IX

Summer skies and summer sun, a white house with green trees.⁠ ⁠…

Martin’s parents had rented several low-ceiled rooms with rickety white furniture and the bluest window-blinds in the world for the small square windows. Close to these windows passed the state highroad. Here wagoners and wayfarers from the islands of the Malar went by continually to and from the city, all stopping to pay the bridge toll, for the white house belonged to the bridge-tender and stood just at the abutment of Nockeby bridge. The bridge-tender sat every evening on his porch, which was twined about with hop vines, drinking toddy, holding out his money-box to the passersby, chatting and telling yarns, for he had been a sea captain and voyaged to many strange lands. But now he was a little old white-haired man, who had for many years had the tenancy of the bridge and had become a well-to-do citizen.

On the evening of the first day, when the packing boxes, trunks, and clothes-baskets were still standing higgledy-piggledy in the room⁠—which still looked a little strange, though every wardrobe and chair, every flower in the wallpaper seemed to say, “We shall soon get acquainted,”⁠—and while the evening meal with butter and cheese and some small broiled fish was spread by the window, Martin sat silent on the corner of a chest surveying the strange and new picture: the gray highroad with telegraph poles in which the wind sang, and the dark shadowy figures of the horses and peasants outlined against the greenish-blue western sky. Obliquely across the way a little to one side was a slope with a clump of oaks, whose verdure stood out strong and heavy in the summer twilight. Among these oaks was one that was naked and black and could not put out leaves like the others, and in its branches the crows had built a nest.

Martin could not take his eyes from this black tree with the crow’s nest between the branches. He thought he knew this tree, that he had seen it before, or heard a story about it.

And he dreamed of it that night.

Summer skies, summer days. Green fields, green trees.⁠ ⁠…

The fields were full of flowers, and Martin and Maria picked them and tied them up in bouquets for their mother. And Maria said to Martin: “Look out for snakes! If you step on a snake, he’ll think you did it on purpose, and then he’ll bite you.” So Martin trod as carefully as he could in the high grass. She taught him too that it was a great sin to pick the white strawberry blossoms, because it was from them the strawberries grew. They agreed that the first one who saw a strawberry blossom should say, “Free for that one!” And the one who had said it should then have the right to pick it when it was ripe. But when they came to the slope with the oaks, it was all white with blossoms under the trees. Maria, who was the first to see it, cried, “Free for the whole lot!” But when she saw that Martin did not look pleased, she immediately proposed that they should divide the treasure, so they drew an imaginary line from one tree to another and in this way divided the whole slope into two parts. To the right of the line was Maria’s strawberry field and to the left was Martin’s. After that they sat down in the shade of an oak and arranged their flowers as they thought best, and Maria taught Martin to stick in some fine heart-shaped grass among the buttercups and ox-eye daisies and to tie up the bouquets with long straws. But Martin soon grew tired with his flowers, for he had forgot he had picked them to give to his mother. He let them lie in the grass and lay down on his back among them to look at the clouds that were drifting across the blue heavens high above his head. They were like white dogs, small shaggy white dogs. Perhaps they were white dogs. When people die, they go to heaven; but dogs, who have no regular soul, can’t very well get so high up. They can jump around outside and play with each other. But their masters must come out to them sometimes, and then the little dogs leap up on their masters and lick them and are ever so happy.⁠ ⁠…

White clouds, summer clouds.

But the finest thing of all was the long bridge and the lake and all the steamboats that blew their whistles when they were still far off so that the bridge should open and let them through. Martin soon taught himself to know them all: the Fyris, the Garibaldi, the Bragë, which was never in a hurry; the lovely blue Tynnelsö, and the brown Enköping, which was called the Coffeepot, because it sputtered like boiling coffee. Each boat had for him its particular expression, so that he could distinguish them one from another a long way off. They helped him to keep account of the time too. When the Tynnelsö was passing through the bridge, it was time to go home and have breakfast; and when the Runa blew with its hoarse throat, the Bragë was not far away, and it was in the Bragë that papa came from the city. There were towboats too with their long lines of barges; these barges often got stuck in the gap of the bridge, and nothing in the world was so much fun as to hear the bargemen swear. But on days when the lake was green, with white foam, and the waves plashed high up over the bridge, no steamboats could vie with the coasting sloops for first place in Martin’s heart. In every skipper he saw a hero who defied wind and wave to reach some strange, unknown port, for it never occurred to him to think that they only sailed to Stockholm to sell the wood, hay, or pottery they had on board. These cargoes, however, did not quite please him, for he could not help their suggesting against his will some dark suspicion of an ulterior motive in the skipper, and in the depths of his heart he liked best the sloops that came empty from the city. Then too these danced most boldly over the waves, and they steered toward regions where Martin had never been, far beyond Tyska Botten and Blackeberg⁠—which were the boundary of the known world.

It was there too that the sun went down every evening in a red and glittering land of promise. Martin was entirely certain it was just there the sun went down, right behind the cape, and not anywhere else. He could see it all so plainly. He did not, however, imagine that the people living over there could see the sun at close range or that they need be afraid of its falling on their heads. If another boy had come to him and said such a thing, Martin would have thought him very stupid. For it is just the same with children as with grownups: they often form the strangest conceptions of the world; but if anyone shows them the consequences of their ideas, they say he is very stupid, or that it is improper to joke about serious things.

Summertime, strawberry time.

At that period summer was different from now. There was a joy that filled the days and evenings, pressing even into one’s nightly dreams; and morning was joy personified. But one morning Martin awoke earlier than usual, and when he heard a little bird twittering in the privet hedge before his window and saw the sun was shining, he sat up in bed and wanted to dress and go out. Then his mother came in and said he was to lie still a little while yet, because it was his birthday, and Maria was working at something outside which he mustn’t see before it was ready. She kissed him and said that now he was seven he ought to be really industrious and good in the summer, so that he wouldn’t need to be ashamed in the autumn when he was to begin school. But when Martin heard the word “school,” he forgot the bird twittering on the hedge and the sun that was shining, and his throat felt choked as if he was going to cry; but he controlled himself and didn’t cry. He didn’t know very clearly what “school” meant, but it sounded very harsh and hard.

To be sure his mother had school for him and Maria, but that was only for a short while every day down in the garden, in the lilac arbor, where butterflies flitted, yellow and white and blue, and bees hummed, while his mother told them stories about Joseph in Egypt and about kings and prophets, and taught them to make letters after a model. He comprehended that real school must be something quite different. But while his heart was troubled over having to start school in the autumn, they all came in and congratulated him on his birthday: papa and grandmother and Maria, and Maria put on an affected manner and said with a bow, “I have the honor to congratulate⁠—” But Martin became bashful and blushed and turned his face to the wall.

Then they left him alone. But it wasn’t long before grandmother stuck in her head and called that the king was coming riding with fifteen generals to congratulate Martin, and at the same moment he heard a rumbling over the bridge as if there was thunder. He jumped out of bed and threw on his clothes, but the noise came nearer, there was a cloud of dust over the road, horses’ hoofs rang on the ground and the bridge, and there were lightnings of drawn swords. When he came out on the porch, the foremost riders had already passed, but Martin’s mother consoled him with the fact that the king had not been with them. Instead it had been almost all his army, which was on its way to the region of Drottningsholm for maneuvers. There were hussars and dragoons and all the artillery from Stockholm, and the artillerists were shaking like sacks of potatoes on their caissons and were gray and black with dust and dirt. But Martin admired them all the more in that condition and wondered within himself if it wouldn’t be better to be an artillerist than a coasting skipper.

The martial array passed and was gone, a fresh wind came from the lake and took with it the odor of dirt and sweat which remained, and when Martin turned around, there stood beside the breakfast table a little table set especially for him; Maria had decorated it with flowers and green leaves. Then he got bashful and blushed again, but he was very happy too, for on the middle of the table stood a cake which his mother had baked for him, a big dish full of wild strawberries which Maria had picked under the oaks, a twenty-five-öre piece from papa, and a package of stockings which mother had knitted. Of all these things Martin cared most for the twenty-five-öre piece. For he had come to realize that a pair of stockings was just a pair of stockings, and a cake was a cake, but a twenty-five-öre piece was an indefinite number of fulfilled wishes in any direction whatever up to a certain limit, and experience had not yet taught him how narrow was that limit.

Martin went around and thanked everybody, and tasted the cake and the berries, and saw that the stockings were handsome with red borders, and put the twenty-five-öre piece in a match box, which was his savings bank. In it up to now there had been a couple of old copper coins and some small pebbles which he had come across in the sand and kept because they were so pretty.

Then the Bragë blew at Tysk Botten, and papa had to be off to the city, but Martin was allowed to go with mamma and grandmother and Maria to Drottningsholm. There stood the king’s white summer palace, mirrored in the bright inlet. The trees in the park were bigger than any other trees, and the shade under them was deep and cool. And over the dark waters of the ponds and canals the white swans glided with their stiffly outstretched necks, and Martin imagined that they never troubled themselves about anything else in the world than their own white dreams.

But grandmother had a French roll with her, which she broke into crumbs and fed to them as one feeds chickens.

Summer days, pleasure days, cornflowers in the yellow rye.⁠ ⁠…

It was near harvest time, and Martin was walking along the road with his mother. Maria was on the other side, and now and then she would pick a cornflower from out of the rye. Mother had a pink dress and a straw hat with a wide brim, and she was talking with them about mankind and the world and God.

“Look, Martin,” she said, “there are the heavy and the light ears of grain that we read about today in the arbor. You remember the full ear that bowed itself so deeply to the earth because it had so many grains to carry. The grains are ground into meal in the mill, and the meal is baked into bread, and the bread is good to eat when anyone is hungry. But the empty ear is good for nothing, the farmer throws it away or gives it to his horse to chew, and even the horse doesn’t get any fatter from it. And yet it raises itself so proudly aloft and looks down on the other ears which stand and bend around it.”

With that mother broke off the proud light ear and showed Martin that it was quite empty.

“Such are many among men,” she said. “You’ll come to see that when you’re big. You will also see people who go about hanging their heads to make others think they belong to the full ears. But they are just the emptiest of all.

“But you must also remember, children, that it is not your part to judge, either now or when you grow up, whether anyone belongs to the full or the empty ears. Such a thing no man can rightly know about another. That only God knows.”

When mother talked to Martin about God, he felt at the same time solemn and a little embarrassed, somewhat as a little dog might feel when one tries to talk to him as to a person. For when he heard his mother tell about paradise and Noah’s ark, he could follow along very well⁠—he saw it all so clearly before his eyes, the apple tree and the serpent and all the animals in the ark. But at the word “God” he could not picture anything definite, either an old man or a middle-aged man with a black beard. At the very top of the blue dome in the church cupola was a great painted eye, and mother had said this was a symbol of God. But this solitary eye seemed to Martin so uncanny and sad. He hardly dared look at it, and it did not at all help him to comprehend what God really looked like. He had also had to learn by heart the Ten Commandments, which God had written for Moses on Mt. Sinai. But they seemed only to strengthen his secret suspicion that God was something that only concerned the grownups. It never could be to Martin that God spoke when he said, “Thou shalt have no other gods but me.” Martin knew neither what an idol looked like nor what one could do to worship it. That he should honor his parents came of itself. He felt no temptation to murder or to steal or to covet his neighbor’s maidservant, his ox, or his ass. And he had no idea how he could commit adultery; but he resolved he would try to guard against it anyway, to be on the safe side.

“God knows everything, both the present and the future. He Himself has ordained it all. And when you pray to God, Martin, you must not believe that you with your prayers can in the slightest alter His will. But still God wishes men to pray to Him, and therefore you must do it. You must never give up saying your evening prayer before you go to sleep, no matter how big and wise you get. But when you become big and have to look out for yourself in the world, you must never forget that you must depend first and foremost on yourself. God helps only him who helps himself. And if it ever happens in life that there is something you desire deeply, so that you think you can never be happy again unless you get it⁠—then you must not pray to God to give it to you. Try rather to get it for yourself; but if that is impossible, then pray Him for strength to renounce your wish. He does not like other kinds of prayer.”

So Martin Birck’s mother spoke as they walked along. And the summer wind whispered around them and passed on over the field, and the grain waved.

The bridge-tender, old Moberg, had an assistant by the name of Johan. Johan was fourteen or fifteen and soon became Martin’s best friend. He made bows and arrows and bark boats for Martin, and Martin helped him to wind up the drawbridge. In the evening, when he was free, he used also to play hide and seek and “There’s no robbers in the woods” with Martin and Maria and a few other children. But it was neither on account of the bark boats nor the games that Martin was so fond of Johan and admired him so extraordinarily. It was because Johan always had so many wonderful things to tell about, things that papa and mamma and grandmother never told about. It was especially in the dusk that Johan was wont to be so communicative, when Martin and he sat on a beam by the opening in the bridge and waited for the approaching steamboat, whose lanterns would sooner or later pop out from behind the cape, first the green and then the red. At such times Johan might tell of this, that, or the other thing. One time it would be about old Moberg, who used to see tiny little devils jumping up and down, up and down, in his toddy glass; it was about them he talked when he sat muttering to himself and stirring his glass. But the minister at Lovö was still worse. Why, he was a friend of Old Spotty himself, the whole parish knew that. Anybody could see that for himself if he thought about it; how otherwise could he get up in the pulpit and preach the way he did for a whole hour; where did he get all his words from? Furthermore Johan had had to go to him one time on an errand and had been in his room and had seen with his own eyes that it was chock-full of books from floor to ceiling. Oh, yes, he was in with the Old Boy sure enough!⁠—Or Johan would tell about a man who had been murdered on the highroad three years back, quite near, and would describe the place exactly: “It was just there where the wood is so thick on one side, and on the other is a willow alongside of a telegraph pole. It was an evening in November that it happened, and now if anybody goes by at the right time, he can hear the most terrible groaning in the ditch⁠—But they never got the fellow that did it.”

When Martin heard such things, he squeezed close to Johan’s arm, and he felt lighter at heart when the steamboat’s lanterns shone out of the dark and came nearer, when he heard the thump-thump of the engine and the captain’s orders, and they had to hurry to wind up the drawbridge. When they went home across the bridge, they were both excited with thoughts of ghosts and murders, and Johan said to Martin, “Listen, he’s after us!”

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 anyone 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.