Part 4

Martin didn’t know whether _he_ was the murderer or the murdered, but he fancied he heard steps on the bridge and didn’t dare to look around. Johan, however, who had a cheerful disposition, drove off his fear by striking up a jolly song. He sang to the tune of «There was an old woman by Konham Square»:

«I go to my death wherever I go, killivillivippombom!»

And Martin joined in and sang along with him.

But when they got to the bridge-tender’s house, Johan was silent while Martin sang at the top of his voice:

«I go to my death wherever I go, killivillivippombom!»

The bridge-tender, old Moberg, was sitting on his porch, which was embowered in hop vines, drinking toddy with two farmers in the light of a round Japanese lantern. He was an old man who drank toddy every evening, and people said he couldn’t last much longer. But he was most unwilling to die. If he heard any one speak of illness or death, it was to him as if he had heard something indecent, or indeed it was much worse, for indecent talk rather raised his spirits than offended his ears. But when he saw Martin coming along the road and heard him singing a funeral hymn to the tune of an insolent street song, he got up and advanced along the road with tottering steps till he halted in front of Martin. Martin stopped too and was silent directly. He looked around for Johan, but Johan had vanished.

Old Moberg had become blue in the face, as he said in a trembling voice: «And this child is supposed to come of respectable people! These are strange times, I may say.»

Thereupon he went into the house, without either drinking his toddy or saying good night to the farmers, and went to bed.

But Martin was left alone on the road, and everything around him had become silent all of a sudden. He heard only the sound of the farmers’ sticks as they went off in the dark without speaking.

Martin’s parents, however, had heard the whole affair from the veranda on the side of the house.

«Martin, come in!»

Martin was as red as his collar was white. Now he’d have to give an account of who had taught him to sing such things. But he said he had thought of it himself. Father explained to Martin how dreadfully he had behaved, and Martin cried and was sent to bed. His mother cried too when she said prayers with him. She was frightened and wrought up. For children’s offenses, like those of adults, are judged more according to the scandal they have aroused than according to their inner nature, and Martin’s misdeed had caused a terrible scandal.

* * * * *

The most beautiful days of summer were gone. In the daytime there was rain and wind, and the lake turned green. And at dusk the crows flapped around the slope with the oaks and the naked tree.

When it rained, Martin was set to read «The Bee and the Dove» and «The Toad and the Ox.» He read too «Tiny’s Trip to Dreamtown.»

«Little gold fishes in goodly row Swim through the silver sea there. Tiny is off to Dreamtown, ho! Ere it is night he’ll be there.

«Soon, soon Close to the moon He sees its outline fleeting. Bright, bright Many a light Sends him a kindly greeting.

«On glides the ship, it nears the land. Lamps are a-gleam so pretty Down at the edge of the murmuring strand, Bells ring out from the city.»

The city! Tears came into Martin’s eyes. He had often thought of the city in the past days and had wondered if everything was the same at home. For in winter Martin longed for the green grass of summer and the strawberries in the woods, but when a flock of summer days had gone by and the green was no longer fresh and the wild roses in the meadows were gray with the dust of the highroad, he dreamed once more of the city’s gleaming rows of lamps, of Christmas and snow, and of the gray winter twilight in front of the lighted fire.

--X--

The wheel of the year had gone around, and it was again autumn.

In the city there was much that was new. Long Row was gone with its gardens and sheds; in its place a great brick building rose aloft, growing higher every day, obscuring both the lindens of Humlegård Park and the Observatory on its hill. Everywhere people were pulling down and building up, and dynamite blasts resounded every day in the district, which was now no longer to be called Ladgardsland but Östermalm. And Mrs. Heggbom had become a lady. If anybody called her by her former title, she would answer politely but decidedly, «Not any more!»

Martin went to school, but it was a modest little school and not nearly so terrible as he had thought. One had only to learn one’s lessons, and everything went well. And Martin felt with pride that his knowledge of the world was enlarged with every day. Space and time daily extended their boundaries before his eyes; the world was much bigger than he had dreamed and so old that his head grew giddy at the multitude of the years. If one looked ahead, time had no limits--it ran out into a dizzying blue infinity; but if one traced it back, one at least found far back in the darkness a beginning, a place where one had to stop: six thousand years before the birth of Our Saviour it was that God had created the world. That stood clear and plain in Martin’s Biblical History, on the first page.

In six days He had made it. But the teacher said that days were longer at that time.

But if possibly the days of the creation had been a little longer than ordinary days, it was just the opposite with Methusalem’s nine hundred and sixty-nine years. «At that time, you see, they didn’t reckon the years as long as now,» the teacher said.

There was so much new to learn and digest; school had in reality none of those terrors with which Martin had arrayed it in his imagination.

But on the other hand the way to and from school was filled with all sorts of perils and adventures. Those ill-disposed beings who were called rowdies and who called Martin and his comrades stuck-ups might be in ambush around any corner. The worst of these rowdies were the fierce and formidable «marsh rowdies,» who would now and then leave their gloomy habitation in the tract between the Humlegård and Roslagstorg, the «Marsh,» to go on the war path. Their weapons were said to be lead balls on the end of short ropes. But more than these marsh rowdies, whom Martin had never seen and of whose existence he was not entirely sure, he feared the horrible Franz, who used to live in the Long Row and still resided in the same street. For this rowdy directed all his energies and intelligence toward embittering Martin’s life by day and even pursued him into his nocturnal dreams.

But one day when Martin was on his way for morning recess, he found two of his comrades in a fight with Franz at a street corner; in fact they had already overcome him, thrown him down, and were pummeling him with their fists. At this time Martin had begun to read Indian books, so that he at once saw in Franz a parallel to the noble redskin and did not want to miss so favorable a chance of making him his ally against other rowdies. He therefore advanced and represented to his comrades how cowardly it was to fight two against one, said that Franz lived in his street and was a very decent rowdy, and proposed that they let him go in peace. While he thus drew the attention of his comrades, Franz managed to get up and run away.

In return Martin got all the licking intended for Franz. Furthermore he had to endure the scorn of his comrades for being the friend of a rowdy. And the next time he met Franz on the street in front of the dyer’s gate, the latter tripped him so that he fell into the gutter, then gave him a bloody nose, tore his books apart, swore at him frightfully, and ran off.

He had not understood that he was supposed to be a noble redskin. But this Franz was not a rowdy of the usual sort; he was a thoroughly awful rowdy.

--XI--

Martin entered the high school.

Here everything was strange and cold. Gray walls, long corridors. The school yard was like the desert of Sahara. When the bell rang for the first recess, Martin slipped off by himself so as to escape his new comrades. But the next recess they gathered around him in a ring, surveying him for a while in silence, till finally a little red-haired boy with a broad pate opened his mouth to ask, «What sort of devil are you?»

At these words Martin had a dark premonition that a new stage of his life was beginning. He had been as happy as a plant in the earth, as is every little child with kind parents and a good home. Now the doors were opened upon an entirely new world, a world where one could not get on by the same simple means that his father and mother had shown him: _i.e._, by being polite and friendly towards all he met and never taking advantage of others. Here the thing was to decide quickly and firmly in what case one should use one’s fists, in what one should take to one’s heels, and under what circumstances one could benefit by cunning and deceit. It was not long, either, before Martin got the way of things. He suddenly remembered various curses and ugly words that he had heard from the bridge-tender’s assistant in the country, and he missed no opportunity of fitting them in here and there in conversation with his associates wherever he thought they would go. In this way he became sooner acquainted with the other boys, and they in return enlightened him in much that a newcomer might find useful: _e.g._, which of the teachers flogged and which only gave bad marks; that the worst of all was Director Sundell, who had mirrors in his spectacles so that he saw what was done behind his back and always wore galoshes so that he couldn’t be heard in the corridors; that «Sausages» was decent, though he marked hard, but that «The Flea» was a damned sneak.

--XII--

So year was added to year, and the new buried the old, while Martin was slowly initiated into the twofold art of life, to learn and to forget. For as the gambler in order to keep on till the last coin has run through his trembling fingers must forget his losses in the hope of future gains, so humanity, the gambler by compulsion, finds that the greatest art is to forget and that upon this depends everything.

Martin forgot. The Red Turk, who had long since wearied of jumping, was as much forgotten as if he had never been. And Uncle Abraham, who had given him to Martin and who had hanged himself with a stove-cord one rainy day, when he didn’t find it worth the trouble to live any more, was soon forgotten as well, though he now and again came up in Martin’s dreams as a dark and disturbing riddle. But while the boy was forgetting, he learned. A third of the truth was transmitted by the teachers, and another third was given by his comrades, who soon helped him to lift the veil under which was hidden the Sixth Commandment and everything pertaining to it. They made free use of the Scriptures in their researches. They explained precisely what it was that Absolom did with his father’s concubines on the roof of the palace before all the people, and they reveled with Ezekiel over the abysmal sin of Ahala and Ahaliba. But although both of these thirds were given him with an admixture of errors and lies, and although the final third--which was perhaps the most important and which it was his task to search out for himself sometime--had not yet begun to occupy him; yet nevertheless every day widened the chinks experience tore through the spiderweb tissue of legend and dream with which friendly hands had fenced in his childhood, and more and more often through the cracks gaped the great empty void which is called the world.

THE WHITE CAP ❧

--I--

When Martin Birck had got the white cap, his first errand was to go into a cigar booth to buy a cane of cinnamon wood and a package of cigarettes. The young girl who stood in the shop had black eyes and a thick bang. Her exterior corresponded but imperfectly with the ideal of his dreams, which belonged to a more blonde and Gretchen-like sphere; but when she congratulated him pleasantly on his white cap and at the same time regarded him with a look full of kindliness, despite the fact that he had never before been in her shop, he suddenly felt all warm about the heart, caught her dirty hand, which lay outstretched across the counter display of Cameo and Duke of Durham, and tenderly kissed it. However, he repented almost at once. He had no doubt behaved badly. He did not, to be sure, imagine that the young girl was completely innocent--she had no doubt a lover, possibly several; but that was no reason why any one at all had the right to come in from the street and kiss her hand just like that. He was embarrassed and didn’t know what to say or do, till he finally plucked up courage to select a cane, light a cigarette, and go out.

Queen Street was still wet after the last shower, little ladies with jogging bustles lifted their skirts to jump over puddles, which mirrored the blue above; stylish gentlemen with thin angular legs and canes like Martin’s swung their top-hats in pompous salutation, revealing in the act heads so close-clipped that the scalp shone through. Over the roofs and chimneys of the gray houses the restless white spring clouds hurried in fluttering haste, and far down at the bottom of the street the sunlight quivered between churches and towers.

Martin stopped in front of every store window to see the reflection of his white cap. He could not understand how he had become a student. Up to the last he had believed he would be flunked. His surprise was the more joyous when he received his student certificate the same as the others, and especially when he came to the closing lines, «In consideration whereof the aforesaid M. Birck has been adjudged worthy to receive the certificate: _Graduated with honor_.» These words caused his heart to swell with deep gratitude toward his corps of teachers, for although he considered himself fairly proficient, it was far beyond his expectations to find this idea shared by his instructors. During the last terms he had seldom known his lessons. Often he had not even been able to bring himself to read them over in the ten-minute intermission before classes or to slip a couple of loose leaves from his textbook into his Bible so as to study them during morning prayers, while the lector in theology stood on the platform and talked bosh--a resource which ordinarily even the most frivolous of his comrades would not fail to use. He would, however, have liked to gratify his parents with good marks, although for his own part he had not any great ambition in that direction; but during the last years there had come over him a dull apathy for everything connected with school, against which he could do nothing. It was so hard for him to take it in full earnest. Whenever, contrary to his custom, he had distinguished himself in this or that subject, he was almost ashamed within himself, as if he had done something stupid. As often as he was supposed to dig down into the paltry details in which textbooks delight, he felt himself as ridiculous as the man who, when his house was on fire, saved the poker.

Now that the poker was saved, however, he was so overjoyed that he could have sung; he felt that he was happy and free, as he hastened home with his white cap, home to the blossoming street of his childhood. But the street was no longer the same as before. From a single plot the cherry tree still stretched its branches out over a mossy board fence; everything else was great red brick buildings and small commonplace meeting-houses. The rowdy Franz could no longer disturb what idyllic atmosphere was still left, for he had grown up and become big, and had now been for some time behind the bars of Langholm jail.

--II--

Home was quieter and more empty than before. Maria, Martin’s sister, had been married a year ago to a doctor who lived far away in the country, and grandmother was no longer there.

In the evening Martin and his companions were to have a supper at Hasselbacken. Martin’s father gave him five crowns to offer to the joy of youth, and his mother took him aside and said: «Martin, Martin, you must promise me to be careful tonight and not be led into any foolishness. Don’t make a point of emptying your glass every time any one drinks a toast with you, or you’ll lose your head. The best thing would be just to pretend you drank. And I must tell you, Martin, that there is a class of dreadful women who do nothing else but try to lead young men to their destruction. You must beware of them especially. Dear Martin, if I only knew you had given yourself to the Lord and had your thoughts fixed on Him, I shouldn’t be anxious about you; but I know you don’t do that. Their very breath is poisonous; if you only stand on the street and talk to such a woman, you may catch the most frightful diseases that no doctor in the world can cure.»

«Mother dear,» said Martin, «you’re always getting off on that.»

He took up his white cap, said good-by and went.

His mother followed him with troubled eyes, and when he was gone, sat down in a dark corner and wept. For she knew she was going to lose him as mothers always lose their sons.

--III--

Martin thought of his mother as he went along the Avenue on the way to the Park. How could the relations between them have become what they were? To her he was still a little child. When he first began to speak to her of his religious doubts, she pretended to believe that it was something he had got from outside, from bad comrades or some wicked book. Later things reached such a point that he could no longer talk to her about anything but the most ordinary subjects--about shirts and socks and buttons to be sewed on. If their conversation ever took a serious turn, they treated each other mutually as little children. Thus, without his meaning it or noticing it before it was too late, he got a condescending tone that hurt her, so that after such a conversation a thorn remained in the heart of each.

She often lay awake at night weeping and sorrowing over his unbelief. She herself, however, was of the earth in her thoughts, her hopes, and the whole of her being. She believed in hell of course, because she believed in the Bible; but she could never seriously imagine that her son or any one at all whom she knew and associated with would go to such a horrible place. It was not therefore on account of his soul that she grieved most but for his future here on earth, since she had observed that things did not ordinarily go well in the world with those who contemned God and religion. Some of them got into prison, others left their country to go among strangers, and all aroused distrust and ill-will among respectable folk. She feared that her son might come to be one of these, and it was this idea which kept her awake at night and left her with swollen eyes. She had no more precious dream than that he should be «like other folk,» as most people are, if possible better and above all happier, but still on the whole as they were. She could imagine that her son might become a poet, she could even wish it, for she loved poetry; the tears came into her eyes when he read her some of his poems; but she pictured it that he would sit at some office work on weekdays, and only on Sundays or in his free hours write some verses about sunsets, which he would send in to the Swedish Academy and get a prize, so that he would become at the same time a great poet and a respected business man with an assured income. She believed in full seriousness that he would be more highly thought of among poets if he was in an office and had a title than if he just wrote. That was how it had been with all the real poets. Tegnér was a bishop, and even Bellman had at least had a position in the lottery bureau. As an example that Martin should especially take to follow, she used to mention a poet whom she had known when she was young, who was now an auditor in the Court of Exchequer and wrote verses about everything that was grand and beautiful, about the sea and the sun and the king, and had been decorated with the Order of Vasa. Such a life she considered noble and to be emulated, and when her dreams of her son’s future were at their highest, it was something of this sort she imagined.

But Martin dreamed other dreams. He wanted to be a poet. He would write a book; a novel or a lyric sequence, or best of all a drama of ideas in the same verse form as «Brand» or «Peer Gynt.» He would devote his life to searching for the truth and giving to mankind what he found or thought he had found of it. He would also become famous, a great man; he would earn a lot of money, he would buy a little house for his father and a new silk dress for his mother--her old one was worn and faded. He would be envied by men and sought after by women, but of all the women in the world he should not love more than one, and that one a woman who loved another man. This unhappy love should give his thoughts depth and bitterness and his poems wings. But he had a dark feeling that while he sought for truth he should only find truths, and that while he gave them to men in verse more wonderful than any music or in a clear and cold prose with words like sharp teeth, he would despise himself for reaping honor and gold for the morsels he had found by accident while he was seeking for something else. This self-contempt would eat into his soul and make of him an empty husk. But he would not let the world note anything; he would paint his cheeks, pencil his eyebrows and hold up his head, and at the very moment when he himself most deeply despised his poetry and set it below the humblest manual labor, he would inspire men most and be elected to the Swedish Academy to succeed Wirsén. With a countenance immobile as a mask he would give the usual flowery oration on his predecessor. Never again after that would he set pen to paper. In a strangely colorful and disordered life he would seek to deaden his despair. No sin should be unknown to him; in broad daylight he would drive in an open carriage through the streets with harlots and buffoons, and he would pass the nights in drinking and play. Till one gloomy October night he wearied of his mad and empty life, made a fire in his stove and burned his papers, emptied a glass of dark red wine spiced with a strange herb, and went to sleep to awake no more....

Or perhaps it was unnecessary that his life should end so tragically. When he thought it over more carefully, this seemed to him even a trifle banal. He might just as well move to a small town, to Strengness or Grenna. There he could live alone with a parrot and a black cat. He might also have an aquarium with goldfish. Behind closed shutters he would dream away the day, but when night came he would light candles in all the rooms and pace back and forth, back and forth, meditating on the vanity of life. And when the townfolk passed his house on the way home from their evening toddy at the rathskeller, they would stop to point at his window and say: «There lives Martin Birck. He has taught like a sage and lived like a fool, and he is very unhappy.»

* * * * *

All this and a lot more Martin Birck thought as he went out the Avenue across the park on the way to Hasselbacken.

--IV--

The orchestra struck up the opening bars of «Mefistofele.»