Part 10

«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»