Part 9

Von Heringslake, who had by now eaten his roasted apples and resumed his place at the table next to Martin, turned on his chair and surveyed him mournfully.

«You have no heart,» he said.

* * * * *

It was after three o’clock; here and there the men were gathering up their papers and going off. Martin got up, took his coat and hat, put out his green lamp, and departed. He had crape on his hat, for his mother was dead.

--II--

He turned into Long Western Street. On snowy days such as this he nearly always took that street, because in the narrow winding rift between the tall old houses one was as if half indoors, in the lee of the worst wind gusts.

«Winter, cold.... Strange there are people who assert that they like this weather. Heringslake, who has a heart in his breast and loves his native land, regards cold as preferable to heat. But when it’s cold, he always puts on furs. The conception of hell as a very warm place clearly originated in the torrid zone. If a northerner had invented it, it would have been contrariwise a fearful place for draughts, the breeding ground of influenza and chronic snuffles. But such as the climate is, I have got used to it, and it has possibly done me excellent service of which I myself am not aware. Provisions are laid on ice in order to keep; everything is preserved longer in cold. Why not human beings as well? I once longed to be consumed in the flame of a great passion. It never came, whether because I was not deserving of so great an honor, or whatever the reason may have been. But now, afterwards, I have begun to misdoubt that such a conflagration may rather be a bonfire to amuse the spectators than any real enjoyment for the chief actor. Fire is, in any case, distinctly not my element. If a real spring sun were ever to come into my life, I should go rotten at once from being unused to the climate.»

He stopped a moment in front of a jeweler’s window. Most of the pieces were distinguished by a commonplaceness which left him no regret that he could not purchase any. Once, indeed, it was just a year ago to the day, he had bought a little ring with a green emerald. She to whom it had been given still wore it and never wanted to wear any other ring. She said she shouldn’t ever want to wear a plain gold ring. Well, in any case he couldn’t offer her such a specimen....

«I’m ungrateful,» he said to himself, «now that at last a little sunlight has come into my life, more maybe than comes into most. But I have been frozen too long; I haven’t been able to thaw out yet.»

He had come out on Mint Square, the northerly gale blew his eyes shut with the snow, and he felt his way along, half blind, toward North Bridge. He had to stop again to get breath at Looström’s bookstore, where the celebrities of the day were exhibited in the window: Crispi, King Milan, and Taine, while between an Excellency and a forger he discovered a face that looked familiar. It was a Swedish poet, the decadent who had expounded his ideas of life at the «Anglais» over the green chartreuse. He was not there because he was a great man but because he was dead.

Martin went on toward home.

«At last a man who has reached his goal! His goal was a bit unusual, and he did not reach it quite as he imagined; he never got the general paralysis of his dream, for he died simply and modestly of consumption. But I don’t suppose he was so particular as to details; as a matter of fact he only wanted to succumb, no matter how. Perhaps he was right; that’s the sort of goal one ought to set for oneself if he hopes to reach it in his lifetime. It is true one might also propose to oneself to be a millionaire or a bishop or a member of the legislature, and that goal too one can usually reach if he really wants to. Those who know how to concentrate their will with sufficient intensity on a single object are so extremely few that the competition is by no means prohibitive. Everybody wants to be rich, but most men wish at the same time to live as if they were rich already; they want to take things easy, to have a nap after dinner, drink champagne with the girlies and so on, and so they never get rich, never even become bishops or members of the legislature. He who wants to stop on the road every now and then and enjoy life a bit before he reaches his objective will never reach it; and the others, the indefatigable pilgrims, the men of will who arrive--what have they left afterwards when they get there?

«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.