Chapter V: Part 5

«On the other hand it is possibly superfluous to expend any particular effort on the objective: to succumb. That is a goal which can certainly be attained at a cheaper price; it even comes near of itself, slowly and surely. The best thing is perhaps that which the other dead man over there in the bookshop window loved so much while he lived: a big tree and tranquil thoughts. For it is not quite true, what Messer Guido Cavalcanti said when he felt death approaching, that it is as vain to think as to act. In one way it is no doubt true: namely, that the final result will always be the same black pit, and as a meditation on death Messer Guido’s words have their value. But looked at from another point of view, it is clear that he who enjoys thinking is always in this world of incalculables in a slightly better position than a man of action. Because for him the minute has its worth in and for itself, independent of the uncertainties of the future. He who wishes to become a Knight of the Order of the Seraphim or a pope and gives up everything, the pleasures both of thought and of love, to attain that object--and the first sacrifice at least is inevitable--and then gets a fishbone in his throat and dies before he has reached it, his life is a nullity, an intention without performance. But he whose standard lies in thought may have his life cut off at any point and it will be like the snake of popular superstition, it will still live, it will have its value even as a fragment; nay, it has never, properly speaking, assumed that it wished to be anything but a fragment. For he who is measured by the standard of thought can never set himself any human goal, or if he does, this will be arbitrary and inessential, and it is a matter of no significance whether he reaches it or not.»

* * * * *

Martin had got up to Östermalm and was almost home; he was hungry and was eager for his dinner, yet he stopped at a street corner and looked up toward a window high up in a fourth story.

Yes, there was a light there; she was home then. He knew that already, anyhow, and he knew besides that she expected him after dinner. In the evening they were to go to a theater together; they were to sit in a stage box behind a screen where nobody could see them.

He had taken a mistress. Chance had brought them together. She worked in a life insurance office in the morning counting money. She worked for her living. She had, to be sure, an old father somewhere off in the country, a pensioned forester who wrote her letters three times a year; but she was self-supporting and depended upon no one. Like other young girls she had dreamed of a happiness which should be correct, and had guarded her jewel in the hope of being married. She had had her fancies and been in love with men who had not even noticed it. But these small flames had gone out when they had no fuel, and if a man not too ridiculous or repulsive had wished to offer her his hand, she could easily have persuaded herself that she loved him. But she had seen the years run away; she had danced in the winter and bicycled in the summer, and many men had let her divine by their looks and veiled words that they would gladly possess her; but no one had wanted to marry her, for she had no dowry and did not belong to a family with influence. The more economical and diffident of the men, moreover, were frightened by her elegance, for she had a sure and delicate taste and two industrious hands, and many a night she sat up by her lamp and sewed cheap remnants and old shreds into dresses, which later gave to inexperienced eyes the impression of having cost a great deal, or to the more skeptical-minded even suggested a doubt of her virtue. She was not, however, beautiful enough for the men whose feelings were governed by their vanity, nor did her nature have anything of the sweet and docile quality fitted to attract men who wished to be lords in their own home, men who had simply tired of bachelor life and therefore looked about for a nice and charming and modest and obedient wife.

Both her own character and her outer circumstances were such that she had no great prospect of being loved for any other reason than love, and she had gradually begun to suspect that this feeling, of which so much was said and written, was really scorned and put to one side so that it was extremely rare. She had thought over all this, she had felt the minutes running through her fingers like sand, and had decided that the years to come would be still more wretched and worthless than those before and that the jewel she guarded was losing its value every day. Most of all she had been frightened at how quickly women age who live without men, except those who are so fortunate as not to feel any strong desire or lack. But she was not of these; no, she was a real woman and she knew she was. The desire which in her first youth had only been a sweet and indefinite longing, a dream of happiness of a strange and unknown sort, now burned in her veins like poison; and her first timid girlish fancy, which had hardly dared to look beyond a kiss in the twilight between bushes of roses, had developed with years into a hobgoblin much worse than those used in children’s picture-books to frighten naughty boys. Her glance became wistful and yearning, and she tried to bring herself to a decision.

She had almost given up hope of a husband; it was a lover she was seeking, and even him she sought for long in vain. It was not that there was a lack of men who would take her out to dance; there were on the contrary many, and she could make a choice. She looked around in her circle; she flirted right and left. She grew less afraid about her reputation than before and went to secret rendezvous with men who had been attentive to her some evening at a ball. But they remained strange to her, and every time an understanding was in the air, she was overcome with shame and became suddenly icy with fear and repugnance. For every time when the critical moment came, she read in the man’s eyes the ineradicable crudity of his heart. She read it as plainly as if it had stood written on white paper that what was for her a wholly new experience in life--perhaps ruin, perhaps salvation--was for him an amorous adventure. She read that what she was about to do was in his eyes merely a _faux pas_, which he could overlook only in so far as it gave him pleasure; and she read that not only did he intend to give her up very soon, but that he also meant to salve his conduct beforehand by showing her his contempt. She saw all this and tired of the game before it had begun, asking herself if she might not just as well follow the path of virtue, which in any case was clearly the most convenient, and wither into old age without will and without hope.

But when she met Martin all this became different, and when she gave herself to him she felt no more fear, because she saw that he had understood her, that his thoughts were not like those of the others, and she felt that he loved her. With him she felt no shame, nor did she feign any, for she had already sinned so much in her thoughts that the reality seemed to her innocent and pure. She was no longer young; she was getting on toward thirty, just as he was. Her complexion had already been marked by the early frost, and vanished illusions had made her bitter at heart and crude of speech. But the bitter heart beat warm and fast when it rested on his, and the ugly words did not make her mouth less sweet to kiss.

--III--

Martin sat alone with his father at the dinner table within the same circle of yellow light which had enclosed the sleepy winter evenings of his childhood. Martin Birck and his father had seldom anything to say to each other. They thought differently about everything except the taxes on food-stuffs. This lack of agreement did not, however, cause them any sorrow; they attached no importance to it. They both knew that different generations think differently, and they found this natural. Nor did they find silence anything painful or oppressive; it was just the self-evident expression of the fact that nothing had happened which could give rise to an exchange of opinions. When they chatted together it was mostly about the improvement of government work and about new houses. For Martin’s father was interested in his city. On Sundays he often went for long walks to distant parts of the city and saw how new suburbs shot up out of the earth. He thought of how Stockholm had developed since his youth, and he found all the new houses handsome, especially if they were large and imposing with many windows and small towers at the corners. And when Martin heard his father speak of all these ugly houses and call them handsome, he thought of how unjust life was, since it remorselessly closed the way to the inner regions of beauty for the best and most useful members of the community. For the way thither went through melancholy, there was no other, and it was not idly that the Greek musician answered Alexander, «May the gods never make you so unhappy, my lord, that you may learn to understand music better than I.» Martin’s father had had a youth too full of worry and a manhood too full of strenuous responsibility to know anything of the mental depression with which life punishes those who think more about beautiful and ugly and good and evil than they do about their daily bread.

* * * * *

On this day, as usual, Martin’s father discoursed about one thing and another over his coffee and cigar. He spoke of a men’s dinner he had attended the day before, where he had felt embarrassed on account of his Vasa decoration; for he had gone with the large official medal, which was the only one he had, whereas the other men had had the small miniatures.

«So,» he finished, «I looked like the biggest fool of the company.»

«Yes,» observed Martin, «appearances were clearly against you. But in reality the miniature medals of the others gave the clearest proof that their foolishness was greater, since because of their decoration they went to more expense than was strictly necessary.»

«Yes,» his father answered, «I thought of that too, but I felt awkward, anyhow.»

The conversation died down. Martin was thinking of various stories about decorations which he had heard, such as that about a man who had been given the Vasa medal because he had sent flowers to the royal hospital on the days when the queen was to visit it, and about one who got the North Star because he had bought a house. But it never occurred to him to tell these, because when he thought the matter over he could see that these stories, which he found so amusing, might not have quite the same effect on the elder man, who had earned his decoration by forty years of ill-paid work in the government service and could therefore hardly fail to think of it without some respect, although in conversation he might make fun of it.

Silence spread out around them; the father smoked his cigar and looked out into the dark, and Martin sat in thought. He thought of the history of his home, how it, like other homes, had come into existence, grown and blossomed, and how afterwards the bonds had one after another been broken: his sister married, his mother dead. The best time, the blossom time, was mostly that when the children had just grown up and the elders were not really old. It was true he had heard old women say that the happiest time was when the children were small. Yes, that might well be--for the mothers. But he remembered the years when his sister had just grown up and was about to be married. Then everything was glad in the home; they had youth, friends, music. The piano, which now was dumb, still held the waltzes and opera selections of the bygone years; and often when he lay awake at night, he could still hear the Norwegian songs they sang then: «He Leaned above the Garden Bench» and «I Ask Thee Not for Roses from thy Breast.» In these songs still lived a part of his youth, and they now seemed full of all the strange melancholy of the past. Then suddenly the house had became silent, more silent with every year, till one day the father sat alone with the son in an empty and shattered home.

Looking at his father, he asked himself, «What can I be to him?» «Infinitely little,» he had to answer, «almost nothing.» She whom he had loved from his youth up now lay under the earth, under a little snow-covered gray stone, and could not warm his age. The fire on the hearth was ready to die out. _He_ was the one whose duty it was to kindle the new flame. He felt it was this which, in the normal course of things, the elders of the family had the right to expect of the young: to see the chain carried on, a new home, and grandchildren to rock on their knees. It was so that nature had arranged, she tried everywhere to hide the dead with new young life, as we ourselves cover corpses under flowers. Dissolution was thus more easily approached; the way went downward, to be sure, but one took it amid play and prattle, as when one started the journey. But to that great and simple craving he could answer nothing. It was true he could do several things: he did not think there was any sort of beauty in the world that was foreign to him, or any thought or shade of a thought that he could not follow, and furthermore he could look over government ledgers and inscribe signs in the margins, and drink a good deal of whisky without losing control of his mind, and perhaps a few other small matters. But he could not build a home. Not a chance, not a possibility of it. An artisan, a day laborer could do it, but not he. He could not conjure forth the four thousand crowns a year that a poor family of the middle class needed to live. If he could ever get to that point, as he well might with years, he would be old, his father dead, and she whom he loved--what would have become of her?

But it was true, he realized, that the old man did not, at least not consciously, make any such demand on him. On the contrary his father understood clearly how impossible it was. He had no hope of seeing a continuation of his line, of being able to grow old in an environment of futurity and promise and new scions. But Martin realized that just this, the fact that he could have no such hope, weighed upon him like a dark sorrow and made his twilight even more gray and empty. He had had grief enough without that. He had received small pleasure from his daughter’s marriage. Her little boy was dead, and she had lately written home that she wanted a divorce from her husband.

«The fire is dying on the hearth. Who is to kindle the new flame?»

His father went into his room for his after-dinner nap.

It was five, and Martin dressed to go to her who was waiting for him. He put on an evening suit despite the fact that they were to be alone and unseen. He had promised her that, for it was their bridal anniversary.

--IV--

She stood at her dressing table, where two narrow candles burned before the mirror. She had just arranged her rich brown hair, and before she finished her toilet she touched her face with a powder puff to subdue the color. He sat behind her in a corner of the sofa, but their glances met in the mirror and were fixed on each other in a long smile. The trembling of the candle flames and the distance, which the mirror lengthened, made this smile dark and mysterious. And far within the dusky depth behind the glass danced a green spark from the emerald on her finger.

«Shall you be ready soon?» he asked. «It’s half-past seven. I’m afraid we shall miss the ghost.»

It was Hamlet they were to see.

She turned and stroked his cheek with the powder puff, so that he became as white as a Pierrot.

«Silly Pierrette,» he said, wiping off the powder with her handkerchief, «don’t you see I’m pale enough as it is?»

She leaned down, pressed his head to her breast, and kissed his hair.

«I am so happy,» she whispered, «because it is my bridal day today, and because I am going to the theater with you to sit in a little nook where no one can see us.»

He caressed her hand softly. He felt a secret stab in the heart when he heard her speak so, for he knew almost to a certainty that if there had been any chance of it she would much rather have sat with him in a place where all could see them. But he did not believe that she had been thinking of this just now. Never during the past year had she let fall an allusion to marriage, and she knew only too well how impossible it was. But he on his part could never cease to feel it as a secret disgrace that it was not in his power to give her the happiness which belonged to a secure and respected social position where she would not need to conceal anything from the world. He felt thus not because there remained in a corner of his soul any idea of a duty to be performed or of any transgression that ought to be atoned for, but because he was infinitely fond of her and could have wished to make life bright for her eyes and smooth for her little foot, which had such stony paths to go that it was not surprising if at last it had trodden a bit awry.

He dismissed these thoughts, however; he did not mean to attempt the impossible; he was no strong man who could take her in his arms and break a way for them both. And she had made her own choice. She had known strong men too, the kind of men of whom women commonly say, «He’s a real man»; if she had wished she might have given her love to one of them, and he would not have despised it. But her deepest instinct had held her back with forebodings of shame and unhappiness. For, strangely enough, it was precisely the strong men who rarely acted as he could have wished to do had he been able; they were strong just because in the crisis, when there was really something at stake, their feelings always formed an alliance with their profit, and they usually knew where best to employ their strength. No, he and she had nothing else to do, lonely and chilled as they were, than gratefully and without any yearning for the impossible to warm themselves at the happiness which had fallen into their hands, blessing the day when they were driven together by the voice of their blood, which told them that they suited each other and could bring each other joy. Secretly, however, he often liked to dwell on the remote vision that some day many years hence he might be able to give her a home. The thought that by then she would be already an old woman did not frighten him. He had the feeling that, no matter how fast time flew, even if she had gray hair and wrinkles around her eyes, her young white body could never become old--it would still remain young and warm as now; and no matter how the years passed and winter after winter snowed under his youth and stung his soul and his thoughts with needles of ice, his heart would always be warm as now to the beating of hers, and that always when the two met there would spring up a spark of the sacred fire which warms all the world.

While he was thinking all this, his eyes were following every motion of her slender white arms before the mirror. Again his smile sought hers, she nodded to him with a glimmer of secret happiness in her color underneath the powder, and deep within the dusk he saw his own face, the features sharpened to a mask-like quality by the candlelight, nodding in answer like a Chinese doll.

«There’s no hurry,» she said. «In any case we can’t creep into our little corner before a good bit of the first act is over; otherwise we might meet acquaintances in the lobby.»

«That’s true, you are right,» he answered.

He had thought of that himself too.

«One must have one’s wits about one in such a position as ours,» she nodded. «It’s a different thing from sitting with one’s nose down over a book. But isn’t it almost like magic, when one thinks about it, that we’ve actually been left in peace a whole year and that nobody knows anything? I even think people speak less badly about me now than they used to. Everybody has got so friendly toward me: the manager, the clerks, and the girls in the office. But perhaps that’s because I’ve become prettier--haven’t I? They certainly see I’m happy, and that makes them kindly disposed, so that they are cheerful and nice to me without suspecting why. If they knew!----»

Martin didn’t like to hear her talk of their happiness. It was a different thing to read it in her eyes and her color and to feel it in her kisses; he believed in it then, and no text could be more precious to interpret than that. But when he heard her talk about it he felt on his breast a weight of bitterness and oppression at the thought of how little he had really given her and how full of faults and deficiencies her poor happiness was. He knew that the short minutes she spent with him took on such vivid color just because she had to pay for them with long days and nights of fear, fear lest she should suddenly lose what she had dared so much to win, fear that all of a sudden everything might end some day, her golden happiness turn to withered leaves, and she herself be left more poor and lonely than ever before. This fear never really left her, he knew.

Once, it had not been so long ago, they had arranged to meet at his house. The time was approaching, he was awaiting her, there was a ring at the door, and he hurried to open it. But it was not she; it was one of his friends who had come to sit and talk a while. He could not say he was engaged or that he was expecting a visit, or the friend would have met her on the stairs and taken in the whole thing. He said instead that he was just going on an important errand, put on his hat and coat, and they went out together. They had not gone far beyond the gate before he saw her coming along the street. She cast a frightened and uncertain glance at him and he raised his hat to her as he passed, politely and a little distantly, as he had to do so as not to betray her. He turned off into a side street to get rid of his friend and after a couple of minutes came back circuitously to his gate. She was walking in front of it in the rain and mud. He pressed her hand softly and they went up. But when she was inside the door he saw she was trembling with sobs.

There was no need of explanations; she had already understood the situation, but his curt and chilly greeting as he passed, while he was talking with a strange man, had been enough to rouse the secret fear in her blood; she had to give it vent, she had to weep, and she wept long and silently in his arms.

Ah! their poor happiness; it had given them much but it could not bear the bright and arid illumination of words; it could not endure being spoken of. All his tenderness could not give her the calm which accompanies a life that can be shown to the multitude and approved by them, nor could it in solitude prevent her from sometimes feeling ashamed and conscience-stricken. For because life had shown her two different aspects, between which she could not see any connection, she had not one conscience but two. One told her she had acted rightly and that the time would come some day when no one would be able to understand any more why people had formerly concealed the love between man and woman in shame and filth and called it sin. But the other conscience said nothing about the future; it rose from the depths of the past, speaking with the accents of her dead mother and with voices from her home in the woods and from her childhood, when she knew nothing of the world or of herself, when everything was simple and one only needed to be good to have things go nicely.

On evenings when he had just left and she sat alone in her rented room with strange stupid furniture, amid which the bureau with the Empire mirror and the green stone top was the only thing that was hers and the only object to remind her of her childhood home, the old conscience would rise up and whisper many vulgar things into her ear. It whispered that both the women who married men repugnant to them so as to be provided for and the poor girls who sold their bodies from necessity were better than she was, for they had at least a reason for their conduct but she had none. It did not help that she thought of her great love and defended her course with that; the old conscience was prepared for such an argument and whispered in reply that it was not he who had kindled the fire in her blood; her own desire had blown upon the flame; the evil was in herself, and she was an abandoned creature who ought to be whipped with rods in the town hall, as people used to treat women of loose morals. Still worse things this conscience hit upon, whispering that he whom she loved would soon tire of her, nay, that he had already tired and despised her in his heart because she was always so willing to sin and had never denied him anything.

He knew all this, for she always let him share her troubles. He in turn always felt the same wonder and surprise at this philosophy: namely, that the same desire which in a man was so natural and simple and as easy to admit as hunger or thirst, should be for a woman a burning shame which must be quenched or concealed; this philosophy, which he never could comprehend emotionally, though he followed it in his reflections all the way to its source in the dusk of ancient times, when woman was still man’s property and when the sensual side of her nature was permitted, even praised, as far as it expressed her submission to the will of her master, but was considered criminal and shameful if it came from her own will. This philosophy was still so firmly rooted in woman that modest ladies often felt a secret shame in loving their husbands and longing for their embraces. He even recalled how he had once heard a woman of the streets divide her kind into the decent and the sluts, meaning by the decent those who only thought of giving themselves for money. As a matter of fact this division was more just and profound than she herself imagined. It had its origin in the policy of women inherited through millenniums from one generation to another, as necessity had dictated it from the beginning. Necessity bade a woman not to lower by generous prodigality the price of the commodity which was the only means of power for the weaker sex, the one thing which could save it from being wholly trampled down by the stronger. If the poor streetwalker had known her Bible better, she might in support of her classification have cited the savage anathemas of the prophet Ezekiel against the lascivious Ahala, who was not as other harlots, «whom a man must needs purchase with money.»

He realized all this quite well; life was too stingy to allow women to be lavish, and he condemned none of them, not even the modest. But he loved his generous mistress and consoled her as well as he might on the days when the warning voices within her had frightened and filled her with remorse. That was not hard for him to do, because when he was with her she felt no fear. But he knew also that there were days, nay, weeks, when she went about in consuming anxiety for fear she might have a child in spite of everything. He did not conceal from himself that this was the weak point in all secret love. He saw clearly how uneven the game must always be when one approached this point, how all the risk and danger lay on the side of the woman, and again he was secretly ashamed that it was not in his power to share with her the bitter as he shared the sweet. The risk of having a child was hers to begin with, and if this was avoided she had still the lack and emptiness of not being able to allow herself the happiness of motherhood. It cut him to the heart when he once saw her at twilight take a strange child from the street in her arms and kiss it. But motherhood for her would have implied continual misery, as the world was now.

Neither of them had, however, been pampered by life; they had taught themselves not to covet any complete and unblemished happiness, and love had helped them to take all this as it had to be and ought to be taken.

She was ready now; she put out the candles in front of the mirror and waited a couple of minutes in the dark while he went ahead of her on the street, so that no one might meet them together on the stairway. On the street they sometimes ventured to walk together after it was dark, especially if the weather was misty or if there was rain or snow. On this particular evening the snow was falling so thick and white that nobody could have recognized them. People passed them in the white night like phantoms without name or distinction. Close together, nameless themselves and somewhat like the silhouettes which children cut out in pairs from folded paper, they made their way through the snow. She held his arm pressed to her bosom and both were silent.

--V--

It was dark in the house, and Martin had pushed up the slatted shutters of the box. No one could see them, nor from where he sat in his corner could he see anything of what was happening on the stage. He only heard lines and responses thrown out in the dark, and saw, or fancied he saw, their effects on the curving rows of pale human masks--a sloping flower bed full of large curious flowers, colorless as are plants that grow without sunlight, and not exactly beautiful as they waved gently, as if before an inaudible wind, or nodded on their stems from time to time.

He imagined he could recognize them all, whether because he had really met them so often on the street and in public places, where he had been one of them, that their faces had become fixed in his subconscious memory; or because of the tendency of human faces to group themselves into a few types, so that one rarely seems to encounter a really new face.

Some of these faces, furthermore, he knew very well. Over yonder sat Henrik Rissler, his friend from boyhood. They seldom met now, and that was a pity, for Martin knew of no one with a better appreciation of friendship, ideas, and cigars than he. But he had now been married for several years and led a migratory life. He had not yet finished the odyssey of the newly married couple from one damp abode to another, always on the outside edge of the city, from the Vasa Quarter to South Stockholm, and from there to Kungsholm. But Martin had the conviction that they would find each other again, if life would only grant them both a little more repose.

And there, a bit farther down, that little wrinkled face that reminded one both of a child’s and of an old man’s--wasn’t that another old schoolmate, wasn’t it Josef Marin? He had never become a clergyman as he should have according to the ideas of his obstinate old mother. But he never got firm in his faith. It is often with faith as with appetite--it comes with eating; but he had never got to where the eating began, and he had also at bottom perhaps a thirst for sincerity which made his course a bit too difficult. Now he covered the music halls and funerals for a large newspaper. He wrote unreservedly what he thought and took pains to think as he supposed the editor did; and the editor, who was the deuce of a fellow and could think whatever he wanted to, was careful to think as he imagined the educated and well-to-do folk of the community thought. And because these principles had set the tone of the paper, it had become popular and respected and very old, having a fixed reputation for incorruptible honesty and unpartisan love of truth.

«I might really just as well have become a clergyman,» he had said one day to Martin, rather mournfully, when they were exchanging a few words at a street corner.

And there, far up in the center, that pale slender woman--was it not she who had been his flame on certain spring evenings many years ago, Harriet Skottë? He had written her a letter, too, which had never been sent. Ah! those days.... Life had gone a bit poorly with her since then; she did not look happy. She was married now, and her husband was beside her. He was fat, very well dressed and looked as if he had been varnished. Poor little child, she hadn’t been too lucky in her marriage choice--one could tell that by a look at her husband....

And he saw other faces, those of women whom he knew slightly although they didn’t know him, young women whom he kept in friendly remembrance because sometime without their being aware he had been a little richer and happier when they had floated past him on the street like sunlit clouds.... Down there was one whom he remembered well, for she had once noted his glance and had pulled her skirts around her and given him a look as if he were a murderer of the Jack the Ripper type. Poor little lady! the time had flown, she was no longer young, for she had then been in her late bloom, and now she would get no more such glances when she went down Sture Street....

He grew tired of looking at one thing and listening to another. The deep and wonderful old words which sounded from the stage said nothing to him at the moment, and he thought he could read by the masks in the parquet that the words recoiled unheard from them too, and that they scarcely comprehended more of what occurred on the stage than the mere pantomime. It was the fifth act. He leaned back in his corner, letting the two grave-diggers toss about skulls and witticisms as they chose, while he sought in the dark the glance of his mistress. But he did not catch it, because she could see everything from her place and never took her eyes from the stage. Then once more the words took on color and life to his ears, when he saw the eagerness in her face; and the whole churchyard scene, which he could not see but which he knew so well, seemed to be mirrored in her glance. He saw Hamlet stand there in his mantle of night and mystery with Yorick’s skull in his hand, he saw the funeral procession, the lowering of the coffin, and the queen as she strewed flowers on the grave: «Sweets to the sweet.» He saw the strange struggle in the grave, the two men wrestling down there, and he heard Hamlet’s voice, «I loved Ophelia.»

What did he want--did he want to tear her out of the grave? Suppose she were not dead, suppose she should arise from the coffin now as if after a quiet sleep--wouldn’t he take her in his arms and carry her away and love her to the end of days? No, it was not as he thought. He had said while she was still alive, «Lady, I loved you once.» He was no ordinary fickle cavalier, he had not forgotten her for another lady-in-waiting with a slenderer waist and a deeper bosom, and still he could say, «I loved you once.» He could possibly say that of many things. He had loved the sun, and the flowers and the trees. The blue heavens he had loved, and water and fire and the good brown earth. He had loved all that; to all the four elements and to life itself he might have said, «I loved you once.» But then things had changed, there was something which stole in between all this and him, something which took him in its grasp without asking any leave and drove away everything else, the sun and the flowers and the women and Woman, far away, so that he hardly saw it any more except as if through a mist.... And now when he saw the funeral procession come, and heard that it was for her whom he had had and had lost--but he also knew that he had lost her and all the rest before she was dead, and the very loss seemed real to him only at the first moment; at the next he saw it far off, through a mist.

* * * * *

Martin had shut his eyes, and when he opened them again, he himself saw everything through a mist: the parquet and the white masks down there and her whom he loved.

She took his hand and caressed it softly between her two warm hands while she whispered to him, «Tell me, what are you thinking of?»

The winter night slept around them. It snowed no longer, and they went home in a white moonlit mist through the snowdrifts, in through her door and up the stairs. It got brighter and brighter the higher they climbed. They stopped at a stairway window and looked out. The greater part of the mist was now below them, it lay wrapped around the yards and open spaces beneath, but in the upper regions of the air everything was almost clear; it was bluish and bright as a night in August. A wide ring of light was around the moon, and in the pale glow the world lay as if ice-bound and petrified. Out of the ocean of mist down there arose a lonely gable wall without a window, which absorbed the cold glance of the moon and stared blindly and emptily back. A long shiver went through them both, they pressed hard against each other, closing their eyes, and everything was lost to them in a kiss.

It became a long and wonderful kiss. He felt all her being dissolve, while he heard in his ears the sound of distant bells from a little country church far away between hedges and wheat fields. It seemed to be a Sunday morning: he saw a neat gravel plot, red peonies were glowing from the flower beds, white and yellow butterflies were fluttering about the bushes and the lawn, and he heard the rustling of mighty trees. He was walking with her among the trees, but through their murmur passed a breath of autumn, the yellow butterflies were yellow leaves, and some were already dark with frost. The wind carried with it broken accents and words, which were sometimes like the dry words of everyday speech, sometimes like furtive whispers about something that had to be kept secret, with all of which was blended as it were the echo of the actor’s strange intonation a little while before when he said, «I loved Ophelia.»

But he did not relinquish her mouth. They sank ever more deeply into one another. He seemed to be voyaging through space: in the white moon-mist burned a red star, first faint and expiring, then more powerful and ever nearer, growing and broadening into a flaming spring of fire, to which he fastened his lips tightly. He seemed to burn without suffering, the flames cooled his tongue like a slightly bitter wine, until he felt that he was drinking in everything: satiety and hunger, thirst and coolness, the sun’s health and the midnight’s anguish, the lucid thought of day and the morbid brooding of moonlit dusk, all the joy and all the misery of the earth--from this one spring.

MARTIN BIRCK’S YOUTH BY HJALMAR
SÖDERBERG IS SET IN BODONI TYPE.
THE ILLUSTRATIONS ARE BY THEODORE
NADEJEN. FORMAT BY A. W. RUSHMORE.
MADE BY THE HADDON CRAFTSMEN.
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
· MCMXXX ·

Transcriber’s Notes

Surrounding characters have been used to indicate _italics_
or +small caps+
A three-leaf glyph has been replaced with ❧
Inconsistent hyphenation has been retained.
p. 9 changed ; to ! following «death»
p. 37 changed » to › following «kick.»
p. 42 joined unhyphenated parts of «cauldron»
p. 90 removed period between «know» and «----»
p. 107 changed «say" to «saw»
p. 133 changed close quote to close guillemet following «right,»
p. 136 changed quotes to guillemets around «He who hath seen God,
he must die the death»
p. 178 changed «superstitution» to «superstition»
p. 188 changed period to comma following «little»