Part 8

«Yes,» said Martin, «that sort of thing happens sometimes. And there are cases then in which a man digs up the oldest, the deadest, and most withered thing in his past and begins to worship it anew without seeing the caricature. That’s nearly the worst of all. Better the old saying: poor but proud.»

They sat silent a few minutes. The sun had gone, and still it was not twilight yet. It was almost brighter in the room than just before; everything in it had merely become suddenly pale.

Henrik broke the silence.

«Yes,» he said, «it’s a melancholy feeling to grow out of oneself and one’s old associations--but what’s it matter so long as one grows? And what is melancholy, anyhow, if it isn’t what the rowdy said of the toothbrush, a new kind of amusement invented by the upper classes? But the melancholy is only there when it’s a matter of associations and music and ideas. It was really something else I’ve been thinking of all the time. I’ve been thinking of love and women. If one comes into that province, it isn’t only just melancholy any longer; no, one can’t get off so cheaply. A man is fond of a woman. He wants the whole of eternity to be in that feeling. And yet he can’t escape reflecting that this emotion must be subordinate to the same law of growth as everything else in the world, that some day he will weary of what he loves just as one wearies of the moonlight music in ‹Faust.› I have not had many love affairs, but, believe me, I have never even in my imagination begun the game otherwise than with the thought: may she be the first to tire, and not I!»

«I’m afraid that prayer will not be often uttered,» said Martin. «To be sure both a lover and a married man may be betrayed, but it rarely happens that they wish to be.»

«Still I’m ashamed of the prayer, for I know it comes straight from my heart’s great cowardice. How far must we not have come from the primitive simple and straightforward conception of these things to think it is happier to be betrayed than to betray! And yet that’s how I feel. What does love signify to me; what does it ever mean to a man? Why should there be anything tragic in the fact that a man is betrayed in love? If he takes it tragically he merely becomes comic. And if on the discovery that he is a cuckold he breaks off reading a good book, he deserves to be one. But women--it’s a different thing with them.»

Henrik’s glance was fixed on vacancy.

«Deserted women,» he said--«there’s something special about them. One can’t escape lightly from the thought of them. No, if they scold and fuss and make a row, it’s easier at once; then the whole thing becomes burlesque, one shakes it off, and is free. Then one asks oneself, ‹How did I ever come to love such a creature?› One easily persuades oneself that one has never loved her, and so she’s out of the story. But the others--it seems the most painful thing of all to me to imagine her whom I love withered and pale, discarded, put in the shadow side of life, while I myself live on.... It is a paradox, I realize--it can never happen; one cannot at the same time act so and feel it so. And yet ... I met an old woman just now, here on the street, right outside your door. She was old and very pale and a little comic. She was quite shabbily dressed, too--one of the poor who are too proud to beg. One often sees such old women; there was nothing remarkable about her, nothing that distinguished her from any others of her kind, except that all at once, when I came close to her, she struck me as so like---- No, I can’t tell you straight out. There’s a young girl I’m very fond of. I’m so fond of her that we’re going to be married, perhaps very soon. It was she that the old woman was like, despite the difference in age and all the rest--it was one of those indefinite resemblances that one thinks one sees the first moment, and the next it’s gone without one’s knowing in what it consists. But that moment was enough for me; a chill went through me, a shudder as if I had seen something terrible, and it seemed to me only all the worse that everything else was as usual: the sun was shining and people were on the street.... The girl I care for stood before me, she passed me, withered, discarded, a little comic. It came over me that not even the thought that I myself was dead and lying under the earth could be any consolation to me in such a case; the only conception that could bring any relief was that I was living as wretched and exhausted as she.»

They sat quiet a long while.

«Tell me,» Martin finally asked, «who is she, the girl you are fond of? That is, if it’s no secret. Do I know her?»

«Yes,» said Henrik, in a subdued voice, «you know her, and I can tell you. It is Sigrid Tesch.»

Sigrid Tesch. Martin saw before him a young and supple figure, with dark abundant hair and delicate regular features. He had met her a couple of times quite cursorily. He knew she had made an impression on Henrik, and in his own twilight thoughts she had sometimes passed by with a pallid dream smile.

So it was she then, Sigrid Tesch, who was to be Henrik’s bride.

«Yes,» said Henrik, «isn’t it inexplicable that one can dare go into such a thing as love?... And yet....»

«Yes,» said Martin, «and yet....»

They both smiled.

Henrik Rissler got up.

«It is dusk,» he said; «we can hardly see the glasses. Will you go out with me? It’s wonderful outside tonight. Oh, you want to write---- Well, we’ll see each other again soon. Good-by!»

--XIII--

It was dusk now, almost dark, and Martin was still sitting in his rocking-chair at the table and could not get up energy to light the lamp. There was a little wine left in the bottle; he poured it into his glass and drank. He had raised the window to let the smoke drift out, and through the trampling of feet which rose from below like the sound of a hundred ticking clocks he heard the house door open and close again and steps going off down the street--they were Henrik’s. Martin thought about his love and what he had said about it, and he was at once struck with the fact that at the mere touch of this bit of reality his own love affair evaporated and was gone like mist and dream. Harriet Skottë.... He asked himself: «If I should read in the paper tomorrow that she was engaged or married, or that she was dead--what would that signify to me? Nothing, no reality lost, no expectation gone to shipwreck--just a mood burst, which would soon have burst anyhow.»

He took from his pocket the letter he had written, tore it open, and read it again. «I’ll burn it,» he thought--«but why burn it? I may be able to use it sometime in a story.»

He tossed it into a table drawer among other manuscripts. Then he sank again into reverie.

* * * * *

Suddenly his mother stood in the doorway. She held a lamp in her hand and was leaning forward, looking at him.

«You’re sitting in the dark,» she said. «Papa has gone out. May I sit with you here a while?»

Martin nodded. She set the lamp on the table, fetched a basket with her sewing, and sat down to sew.

She sat silent, bent over her work. At length she raised her eyes, large with tears and sleeplessness.

«Tell me, Martin,» she said; «you mustn’t be cross, but one day when you were out I couldn’t help pulling out a drawer of your table and glancing at your papers. Otherwise I should never know what you’re thinking about. And what I got hold of made me so worried that I had to sit down and cry. I didn’t understand it, I don’t know if it was supposed to be verse or what it was, but I thought it was only full of terrible blasphemies. I got so frightened, I almost thought for a moment that you were out of your head. I know I don’t understand anything, but so much I can still see, that you’ll never get anywhere with writing that way. You can write very finely, too, if you want to.»

Martin was silent. What should he answer? He divined, or at least supposed, that his mother had really wished to say something quite different, and that her saying he wouldn’t get on in the world was merely a forced expedient which she caught at when thoughts and words deserted her. She had of course felt and suspected that the poem she had found in the drawer was meant to be taken quite differently from the way she now feigned to think, she wanted him to explain himself, to talk to her about his thoughts. She was pounding at the door, «Let me in! don’t make me stand outside; I’m cold and it’s so lonely!» And yet he didn’t open the door, he couldn’t; he hadn’t fastened it, it had locked itself.

What ought he to answer her? Her words had filled him with a deep discouragement. If he had any ambition, it was to write so that each and all who really cared to could understand him. He had no taste for any literary freemasonry; he did not believe in a literature for the _élite_, nor had he failed to observe how often it happened that no one wanted to be of the _élite_. Now it suddenly became clear to him how hopeless was his ideal: there was no art for all, there were no thoughts for all; on the contrary the simplest ideas in the clearest language were but seldom understood by others than those who were familiar beforehand with just that type of thought. How should he be able to speak with her about his thoughts, when her vocabulary, as the monotony of the years had developed it, did not even suffice to express what she herself thought and felt at the bottom of her heart? The god with whom his poem dealt was of course Spinoza’s god, the World Soul; but this god was merely an intellectual experiment, whereas hers--his mother’s--was at least a product of the imagination and as such had a bit more life and more blood. How should he explain that what she called blasphemies did not apply to her god? She would have answered that there was only one god. He knew all she would answer and say; therefore he remained silent and looked out of the window, listening to the Saturday tread of tired feet on the pavement, and the rain which began to fall against the windowpanes.

And as to what she had said about his future, what could he say? To that there was but one answer: to be successful, to become famous. And that answer he could not give. «If I win recognition some day,» he thought to himself, «a recognition such as would gratify her, it will be when she is no longer alive. So it always is. Why should I hope for an exception for her and me?» What was he to do? Ought he to put his arms around her neck, ought he to stroke her hair and kiss her? No, that wouldn’t seem natural. He didn’t care for that sort of deception and she didn’t either; he knew her; she wouldn’t be satisfied with that. She had asked, and it was an answer she awaited. He could answer nothing, and he was silent.

He was silent and felt at the same time how the silence burned in her breast, and though he could say nothing he sought instead with his glance to meet her eyes, those eyes which used to smile so bright and blue when they looked into his. It still happened sometimes in the midst of dinner or in the evening at the tea-table that she looked at him and nodded and smiled brightly as before, as mothers nod and smile to their little children before they are able to talk. Perhaps she had the feeling that time had gone in a circle, and that this smile was the only form of expression she still had in her power when she wished to communicate with her children. It was just so that he wished she could have looked at him and nodded and smiled, with a smile far beyond all the unimportant things which separated them.

But she did not smile now; she sat silent with hands crossed on her knees, and her eyes, generally so near to weeping, now stared tearless into the shadows as if they sought and asked, «Are all mothers as unhappy as I? As lonely? As deserted by their children?»

The lamp flame fluttered in the night wind. She rose and said good night, took the lamp, and went out.

--XIV--

Martin still sat a long while at the window.

«Here time has stood still,» Henrik Rissler had said. «Yes, he was right. Here it stood still, time. It is by changes that one measures the course of time; I have nothing to measure it with. I shouldn’t even know it was Saturday today if I didn’t hear the tramping down there.»

An old story came to his mind. There was once a sinner who died one evening in his bed. Next morning he awoke in hell, rubbed his eyes, and called, «What’s the time?» But at his side stood the devil laughing and holding up before him a clock that had no hands. Time was over and eternity had set in.

«Eternity; no hurry any more....

«Other people have day and night, workday and holiday, Christmas and Easter. For me it all flows into one. Am I then already living in eternity?»

And he thought on: «Tomorrow is Sunday. What does that mean for me? It means that tomorrow I am free from my ostensible work, and that I thus feel twice as strongly the demand of that which should be my real work. But if the weather is fine, I shall naturally go out for a walk.... So, anyhow, it won’t be a real Sunday no matter what I do. What a strange sort of work I have taken upon me! Wouldn’t it be better to give it up while there is still time, to submit to the rules that hold for other men? One is never done with this, there is never a feeling of quiet and rest. Many a free Monday, but never a real Sunday, never any more!

«My ostensible and my real work--how long shall I be able to keep up this illusion? The truth is I’m in a good way to get a permanent job, that in eight or ten years I could become a regular clerk, and in forty years would get my discharge with a pension. My poor mother would be able to spare herself a deal of trouble if she saw all that clearly as I do now. But she imagines in the innocence of her heart that what I write on a few scraps of paper at night will hinder my advancement, for she has no conception of the boundless indifference of men of ideas. To hurt my prospects I should be forced to write personal abuse about my superiors, and why should I do that? They are good-natured men and have got me gratuities and commissions although others deserved them better. They have certainly taken an interest in me. I am not the sort of fellow to put a torpedo under the ark; they have felt that instinctively, and they are presumably right.»

He felt that he would eventually be lost in the multitude. He could not escape the thought that he was at bottom like all the rest; and whether this was his rightful fate, or whether he was too exceptional to be effective among exceptions, he felt only that routine held him every day more tightly a prisoner and that he was going to be lost in the crowd. And the other thing--his poetry; what was that and whither could it lead? Once when he had needed money he had collected a bundle of his poems and gone around to the publishers. A couple of them had wanted to print the volume but none had been willing to pay anything. «No,» he had answered very seriously, «do not count on my ambition!» When he had come home he had looked through these verses again; and again, as so many times before, he had found them uninspired and empty. Most of them were written so as to be sold at once to a magazine and showed that they were so written. And he said to himself, «How absurd it is for a man to make a business of ideas when he has no sure means of subsistence! As clever as the way the minister at a funeral sermon transforms the dead man’s means of livelihood into a mission in life. But existence knows how briskly and mercilessly to transform a mission in life into a means of livelihood for a man with no income. Yet supposing this should be a real means of livelihood--but no, it won’t be; distaste and weariness will come, one will tire of the whole thing and sink back, down into the crowd.

«Down into the crowd; one will do as the others do, there will at least be no more need of conjuring tricks, one will get back his sense of time, one will have Sundays and weekdays, work and rest, real rest....»

* * * * *

The night air streamed in cold through the window, he shivered but couldn’t make himself raise his arms and shut the sash. The rain fell steadily, and, as often happened when he was very tired, his thoughts began to go into meter and rhyme:

I sit alone in the darkness And hear the falling rain, I hear the drops come plashing Against the windowpane.

A grief on my heart lies heavy, My labored breath comes fast. Drop after drop my youthtime Is trickling, trickling past.

THE WINTER NIGHT ❧

--I--

Over Martin’s table in the office an electric light with a green shade swung, like a pendulum, gently to and fro on its silken cord. It had been set in motion just a moment ago when he had lighted it. He stretched out his hand to stop it, but instead waited the time when the swinging should subside and die down until it was imperceptible. Lamps were likewise screwed up over the other tables, six shining green triangles swung to and fro in the semi-darkness of the room, and lean writers’ hands fumbled at the windows after the curtain cords to pull them down and shut out the snow and the winter dusk. Martin loved these green lamps, which gave out no heat or bad odor, and whose glow had the pure and cold sheen of jewels; and he longed for the day when electric light should be cheap enough to make its way down even into the homes of the poor. And just here in this big low old room with whitewashed walls, because the house was old and had a groined gateway and low small-paned windows in the entrance hall where his office was, these green lamps seemed to him to fit in even better; he saw in this a symbol of continuous development, an unbroken chain of hands and wills, from those which had wearied long since to those which were now in embryo, the new inwoven with the old. Where all is old there enters an atmosphere of wretchedness and decay, and where all is new only that can thrive and feel at home which is itself new from top to toe, from pocketbook to soul.

And Martin was not new, his clothes were not new, nor were his thoughts. He thought and knew nothing great other than that which others had taught him--various old gentlemen in England and France who were now for the most part dead. If these thoughts still brought him any joy, it was mainly because the times had seemingly forgotten them long ago, as if they had been written in running water. Other winds were blowing now, winds before which he preferred to draw up his collar over his ears; everything came back and all the corpses peeped out, but he did not care to see them.

The lamp had ceased to swing over his desk, and he returned to his accounting. He no longer contented himself with putting down ticks; he carefully scanned every item and added up every column. His first youthful antipathy to a mechanical task was long since conquered, and he had gradually come to learn that these figures were not, as he had first believed, entirely free from the imperfections which are inherent in everything human. On the contrary they were often encumbered with inaccuracies and mistakes; and when he now and again discovered such mistakes, he was glad at heart but felt at the same time a faint sensation of sorrow. He was glad because he had occasion to show his great zeal and because he could count upon his rightful percentage of the sum which his alertness had saved the state treasury; and he felt the dark memory of ancient sorrow when he recalled that he had desired a quite different sort of joy from life. Sometimes, too, he thought of the poor officials down at Landskrona, Ohus, or Haparanda, who had made the wrong calculations, perhaps under the influence of last night’s toddy, and who would now have to pay the difference. But this thought left him cold, for the years had taught him he must set limits to his sympathies.

It was warm in the room, the remains of a great birchwood fire glowed in the porcelain stove, for there was no inducement to spare the government’s wood in these times when one had to skimp one’s fuel at home. Von Heringslake, the chief clerk, who had an income of forty-six hundred crowns and performed his duties with the pleasant ease which comes with an independence, sat squatted in front of the stove and roasted apples over the embers. On his bald pate--which his mortal enemy, Auditor Camin, asserted was the result of early dissipations but which in reality shone with the innocence of early childhood--glinted the triangular reflection of a green lamp. The fragrance of roasted apples spread and stung Martin’s nostrils, and he was bitterly annoyed that he had not in all ways the same views concerning this and the future life as Heringslake, for then he would surely have been offered an apple. From Auditor Camin’s place sounded for the hundredth time the old pronouncement, «The country will never be right till we make the farmers pay for shooting licenses.» And down at the bottom table off by the door, where it was draughty and there was a wet odor of umbrellas and overcoats, the youngest generation was eagerly at work putting in ticks and trying at the same time to recount in whispers the orgies of last night and the number of punch bottles emptied.

Martin was still young, for in government service one ages slowly, but he was no longer one of the youngest and did not have to sit in the draught of the door. He had drunk brotherhood with most of his immediate superiors and in his turn did not neglect the duty of laying aside formalities with those who were younger than he. These ceremonies were wont to be performed at a general banquet in December. This was to occur in a few days, and the list of subscriptions was now being circulated in the department, but Martin did not sign it. He had other uses for his money, and there was only one of the newcomers with whom he would have cared to drink brotherhood, a young man who had a place just opposite him at the same table and in whom there was something familiar and appealing to his sympathy: namely, an absent and dreamy glance and the mechanical gesture with which he set down the ticks. Martin often used to talk to him about the way of the world and was pleased when he sometimes received intelligent answers.

As he handed over the subscription list without writing on it himself, the other looked up and asked in a tone which seemed to convey a touch of disappointment, «Aren’t you coming to the banquet?»

«No,» answered Martin, «I have another engagement. But we who are above conventional forms can assume that we have drunk brotherhood just the same.»

The other blushed a little, and they shook hands across the table.

«Tell me,» the younger man asked after a while, «why does Auditor Camin want to charge the farmers for shooting licenses?»

«I don’t really believe he wants that,» Martin replied. «He knows that shooting licenses for the farmers would raise the price of necessities even more than taxes. He is only repeating an old saw that he heard in his youth when he was an assistant. It has stuck to him because it expresses a collective antipathy, a class hatred; and commonplace men always need to hate and love collectively. Look out for that, it is one of the surest signs of an inferior point of view. He likes women, officials, leading actors, and West Gothlanders, because he is a West Gothlander himself; and he hates farmers, Jews, Northlanders, and journalists. It is true that the farmers are a bit stingy in recognizing the services which he and the rest of us perform for our country, and that is why he hates them. But in that they observe the same principle as all employers of labor: to pay as little as competition will allow. If there was a shortage in clerks, they would pay more.»