XI

The afternoon sun fell across the writing table and gilded everything: the inkstand, the books, and the words he wrote on the paper. The smoke from the chimneys rose straight and tranquilly toward heaven, and in a window just opposite a young Jewess was playing with her child.

Martin was writing to his sister:

Dear Maria:

Thanks for your letter. Mamma is poorly as usual, perhaps a little better these last weeks. Papa keeps the same, only he gets more silent every year. It’s very quiet here at home, for as you know I am not one either to love idle talk. Silence is golden. Uncle Janne, Aunt Louise, etc., are still, unfortunately, alive and in health, though it doesn’t make much difference anyhow, since we are not likely to be their heirs. But they are always annoying me by asking about the prospects of my work, whether papa isn’t in line for the Order of Vasa soon, whether it’s true that your husband takes morphine, and so on. Otherwise there is no harm in them.

You ask whether I’m writing much just now. No, very little, but on the other hand I have an appointment for a long job as amanuensis, and last night I dreamed very clearly and distinctly that papa and I got an Order of Vasa together, since the king couldn’t manage to give us each one.

Thanks for the invitation to come to you in the summer, but it’s not likely I can get off⁠—my appointment will last over the summer. Too bad your husband is nervous. Nice your little boy is well. Remember me to all.

He put the letter in an envelope and laid it aside.

He sat and thought about his sister.

“Is she happy?” he asked himself. And he was forced to answer: “No, she is not happy. She does not perhaps know it herself. Six years ago she was very happy, when she was married and became a doctor’s wife and had her own little home in the country to look after⁠—just what she had most dreamed of. She hasn’t had any sudden fall from the peak of happiness since then. She has just very quietly slipped down, as usually happens with the years. Her husband is amiable and talented and a clever doctor, but he offends the rich people in his district and has most of his practice among the poor. Therefore he is sometimes hard up. Besides, I am afraid his health is undermined and his disposition is sometimes rather bitter. However, he was in very good humor when he was up here last alone, without her. He amused himself as well as he could, and I fear he was a bit unfaithful.

“A curious bird, happiness.⁠ ⁠…”

During these thoughts Martin had begun again to write. He wrote slowly and half in play, with an intention here and there yet without exactly knowing whither he was tending.

“You do not know me. I met you one day in the sunlight. It is weeks, yes, months since then. You went on the side of the street where the sun shone; you went alone with head lowered and smiled to yourself.

“It was one of those days when the snow was beginning to melt on the street and the pavement shone wet and bright. You stopped at the corner of a street, greeted an old lady and conversed with her. The old lady was very ugly and very stupid, and I imagine too a little cross, as stupid people generally are. But when you looked at her and talked with her, she at once grew less cross and less ugly.

“A little farther up the street a gentleman saluted you, and you bowed and returned his greeting. I felt my heart become bitter with envy, and I followed him with my glance as he went on down the street. But one could not see it in him that he had just spoken to you. One could rather believe he was a lieutenant who had just saluted a major.

“I have met you often since then. You do not know me, and it is not likely that you will ever know who I am. You go in the sunlight, I go for the most part in the shadow. I am dressed like many other men, and I always avoid looking at you so that you see it. No, you cannot find out who I am.

“You have a lamp with a yellow shade. Yesterday you stood long at the window in the yellow glow, after you had lighted the lamp, looking at the stars. You went to the window to pull down the curtains, but you forgot about it a little while. Straight in front of your window was a star which burned more brightly than the rest. I could not see it, for I stood shut in by a little black gate opposite the house where you live; but I know that on spring evenings it stands just so that you must see it from your window. It is Venus.

“You do not know me, and I do not know you otherwise than I do the women who sometimes give me the great joy of visiting me at night in my dreams. It is therefore I speak to you so intimately. But among these women you have for some time been the only one, the others have forsaken me, nor do I feel any longing after them.

“Read this letter and think no more of it; burn it, if you will, or hide it at the bottom of your little secret drawer, if you will. Read it and think no more of it, go out as before in the sunlight and smile in your own happy thoughts. But you are not to show it to your friends and let them giggle and snicker over it. If you do that, for three nights in a row you will not be able to sleep for bad dreams, and a little devil from hell will sit on the edge of your bed and look at you from evening till morning.

“But I know you will not do such a thing⁠—you will not show it to anyone. Good night, my beloved, good night!”

Martin sat long with this letter in his hand. “What could it lead to if I sent it?” he asked himself. “To nothing, presumably. It would set her imagination off a bit, her young girl’s longing would perhaps have an impulse toward the new and unknown. She might perhaps bring herself to show the letter to her friends, seeing that faith in devils is on the wane; but she wouldn’t go so far as to burn it. She might perhaps be amused with it, she might even consider it her duty to feel offended. But in reality it would in the long run cause her joy, and if in the process of nature she was married and had children and grew old with household cares and every year sunk deeper down in the inconsolable monotony of existence, she would come to remember this letter and wonder who wrote it and if perhaps it was there that the true seed of happiness lay hid. And she would never once recall that it ever made her angry. Nor as a matter of fact does it contain anything that could properly hurt her. It shows her only that she is desired by a man, and as she is twenty and from head to foot an uncommonly beautiful and glorious creation of nature, she must already have noticed that men desire her. And that doesn’t at all make her angry, but on the contrary happy and joyous, and that is why she walks in the sunlight and smiles.”

Amid such thoughts he sat a long while weighing the letter in his hand as if it had been a human destiny, till in the end he found his hesitation ridiculous, put the letter in an envelope of thick untransparent paper, and wrote the address in a thin and noncommittal girlish style so as not to rouse any curiosity in the young lady’s family. Without revealing any special interest on his part he had succeeded in learning her name. She was a Miss Harriet Skottë. Her father had an estate in the country, in the Malar district, and she was now spending the winter in Stockholm with some relatives to study something or other, French or art-tapestry or something of the sort⁠ ⁠… in order to get engaged, to put it briefly.

Harriet Skottë. He repeated the name to himself and tried to analyze the impression it evoked. He dwelt in particular on the forename and murmured, “Harriet, Harriet.” But this gave him no impression of her nature; it roused only an indefinite conception of something English and pale and blonde, a sensation of tea fumes and benevolence and chilly bedrooms with varnished floors as at a hospital. The surname, again, only suggested family, an uncle who was on the Board of Trade, and a cousin who was a lieutenant in the Army Service Corps. But if he whispered to himself the whole name, “Harriet Skottë,” there came in a new element which quite excluded the others, then it became something quite different and new, then he felt as if she herself passed through the room with her brown hair glinting in a sunbeam.

He started at the ringing of the hall bell; he heard the maid open the front door and a familiar voice asking if he was at home. He stuffed the letter into his pocket. The next instant the door opened and Henrik Rissler stood in the doorway blinking at the sunlight, whose copper-red rays struck horizontally across the room.