Part 6

But one night when he lay awake pondering over this, unable to sleep, while the moon shone straight into his room and the thoughts crowded into his head, suddenly it stood clear to him that he did not believe. It seemed to him that he had long realized the Christian religion was something that no one could really believe if he wished to be honest with himself. It became evident to him that the problem as to the truth of Christianity was something which he had already gone past and that it was actually a quite different problem which now disturbed him: how was it possible that the others could believe in this when he could not? By «the others» he meant not only his comrades--for they did not seem to concern themselves any further in such matters, and he knew besides that one could get them to believe in a little of everything--but his parents, his teachers, all the grown-ups, who must know more of life and the world than he did. How was it possible that he, Martin Birck, who wasn’t sixteen yet and lay in a little iron bed in the home of his parents, could think differently about the highest and most important things than did old and experienced people, and how could he be right and they wrong? This seemed to him almost as wildly absurd as the faith he had just rejected. Here he was completely at a loss; he couldn’t come to any solution. He got up out of bed and went to the window. Snow was glittering white on the roofs, it was dark in the houses, and the street lay empty. The moon stood high in the heavens, but it was a gray-white winter moon, small and frost-bitten and infinitely far away, and in the moon-haze the stars twinkled sleepily and dully. Martin stood tracing with his finger on the pane. «Give me a sign, God!» he whispered. Then he stood long at the window, getting chilly and staring at the moon; he saw it glide in and become hidden behind a black factory chimney and he saw it creep out again on the other side. But he received no sign.

In the depths of his heart he did not wish for a sign either, for he felt that a conviction was something that one could not and should not have as a gift by means of a miracle. To seek for truth and be honest with oneself in the search, that was the one clue he could find.

Martin supposed that confirmation and the first communion were duties prescribed by law which he could not evade. His father had no different conception, or if he had he did not say so, for he reverenced the proverb: Speech is silver, silence is golden. Martin therefore went to communion with the other neophytes. It was a spring day with sun and tender green in the old trees of the churchyard, and when Martin heard the bells roar and sing and the organ begin the processional hymn, his eyes filled with tears and he grieved in his heart that he was not as the others and could not believe and feel as they did. And when he saw the church full of serious folk and heard the voice of the preacher enjoining the young people from the pulpit to hold fast to the faith of their fathers, he felt unrest and confusion through his inmost soul, and again the question came to trouble him: «How is it possible that all these can believe, and not I? It’s mad to think that I alone can be right against all these and against all the dead who sleep in their graves out there, who lived and died in the faith I reject. It’s mad, it’s mad! I must conquer my reason and teach myself to believe.» But when he came to the actual ceremonies and saw the ministers in their surplices going back and forth before the altar, while they dispensed the bread and wine and carried napkins over their arms like waiters, he felt faint and disgusted and could not understand that he had let himself be fooled into such mummery. And although he knew or believed that these ministers who shuffled about there in the gloom were in everyday life about as honest as most people, they seemed to him at that moment shameless hypocrites.

Belief in a God and in a life after this was what Martin had left at this time of his childhood faith. But his god was no longer a fatherly god who listened to prayers and nodded approval if they were needful and intelligent, or shook his head if they were childish and stupid. His god had become cold as ice and remote as the moon he had stood staring at on the winter’s night, and Martin ceased saying his evening prayer, for he did not believe there was anyone who heard it. Then finally came the day when Martin realized that what he had been calling god these last days was something with which no human being could come into any relation either of love or obedience or opposition, something which could only have the name of god by a wanton play of words and a misuse of the incompleteness of language.

And when he examined his belief in immortality, he soon found that he had got far away from the blue heaven of his childhood. He had observed that all who on any ground other than that of revelation preserved their belief in a life after this also assumed a life before this, and he found such an assumption both natural and logical. Only that is eternal which has always existed. What has come into being will sometime cease to be: such was the law for everything existent. But Martin had no memory of any earlier existence, nor had he either read or heard tell of any one who had with any gleam of probability given it out that he remembered any such state. There were, to be sure, people who asserted that they recalled their preëxistence, but they regularly maintained that they had been some historic personage of whom they had read in books during their present life: _e.g._, Julius Caesar or Gregory VII. Only rarely could any one remember having been a slave or a waiter or a shop-clerk. This circumstance appeared peculiar. In any event it was clear that the great majority of people, and Martin among them, had not the slightest recollection of any previous existence. He concluded from this that neither in a future life would he be able to remember anything of the present, that indeed he would not be able to verify his own identity; and he found that if one called such an existence immortality, it was again--as in the question of God--a weakness of thought, a play with the imperfection of language, and nothing else. And it struck him as even more bizarre to give such a name to the passage of the dead body into living nature, into plants and animals and air and water. He had no mind for such kinds of word-play.

Things went on in this way so that Martin set out in life without any other belief than that he would grow up, get old and die like a tree in the ground, as his forefathers had done, and that the green earth which he saw with his eyes was his only home in the world and the only space in which it was given him to live and act. And among the many dreams he composed about his life was that in which he was to become like a great and beautiful tree by the wayside with rich foliage, giving coolness and shelter to many. He wished to create happiness and beauty around him and to clear away illusions; he meant to speak and write so that all would have to perceive at once that he was right. To be sure he was not quite certain that truth in itself could produce happiness, but history had taught him that illusion created unhappiness and crime. Like pestilences the various religions had passed over the world, and he was astounded when he thought of all the desolation with which Christianity had marked its way through times and peoples. But he believed in full confidence that its days were reckoned, that he lived at the dawn of a new time, and he wanted to play his part in thought and poetry toward breaking the road for what was to come.

At the time when Martin believed and thought thus it still occurred to him that life, no matter how short and unstable it was, had nevertheless a sort of meaning. He felt himself to be in a state of development and growth; every day new truths arose before his mind and new beauty before his senses during his long lonely wanderings to the edge of the city or in the woods when spring had begun. And spring.... At that time spring was still a real spring--not a disease, an intoxication, a fever in the blood, in which all old half-forgotten yearning and regret rises to the surface and says: «Look, here I am! Do you recognize me? I have slept long but I am not dead.» Nothing of that sort, but an awakening, a morning, a murmur in the air, and a resounding song. And at that time the thousand unsatisfied desires which he bore within him were like so many shimmering hopes and half-uttered promises, for no long years of emptiness and disappointment had yet managed to sharpen them into cutting knives which wounded and tore at the soul. And if he did not believe that all these obligations, or even most of them, would be redeemed by life, they were still like bribing possibilities, like a lever for dreams without goal or bounds; and even at the moment when the book he held in his hand or the experience he had had in the course of the day whispered warnings in his ear and advised him not to believe in happiness, these dreams were woven into a longing without bitterness and a melancholy as luminous as a spring twilight.

Nevertheless these warnings came ever more closely together, and ever more often it happened that in the midst of the dreams youthful blood conjured up he caught himself listening to the other voice, the voice that welled up from the depths of the oldest times and was echoed in the newest books of the day, the strange voice that none of the hundred new gospels which periodically as equinoctial storms had blown through the minds of men could silence for more than a brief moment, the voice which said: «All is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun.» Why was he alive, and what was the meaning of it all? He did not cease to ask himself these questions, for he still continuously demanded of the life which he saw with his eyes that there should be something behind it, something which could be called life’s meaning. For most of the happiness which he saw men possess and that which he saw them strive for seemed to him like the fairy gold in the story, to be withered leaves, or it appeared to him like nice playthings, something not to be taken seriously. If he turned his gaze to his own life as he lived it from day to day, he could not escape the thought that in itself it was miserable and empty and that its only worth lay in the uncertain hope that it would not remain as it was. But what he hoped for was not something that one could approach step by step with work and patience and a hundred small sacrifices--competence and respect and that sort of thing--what he hoped for was something indefinite and indescribable: a sunrise, a break-up of the ice, an awakening from a painful and purposeless dream.

For it was like a painful and purposeless dream that his life appeared when he looked at it with waking eyes and found it filled with shabby joy, with vulgar sorrow and ignoble anxiety. Now and then he wrote some poems and stories to earn a little money and to prove how far his words could follow his thoughts, but with every new year all he had written in the old seemed to him childish and worthless, and he felt that nothing would amount to anything which could not fill him completely with the joy of creation. Beyond this he fulfilled almost automatically the sum of actions, or more properly gestures, which usually characterize a young man in a government office or to which other circumstances may lead. He went to his work as late in the day as possible and left as early as propriety allowed. He made acquaintance with his fellow employees and shared in their amusements. He drank punch, ate suppers, and visited cheap girls of the streets; he loved music and often sat at the opera among the blackamoors and musical enthusiasts of the upper gallery, and he sang quartettes and took his reward in double file when an old school superintendent hung the gilded tin funnel on a rose-colored ribbon around his neck with paternal hands.

And he said to himself: «No, I’m dreaming. This is not life.»

--IX--

Years passed.

... Martin was roaming about in the twilight. The streets and squares lay white, snow was falling softly and silently. A man went in front of him on a zigzag course lighting a lamp here and a lamp there.

Martin went along without a purpose; he hardly knew where he went.

Suddenly he noticed that he was crying as he walked. He did not clearly know why. He did not ordinarily find it easy to cry. Some snowflakes must have caught in his eyelashes, and his eyes had got wet.... He turned off into a side street and came to a bit of park, he brushed past a couple half snowed in on a bench, and proceeded on among the trees, where it was lonely and empty and the branches drooped heavily under the wet snow.

... Strange! A hovel in an alley, a smoking lamp. Two naked arms which bent and reached forward to the window, and the sound of curtains coming down. The girl, who was humming the latest popular tune while she slowly and unconcernedly hung up her red bodice--he hummed too so as not to speak aloud--was she pretty or ugly? He did not know, he had hardly set eyes on her. It was not she for whom he longed.

He had sat at home in the dusk, the icy blue dusk of a March afternoon, twisting and turning over an old poem that never would get itself finished. Then all at once he had begun to think of a woman. He had met her at noon as he came from his work, and he had felt the encounter as a sudden intoxication. She was walking in the full sunlight, and many men turned their heads after her as she went. But she seemed to notice or suspect nothing. She was very young--eighteen or possibly twenty. She was neither expensively nor humbly dressed, but she carried her head carelessly and easily, perhaps too a little proudly. Slender and straight, she went on her way, her brown hair shining in the sunlight, and now and then she smiled to herself. He followed her at a distance; she went up to Östermalm and vanished at last in a gateway.

So it was that she had come before his mind again in the twilight, as he sat in his rocking-chair and hunted for rhymes; and she left him no rest--he threw down his pen and went out. There was no longer sunshine; it was snowing. He came to the large gray house where he had seen her go in; he walked to and fro on the pavement directly opposite and saw a window light up here and a window there. Who was she? He remembered he had seen her speak to a man he knew. He went up the steps and read the names on the doors, until at last, deciding that he was childish and stupid, he pulled up his coat collar and went back into the snow. He took by the arm the first girl that gave him a meaningful glance and went home with her.

Now he was standing there in her room. He stood stiffly and silently surveying her as she took off her clothes and chatted and hummed. He hardly asked himself whether she was pretty. He only knew that she might have been prettier without tempting him more and uglier without tempting him less. She showed the marks of her calling. She was still young, and yet one saw that she had long ago tired of choosing and rejecting among her customers. With the same habitual motions of her hand, the coarse hand of a working girl, she hung up her vulgar bodice for any one who asked it of her, for lieutenant or clerk, minister of justice or waiter, making no distinction between them unless possibly that in her heart she preferred the waiter, since he was less haughty than the others and understood her better.

Whence did she come? Perhaps from a back yard with an ash barrel and a privy, perhaps from a village in the woods. The latter seemed likelier; there was still something of the wood girl in her eyes. Glad among other glad children, she had run bare-legged on the slopes and picked strawberries. Early her contemporaries had taught her to bite of the forbidden fruit. So she had come to the city and had fared as did many others. It was perhaps not a necessity in itself; she might have become a workman’s wife if she had wanted, but she had decided that their lot was harder and without much thinking had gone the way that was smoothest to her feet. With a little more intelligence and better luck she might also have become a tradesman’s wife, such as goes to the square with her maid and bargains for her boiled beef and horse-radish.

«Well,» she said, «aren’t you going to undress?»

He stared at her fixedly, and suddenly had no idea of the whole thing, why he had come and what he wanted of her. He muttered something about not feeling very well, laid several crowns on the dressing-table, and departed. She didn’t get angry, only looked surprised and didn’t throw any taunt down the stairs after him.

* * * * *

It snowed continuously. Would it never end, this winter? It was now getting on to the end of March, the trees drooped with the snow and it was bitterly cold....

Martin was weary, he sat on a bench under one of the white trees and let the snow deposit itself in drifts on his hat and shoulders.

«What are we doing with life, we mortals?»

The life he led, the pitiful joy he sought and sometimes found, seemed to him at that moment like the fantasy of a madhouse. Nevertheless that life was the normal life. Most of the men he knew lived thus. He was twenty-three. In the four or five years he had been in the game he ought to have got used to it....

No, he didn’t understand humanity nor did he understand himself. He often listened to the talk of his friends and acquaintances about these things. He had noted that the most respectable of the young men, and of the old for that matter, believed in two kinds of love, a pure kind and a sensual kind. Young women of the better sort were to be loved with the pure kind, but that meant betrothal and marriage, and that one could seldom afford. As a rule, therefore, it was only girls of means who could inspire a pure love; outside of that the feeling was more at home in lyric poetry than in reality. The other sort, on the contrary, the sensual, a man might and should possess about once a week. But this side of existence was not considered to have a serious meaning; it was not anything that could render a man happy or unhappy; it was simply comic, the material for funny stories, an equally pleasant and hygienic diversion when one had received his salary and drunk his bottle of punch. But in the intervals the entire sexual life interested but slightly the respectable and decent class of men; they found its functions unbeautiful and disreputable, or, as they otherwise put it, bestial, since they could not exercise them without feeling themselves like beasts.

This was the prevalent opinion throughout the community, and such conditions were explained in that this way of living was the healthiest and wisest, not of course in the sermons of the clergy, the speeches of the politicians, or the leading articles of the newspapers, but in the enlightened judgment between man and man in all circles. It was considered necessary in order that young men might preserve their health and good spirits and that young women of the better classes might preserve their virtue. The young men accordingly drank punch, visited girls of the streets, became fat and florid, and succeeded not only in putting up with this life as with a sort of wretched substitute, but it appealed to them to such a degree that often even after they were married they did not scorn to make excursions to their old haunts, which had become so endeared. The girls of the better class meanwhile were allowed to preserve their virtue and beyond that were not asked for their opinion, but for some of them their precious jewel became at last too heavy to carry....

«What have we done with our life, we mortals?

«Happiness, the joy of youth, whither has it gone? Life is regulated for the old, therefore it is a misfortune to be young. It is regulated for the thoughtless and stupid, for those who take the false for the true or even prefer the false, because it is a disease to think and feel, a childish disease which one must go through before one becomes a man.»...

The apparition of a woman glided slowly past the bench where he sat, and scarcely had it passed when it stood still, turned its head, and fixed upon him two great dark eyes.

He rose, shook off the snow, and went away.

He walked quickly, for he was cold.

He thought about life and books. During his adolescence a new literature had broken forth, which was at war with the prevalent morals of the community and endeavored to change them. Now it had grown silent. Little had been accomplished, almost nothing, and already it was losing its hold. What the new writers had fought for and in behalf of which they had taken and given such hard blows now suddenly belonged to the «’Eighties» and as such had once for all been tried and condemned, weighed in the balance and found too heavy. Instead the blue flower of poetry exhaled its perfume around him as never before. Once again the old words rang like new; earth returned to the golden age, the woods and waters were filled afresh with centaurs and nymphs, knights and damsels roamed into the sunset, and Song herself, with eyes wide awake and bright after her long sleep, stood forth again in the midst of the people and chanted as she had not done in a hundred years. Martin loved this poetry, its rhythms and words stole into the verses he himself sat and tinkered with in the dusk, and yet all this was strangely foreign to him. The world was just the same all the while, everything went its usual way, and no victory was won. Was this the time to sing? It was true that, when he looked more closely, he discovered ideas at the bottom of this new poetry also, and these ideas too were in open warfare against current morality. But only a few readers noted this and hardly any one attached any importance to it. It was just verse.

It was verse, and as a form for ideas poetry was and remained on about the level of the royal opera. There too the baritone might bellow against tyrants without thereby running any risk of missing his Vasa decoration, there too seduction scenes were played by artificial light without any one’s taking umbrage; what in ordinary life was called by ordinary citizens bestial was conceived of by the same people with regard to «Faust» and «Romeo and Juliet» as poetic and pretty and thoroughly suitable for young girls. It was the same with poetry. Ideas, when woven into verse and beautiful words, were no longer contraband; they were not even noticed.

Would a man never come who did not sing, but spoke, and spoke plainly!

* * * * *

He had come out on Strand Avenue. The ice on Nybro Inlet had just been broken, a tug was now forcing its painful way along between the cakes of ice. To the left several newly built millionaire barracks towered up in the snowy mist, in one of which the electric lights and polished glass prisms already gleamed from a long suite of rooms, and in a large hall a white shimmering maze of dancing couples moved behind the muslin curtains.

Several lonely wanderers had paused in a group as if rooted to stare at the paradise above them. Martin also stopped a minute and proceeded with his thoughts. Several measures of the waltz had reached his ears; it was the «Blue Danube»; he walked on humming it and couldn’t get it out of his head.

O Eros, Eros! The harlot’s room and the festal hall up there.... In both temples the same god was worshiped, and in both temples he was worshiped by the same men. But the women!