Chapter II: Part 2

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.

«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.

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.