III

Martin thought of his mother as he went along the Avenue on the way to the Park. How could the relations between them have become what they were? To her he was still a little child. When he first began to speak to her of his religious doubts, she pretended to believe that it was something he had got from outside, from bad comrades or some wicked book. Later things reached such a point that he could no longer talk to her about anything but the most ordinary subjects⁠—about shirts and socks and buttons to be sewed on. If their conversation ever took a serious turn, they treated each other mutually as little children. Thus, without his meaning it or noticing it before it was too late, he got a condescending tone that hurt her, so that after such a conversation a thorn remained in the heart of each.

She often lay awake at night weeping and sorrowing over his unbelief. She herself, however, was of the earth in her thoughts, her hopes, and the whole of her being. She believed in hell of course, because she believed in the Bible; but she could never seriously imagine that her son or anyone at all whom she knew and associated with would go to such a horrible place. It was not therefore on account of his soul that she grieved most but for his future here on earth, since she had observed that things did not ordinarily go well in the world with those who contemned God and religion. Some of them got into prison, others left their country to go among strangers, and all aroused distrust and ill-will among respectable folk. She feared that her son might come to be one of these, and it was this idea which kept her awake at night and left her with swollen eyes. She had no more precious dream than that he should be “like other folk,” as most people are, if possible better and above all happier, but still on the whole as they were. She could imagine that her son might become a poet, she could even wish it, for she loved poetry; the tears came into her eyes when he read her some of his poems; but she pictured it that he would sit at some office work on weekdays, and only on Sundays or in his free hours write some verses about sunsets, which he would send in to the Swedish Academy and get a prize, so that he would become at the same time a great poet and a respected business man with an assured income. She believed in full seriousness that he would be more highly thought of among poets if he was in an office and had a title than if he just wrote. That was how it had been with all the real poets. Tegnér was a bishop, and even Bellman had at least had a position in the lottery bureau. As an example that Martin should especially take to follow, she used to mention a poet whom she had known when she was young, who was now an auditor in the Court of Exchequer and wrote verses about everything that was grand and beautiful, about the sea and the sun and the king, and had been decorated with the Order of Vasa. Such a life she considered noble and to be emulated, and when her dreams of her son’s future were at their highest, it was something of this sort she imagined.

But Martin dreamed other dreams. He wanted to be a poet. He would write a book; a novel or a lyric sequence, or best of all a drama of ideas in the same verse form as Brand or Peer Gynt. He would devote his life to searching for the truth and giving to mankind what he found or thought he had found of it. He would also become famous, a great man; he would earn a lot of money, he would buy a little house for his father and a new silk dress for his mother⁠—her old one was worn and faded. He would be envied by men and sought after by women, but of all the women in the world he should not love more than one, and that one a woman who loved another man. This unhappy love should give his thoughts depth and bitterness and his poems wings. But he had a dark feeling that while he sought for truth he should only find truths, and that while he gave them to men in verse more wonderful than any music or in a clear and cold prose with words like sharp teeth, he would despise himself for reaping honor and gold for the morsels he had found by accident while he was seeking for something else. This self-contempt would eat into his soul and make of him an empty husk. But he would not let the world note anything; he would paint his cheeks, pencil his eyebrows and hold up his head, and at the very moment when he himself most deeply despised his poetry and set it below the humblest manual labor, he would inspire men most and be elected to the Swedish Academy to succeed Wirsén. With a countenance immobile as a mask he would give the usual flowery oration on his predecessor. Never again after that would he set pen to paper. In a strangely colorful and disordered life he would seek to deaden his despair. No sin should be unknown to him; in broad daylight he would drive in an open carriage through the streets with harlots and buffoons, and he would pass the nights in drinking and play. Till one gloomy October night he wearied of his mad and empty life, made a fire in his stove and burned his papers, emptied a glass of dark red wine spiced with a strange herb, and went to sleep to awake no more.⁠ ⁠…

Or perhaps it was unnecessary that his life should end so tragically. When he thought it over more carefully, this seemed to him even a trifle banal. He might just as well move to a small town, to Strengness or Grenna. There he could live alone with a parrot and a black cat. He might also have an aquarium with goldfish. Behind closed shutters he would dream away the day, but when night came he would light candles in all the rooms and pace back and forth, back and forth, meditating on the vanity of life. And when the townfolk passed his house on the way home from their evening toddy at the rathskeller, they would stop to point at his window and say: “There lives Martin Birck. He has taught like a sage and lived like a fool, and he is very unhappy.”

All this and a lot more Martin Birck thought as he went out the Avenue across the park on the way to Hasselbacken.