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.