Chapter IV: Part 4

«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....

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.

«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?