it is my bridal day today,
+and because I am going to the theater with you to sit in a little nook
+where no one can see us.»
+
+He caressed her hand softly. He felt a secret stab in the heart when
+he heard her speak so, for he knew almost to a certainty that if there
+had been any chance of it she would much rather have sat with him in
+a place where all could see them. But he did not believe that she had
+been thinking of this just now. Never during the past year had she let
+fall an allusion to marriage, and she knew only too well how impossible
+it was. But he on his part could never cease to feel it as a secret
+disgrace that it was not in his power to give her the happiness which
+belonged to a secure and respected social position where she would not
+need to conceal anything from the world. He felt thus not because there
+remained in a corner of his soul any idea of a duty to be performed or
+of any transgression that ought to be atoned for, but because he was
+infinitely fond of her and could have wished to make life bright for
+her eyes and smooth for her little foot, which had such stony paths to
+go that it was not surprising if at last it had trodden a bit awry.
+
+He dismissed these thoughts, however; he did not mean to attempt the
+impossible; he was no strong man who could take her in his arms and
+break a way for them both. And she had made her own choice. She had
+known strong men too, the kind of men of whom women commonly say, «He’s
+a real man»; if she had wished she might have given her love to one of
+them, and he would not have despised it. But her deepest instinct had
+held her back with forebodings of shame and unhappiness. For, strangely
+enough, it was precisely the strong men who rarely acted as he could
+have wished to do had he been able; they were strong just because in
+the crisis, when there was really something at stake, their feelings
+always formed an alliance with their profit, and they usually knew
+where best to employ their strength. No, he and she had nothing else to
+do, lonely and chilled as they were, than gratefully and without any
+yearning for the impossible to warm themselves at the happiness which
+had fallen into their hands, blessing the day when they were driven
+together by the voice of their blood, which told them that they suited
+each other and could bring each other joy. Secretly, however, he often
+liked to dwell on the remote vision that some day many years hence he
+might be able to give her a home. The thought that by then she would
+be already an old woman did not frighten him. He had the feeling that,
+no matter how fast time flew, even if she had gray hair and wrinkles
+around her eyes, her young white body could never become old--it would
+still remain young and warm as now; and no matter how the years passed
+and winter after winter snowed under his youth and stung his soul and
+his thoughts with needles of ice, his heart would always be warm as now
+to the beating of hers, and that always when the two met there would
+spring up a spark of the sacred fire which warms all the world.
+
+While he was thinking all this, his eyes were following every motion
+of her slender white arms before the mirror. Again his smile sought
+hers, she nodded to him with a glimmer of secret happiness in her color
+underneath the powder, and deep within the dusk he saw his own face,
+the features sharpened to a mask-like quality by the candlelight,
+nodding in answer like a Chinese doll.
+
+«There’s no hurry,» she said. «In any case we can’t creep into our
+little corner before a good bit of the first act is over; otherwise we
+might meet acquaintances in the lobby.»
+
+«That’s true, you are right,» he answered.
+
+He had thought of that himself too.
+
+«One must have one’s wits about one in such a position as ours,» she
+nodded. «It’s a different thing from sitting with one’s nose down over
+a book. But isn’t it almost like magic, when one thinks about it, that
+we’ve actually been left in peace a whole year and that nobody knows
+anything? I even think people speak less badly about me now than they
+used to. Everybody has got so friendly toward me: the manager, the
+clerks, and the girls in the office. But perhaps that’s because I’ve
+become prettier--haven’t I? They certainly see I’m happy, and that
+makes them kindly disposed, so that they are cheerful and nice to me
+without suspecting why. If they knew!----»
+
+Martin didn’t like to hear her talk of their happiness. It was a
+different thing to read it in her eyes and her color and to feel it in
+her kisses; he believed in it then, and no text could be more precious
+to interpret than that. But when he heard her talk about it he felt on
+his breast a weight of bitterness and oppression at the thought of how
+little he had really given her and how full of faults and deficiencies
+her poor happiness was. He knew that the short minutes she spent with
+him took on such vivid color just because she had to pay for them with
+long days and nights of fear, fear lest she should suddenly lose what
+she had dared so much to win, fear that all of a sudden everything
+might end some day, her golden happiness turn to withered leaves, and
+she herself be left more poor and lonely than ever before. This fear
+never really left her, he knew.
+
+Once, it had not been so long ago, they had arranged to meet at his
+house. The time was approaching, he was awaiting her, there was a ring
+at the door, and he hurried to open it. But it was not she; it was
+one of his friends who had come to sit and talk a while. He could not
+say he was engaged or that he was expecting a visit, or the friend
+would have met her on the stairs and taken in the whole thing. He said
+instead that he was just going on an important errand, put on his hat
+and coat, and they went out together. They had not gone far beyond the
+gate before he saw her coming along the street. She cast a frightened
+and uncertain glance at him and he raised his hat to her as he passed,
+politely and a little distantly, as he had to do so as not to betray
+her. He turned off into a side street to get rid of his friend and
+after a couple of minutes came back circuitously to his gate. She was
+walking in front of it in the rain and mud. He pressed her hand softly
+and they went up. But when she was inside the door he saw she was
+trembling with sobs.
+
+There was no need of explanations; she had already understood the
+situation, but his curt and chilly greeting as he passed, while he was
+talking with a strange man, had been enough to rouse the secret fear in
+her blood; she had to give it vent, she had to weep, and she wept long
+and silently in his arms.
+
+Ah! their poor happiness; it had given them much but it could not
+bear the bright and arid illumination of words; it could not endure
+being spoken of. All his tenderness could not give her the calm which
+accompanies a life that can be shown to the multitude and approved
+by them, nor could it in solitude prevent her from sometimes feeling
+ashamed and conscience-stricken. For because life had shown her two
+different aspects, between which she could not see any connection, she
+had not one conscience but two. One told her she had acted rightly
+and that the time would come some day when no one would be able to
+understand any more why people had formerly concealed the love between
+man and woman in shame and filth and called it sin. But the other
+conscience said nothing about the future; it rose from the depths of
+the past, speaking with the accents of her dead mother and with voices
+from her home in the woods and from her childhood, when she knew
+nothing of the world or of herself, when everything was simple and one
+only needed to be good to have things go nicely.
+
+On evenings when he had just left and she sat alone in her rented room
+with strange stupid furniture, amid which the bureau with the Empire
+mirror and the green stone top was the only thing that was hers and the
+only object to remind her of her childhood home, the old conscience
+would rise up and whisper many vulgar things into her ear. It whispered
+that both the women who married men repugnant to them so as to be
+provided for and the poor girls who sold their bodies from necessity
+were better than she was, for they had at least a reason for their
+conduct but she had none. It did not help that she thought of her great
+love and defended her course with that; the old conscience was prepared
+for such an argument and whispered in reply that it was not he who had
+kindled the fire in her blood; her own desire had blown upon the flame;
+the evil was in herself, and she was an abandoned creature who ought to
+be whipped with rods in the town hall, as people used to treat women of
+loose morals. Still worse things this conscience hit upon, whispering
+that he whom she loved would soon tire of her, nay, that he had already
+tired and despised her in his heart because she was always so willing
+to sin and had never denied him anything.
+
+He knew all this, for she always let him share her troubles. He in
+turn always felt the same wonder and surprise at this philosophy:
+namely, that the same desire which in a man was so natural and simple
+and as easy to admit as hunger or thirst, should be for a woman a
+burning shame which must be quenched or concealed; this philosophy,
+which he never could comprehend emotionally, though he followed it
+in his reflections all the way to its source in the dusk of ancient
+times, when woman was still man’s property and when the sensual side
+of her nature was permitted, even praised, as far as it expressed her
+submission to the will of her master, but was considered criminal and
+shameful if it came from her own will. This philosophy was still so
+firmly rooted in woman that modest ladies often felt a secret shame in
+loving their husbands and longing for their embraces. He even recalled
+how he had once heard a woman of the streets divide her kind into the
+decent and the sluts, meaning by the decent those who only thought of
+giving themselves for money. As a matter of fact this division was more
+just and profound than she herself imagined. It had its origin in the
+policy of women inherited through millenniums from one generation to
+another, as necessity had dictated it from the beginning. Necessity
+bade a woman not to lower by generous prodigality the price of the
+commodity which was the only means of power for the weaker sex, the
+one thing which could save it from being wholly trampled down by the
+stronger. If the poor streetwalker had known her Bible better, she
+might in support of her classification have cited the savage anathemas
+of the prophet Ezekiel against the lascivious Ahala, who was not as
+other harlots, «whom a man must needs purchase with money.»
+
+He realized all this quite well; life was too stingy to allow women to
+be lavish, and he condemned none of them, not even the modest. But he
+loved his generous mistress and consoled her as well as he might on
+the days when the warning voices within her had frightened and filled
+her with remorse. That was not hard for him to do, because when he was
+with her she felt no fear. But he knew also that there were days, nay,
+weeks, when she went about in consuming anxiety for fear she might have
+a child in spite of everything. He did not conceal from himself that
+this was the weak point in all secret love. He saw clearly how uneven
+the game must always be when one approached this point, how all the
+risk and danger lay on the side of the woman, and again he was secretly
+ashamed that it was not in his power to share with her the bitter as he
+shared the sweet. The risk of having a child was hers to begin with,
+and if this was avoided she had still the lack and emptiness of not
+being able to allow herself the happiness of motherhood. It cut him to
+the heart when he once saw her at twilight take a strange child from
+the street in her arms and kiss it. But motherhood for her would have
+implied continual misery, as the world was now.
+
+Neither of them had, however, been pampered by life; they had taught
+themselves not to covet any complete and unblemished happiness, and
+love had helped them to take all this as it had to be and ought to be
+taken.
+
+She was ready now; she put out the candles in front of the mirror and
+waited a couple of minutes in the dark while he went ahead of her on
+the street, so that no one might meet them together on the stairway.
+On the street they sometimes ventured to walk together after it was
+dark, especially if the weather was misty or if there was rain or snow.
+On this particular evening the snow was falling so thick and white
+that nobody could have recognized them. People passed them in the
+white night like phantoms without name or distinction. Close together,
+nameless themselves and somewhat like the silhouettes which children
+cut out in pairs from folded paper, they made their way through the
+snow. She held his arm pressed to her bosom and both were silent.
+
+
+
+
+--V--
+
+
+It was dark in the house, and Martin had pushed up the slatted shutters
+of the box. No one could see them, nor from where he sat in his corner
+could he see anything of what was happening on the stage. He only heard
+lines and responses thrown out in the dark, and saw, or fancied he saw,
+their effects on the curving rows of pale human masks--a sloping flower
+bed full of large curious flowers, colorless as are plants that grow
+without sunlight, and not exactly beautiful as they waved gently, as if
+before an inaudible wind, or nodded on their stems from time to time.
+
+He imagined he could recognize them all, whether because he had really
+met them so often on the street and in public places, where he had been
+one of them, that their faces had become fixed in his subconscious
+memory; or because of the tendency of human faces to group themselves
+into a few types, so that one rarely seems to encounter a really new
+face.
+
+Some of these faces, furthermore, he knew very well. Over yonder sat
+Henrik Rissler, his friend from boyhood. They seldom met now, and that
+was a pity, for Martin knew of no one with a better appreciation of
+friendship, ideas, and cigars than he. But he had now been married for
+several years and led a migratory life. He had not yet finished the
+odyssey of the newly married couple from one damp abode to another,
+always on the outside edge of the city, from the Vasa Quarter to South
+Stockholm, and from there to Kungsholm. But Martin had the conviction
+that they would find each other again, if life would only grant them
+both a little more repose.
+
+And there, a bit farther down, that little wrinkled face that reminded
+one both of a child’s and of an old man’s--wasn’t that another old
+schoolmate, wasn’t it Josef Marin? He had never become a clergyman as
+he should have according to the ideas of his obstinate old mother.
+But he never got firm in his faith. It is often with faith as with
+appetite--it comes with eating; but he had never got to where the
+eating began, and he had also at bottom perhaps a thirst for sincerity
+which made his course a bit too difficult. Now he covered the music
+halls and funerals for a large newspaper. He wrote unreservedly what
+he thought and took pains to think as he supposed the editor did; and
+the editor, who was the deuce of a fellow and could think whatever
+he wanted to, was careful to think as he imagined the educated and
+well-to-do folk of the community thought. And because these principles
+had set the tone of the paper, it had become popular and respected
+and very old, having a fixed reputation for incorruptible honesty and
+unpartisan love of truth.
+
+«I might really just as well have become a clergyman,» he had said one
+day to Martin, rather mournfully, when they were exchanging a few words
+at a street corner.
+
+And there, far up in the center, that pale slender woman--was it not
+she who had been his flame on certain spring evenings many years ago,
+Harriet Skottë? He had written her a letter, too, which had never been
+sent. Ah! those days.... Life had gone a bit poorly with her since
+then; she did not look happy. She was married now, and her husband was
+beside her. He was fat, very well dressed and looked as if he had been
+varnished. Poor little child, she hadn’t been too lucky in her marriage
+choice--one could tell that by a look at her husband....
+
+And he saw other faces, those of women whom he knew slightly although
+they didn’t know him, young women whom he kept in friendly remembrance
+because sometime without their being aware he had been a little richer
+and happier when they had floated past him on the street like sunlit
+clouds.... Down there was one whom he remembered well, for she had once
+noted his glance and had pulled her skirts around her and given him a
+look as if he were a murderer of the Jack the Ripper type. Poor little
+lady! the time had flown, she was no longer young, for she had then
+been in her late bloom, and now she would get no more such glances when
+she went down Sture Street....
+
+He grew tired of looking at one thing and listening to another. The
+deep and wonderful old words which sounded from the stage said nothing
+to him at the moment, and he thought he could read by the masks in the
+parquet that the words recoiled unheard from them too, and that they
+scarcely comprehended more of what occurred on the stage than the mere
+pantomime. It was the fifth act. He leaned back in his corner, letting
+the two grave-diggers toss about skulls and witticisms as they chose,
+while he sought in the dark the glance of his mistress. But he did not
+catch it, because she could see everything from her place and never
+took her eyes from the stage. Then once more the words took on color
+and life to his ears, when he saw the eagerness in her face; and the
+whole churchyard scene, which he could not see but which he knew so
+well, seemed to be mirrored in her glance. He saw Hamlet stand there
+in his mantle of night and mystery with Yorick’s skull in his hand, he
+saw the funeral procession, the lowering of the coffin, and the queen
+as she strewed flowers on the grave: «Sweets to the sweet.» He saw the
+strange struggle in the grave, the two men wrestling down there, and he
+heard Hamlet’s voice, «I loved Ophelia.»
+
+What did he want--did he want to tear her out of the grave? Suppose she
+were not dead, suppose she should arise from the coffin now as if after
+a quiet sleep--wouldn’t he take her in his arms and carry her away and
+love her to the end of days? No, it was not as he thought. He had said
+while she was still alive, «Lady, I loved you once.» He was no ordinary
+fickle cavalier, he had not forgotten her for another lady-in-waiting
+with a slenderer waist and a deeper bosom, and still he could say,
+«I loved you once.» He could possibly say that of many things. He had
+loved the sun, and the flowers and the trees. The blue heavens he had
+loved, and water and fire and the good brown earth. He had loved all
+that; to all the four elements and to life itself he might have said,
+«I loved you once.» But then things had changed, there was something
+which stole in between all this and him, something which took him in
+its grasp without asking any leave and drove away everything else,
+the sun and the flowers and the women and Woman, far away, so that he
+hardly saw it any more except as if through a mist.... And now when he
+saw the funeral procession come, and heard that it was for her whom he
+had had and had lost--but he also knew that he had lost her and all the
+rest before she was dead, and the very loss seemed real to him only at
+the first moment; at the next he saw it far off, through a mist.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Martin had shut his eyes, and when he opened them again, he himself saw
+everything through a mist: the parquet and the white masks down there
+and her whom he loved.
+
+She took his hand and caressed it softly between her two warm hands
+while she whispered to him, «Tell me, what are you thinking of?»
+
+[Illustration: Man and woman in front of a window]
+
+The winter night slept around them. It snowed no longer, and they
+went home in a white moonlit mist through the snowdrifts, in through
+her door and up the stairs. It got brighter and brighter the higher
+they climbed. They stopped at a stairway window and looked out. The
+greater part of the mist was now below them, it lay wrapped around the
+yards and open spaces beneath, but in the upper regions of the air
+everything was almost clear; it was bluish and bright as a night in
+August. A wide ring of light was around the moon, and in the pale glow
+the world lay as if ice-bound and petrified. Out of the ocean of mist
+down there arose a lonely gable wall without a window, which absorbed
+the cold glance of the moon and stared blindly and emptily back. A long
+shiver went through them both, they pressed hard against each other,
+closing their eyes, and everything was lost to them in a kiss.
+
+It became a long and wonderful kiss. He felt all her being dissolve,
+while he heard in his ears the sound of distant bells from a little
+country church far away between hedges and wheat fields. It seemed
+to be a Sunday morning: he saw a neat gravel plot, red peonies were
+glowing from the flower beds, white and yellow butterflies were
+fluttering about the bushes and the lawn, and he heard the rustling
+of mighty trees. He was walking with her among the trees, but through
+their murmur passed a breath of autumn, the yellow butterflies were
+yellow leaves, and some were already dark with frost. The wind carried
+with it broken accents and words, which were sometimes like the dry
+words of everyday speech, sometimes like furtive whispers about
+something that had to be kept secret, with all of which was blended
+as it were the echo of the actor’s strange intonation a little while
+before when he said, «I loved Ophelia.»
+
+But he did not relinquish her mouth. They sank ever more deeply into
+one another. He seemed to be voyaging through space: in the white
+moon-mist burned a red star, first faint and expiring, then more
+powerful and ever nearer, growing and broadening into a flaming
+spring of fire, to which he fastened his lips tightly. He seemed to
+burn without suffering, the flames cooled his tongue like a slightly
+bitter wine, until he felt that he was drinking in everything: satiety
+and hunger, thirst and coolness, the sun’s health and the midnight’s
+anguish, the lucid thought of day and the morbid brooding of moonlit
+dusk, all the joy and all the misery of the earth--from this one spring.
+
+
+
+
+                     MARTIN BIRCK’S YOUTH BY HJALMAR
+                    SÖDERBERG IS SET IN BODONI TYPE.
+                    THE ILLUSTRATIONS ARE BY THEODORE
+                   NADEJEN. FORMAT BY A. W. RUSHMORE.
+                      MADE BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN.
+                      HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
+                               · MCMXXX ·
+
+
+
+
+Transcriber’s Notes
+
+
+  Surrounding characters have been used to indicate _italics_
+    or +small caps+
+  A three-leaf glyph has been replaced with ❧
+  Inconsistent hyphenation has been retained.
+  p. 9 changed ; to ! following «death»
+  p. 37 changed » to › following «kick.»
+  p. 42 joined unhyphenated parts of «cauldron»
+  p. 90 removed period between «know» and «----»
+  p. 107 changed «say" to «saw»
+  p. 133 changed close quote to close guillemet following «right,»
+  p. 136 changed quotes to guillemets around «He who hath seen God,
+    he must die the death»
+  p. 178 changed «superstitution» to «superstition»
+  p. 188 changed period to comma following «little»
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78363 ***