IX

Years passed.

… Martin was roaming about in the twilight. The streets and squares lay white, snow was falling softly and silently. A man went in front of him on a zigzag course lighting a lamp here and a lamp there.

Martin went along without a purpose; he hardly knew where he went.

Suddenly he noticed that he was crying as he walked. He did not clearly know why. He did not ordinarily find it easy to cry. Some snowflakes must have caught in his eyelashes, and his eyes had got wet.⁠ ⁠… He turned off into a side street and came to a bit of park, he brushed past a couple half snowed in on a bench, and proceeded on among the trees, where it was lonely and empty and the branches drooped heavily under the wet snow.

… Strange! A hovel in an alley, a smoking lamp. Two naked arms which bent and reached forward to the window, and the sound of curtains coming down. The girl, who was humming the latest popular tune while she slowly and unconcernedly hung up her red bodice⁠—he hummed too so as not to speak aloud⁠—was she pretty or ugly? He did not know, he had hardly set eyes on her. It was not she for whom he longed.

He had sat at home in the dusk, the icy blue dusk of a March afternoon, twisting and turning over an old poem that never would get itself finished. Then all at once he had begun to think of a woman. He had met her at noon as he came from his work, and he had felt the encounter as a sudden intoxication. She was walking in the full sunlight, and many men turned their heads after her as she went. But she seemed to notice or suspect nothing. She was very young⁠—eighteen or possibly twenty. She was neither expensively nor humbly dressed, but she carried her head carelessly and easily, perhaps too a little proudly. Slender and straight, she went on her way, her brown hair shining in the sunlight, and now and then she smiled to herself. He followed her at a distance; she went up to Östermalm and vanished at last in a gateway.

So it was that she had come before his mind again in the twilight, as he sat in his rocking-chair and hunted for rhymes; and she left him no rest⁠—he threw down his pen and went out. There was no longer sunshine; it was snowing. He came to the large gray house where he had seen her go in; he walked to and fro on the pavement directly opposite and saw a window light up here and a window there. Who was she? He remembered he had seen her speak to a man he knew. He went up the steps and read the names on the doors, until at last, deciding that he was childish and stupid, he pulled up his coat collar and went back into the snow. He took by the arm the first girl that gave him a meaningful glance and went home with her.

Now he was standing there in her room. He stood stiffly and silently surveying her as she took off her clothes and chatted and hummed. He hardly asked himself whether she was pretty. He only knew that she might have been prettier without tempting him more and uglier without tempting him less. She showed the marks of her calling. She was still young, and yet one saw that she had long ago tired of choosing and rejecting among her customers. With the same habitual motions of her hand, the coarse hand of a working girl, she hung up her vulgar bodice for anyone who asked it of her, for lieutenant or clerk, minister of justice or waiter, making no distinction between them unless possibly that in her heart she preferred the waiter, since he was less haughty than the others and understood her better.

Whence did she come? Perhaps from a back yard with an ash barrel and a privy, perhaps from a village in the woods. The latter seemed likelier; there was still something of the wood girl in her eyes. Glad among other glad children, she had run bare-legged on the slopes and picked strawberries. Early her contemporaries had taught her to bite of the forbidden fruit. So she had come to the city and had fared as did many others. It was perhaps not a necessity in itself; she might have become a workman’s wife if she had wanted, but she had decided that their lot was harder and without much thinking had gone the way that was smoothest to her feet. With a little more intelligence and better luck she might also have become a tradesman’s wife, such as goes to the square with her maid and bargains for her boiled beef and horseradish.

“Well,” she said, “aren’t you going to undress?”

He stared at her fixedly, and suddenly had no idea of the whole thing, why he had come and what he wanted of her. He muttered something about not feeling very well, laid several crowns on the dressing-table, and departed. She didn’t get angry, only looked surprised and didn’t throw any taunt down the stairs after him.

It snowed continuously. Would it never end, this winter? It was now getting on to the end of March, the trees drooped with the snow and it was bitterly cold.⁠ ⁠…

Martin was weary, he sat on a bench under one of the white trees and let the snow deposit itself in drifts on his hat and shoulders.

“What are we doing with life, we mortals?”

The life he led, the pitiful joy he sought and sometimes found, seemed to him at that moment like the fantasy of a madhouse. Nevertheless that life was the normal life. Most of the men he knew lived thus. He was twenty-three. In the four or five years he had been in the game he ought to have got used to it.⁠ ⁠…

No, he didn’t understand humanity nor did he understand himself. He often listened to the talk of his friends and acquaintances about these things. He had noted that the most respectable of the young men, and of the old for that matter, believed in two kinds of love, a pure kind and a sensual kind. Young women of the better sort were to be loved with the pure kind, but that meant betrothal and marriage, and that one could seldom afford. As a rule, therefore, it was only girls of means who could inspire a pure love; outside of that the feeling was more at home in lyric poetry than in reality. The other sort, on the contrary, the sensual, a man might and should possess about once a week. But this side of existence was not considered to have a serious meaning; it was not anything that could render a man happy or unhappy; it was simply comic, the material for funny stories, an equally pleasant and hygienic diversion when one had received his salary and drunk his bottle of punch. But in the intervals the entire sexual life interested but slightly the respectable and decent class of men; they found its functions unbeautiful and disreputable, or, as they otherwise put it, bestial, since they could not exercise them without feeling themselves like beasts.

This was the prevalent opinion throughout the community, and such conditions were explained in that this way of living was the healthiest and wisest, not of course in the sermons of the clergy, the speeches of the politicians, or the leading articles of the newspapers, but in the enlightened judgment between man and man in all circles. It was considered necessary in order that young men might preserve their health and good spirits and that young women of the better classes might preserve their virtue. The young men accordingly drank punch, visited girls of the streets, became fat and florid, and succeeded not only in putting up with this life as with a sort of wretched substitute, but it appealed to them to such a degree that often even after they were married they did not scorn to make excursions to their old haunts, which had become so endeared. The girls of the better class meanwhile were allowed to preserve their virtue and beyond that were not asked for their opinion, but for some of them their precious jewel became at last too heavy to carry.⁠ ⁠…

“What have we done with our life, we mortals?

“Happiness, the joy of youth, whither has it gone? Life is regulated for the old, therefore it is a misfortune to be young. It is regulated for the thoughtless and stupid, for those who take the false for the true or even prefer the false, because it is a disease to think and feel, a childish disease which one must go through before one becomes a man.”⁠ ⁠…

The apparition of a woman glided slowly past the bench where he sat, and scarcely had it passed when it stood still, turned its head, and fixed upon him two great dark eyes.

He rose, shook off the snow, and went away.

He walked quickly, for he was cold.

He thought about life and books. During his adolescence a new literature had broken forth, which was at war with the prevalent morals of the community and endeavored to change them. Now it had grown silent. Little had been accomplished, almost nothing, and already it was losing its hold. What the new writers had fought for and in behalf of which they had taken and given such hard blows now suddenly belonged to the “ ’Eighties” and as such had once for all been tried and condemned, weighed in the balance and found too heavy. Instead the blue flower of poetry exhaled its perfume around him as never before. Once again the old words rang like new; earth returned to the golden age, the woods and waters were filled afresh with centaurs and nymphs, knights and damsels roamed into the sunset, and Song herself, with eyes wide awake and bright after her long sleep, stood forth again in the midst of the people and chanted as she had not done in a hundred years. Martin loved this poetry, its rhythms and words stole into the verses he himself sat and tinkered with in the dusk, and yet all this was strangely foreign to him. The world was just the same all the while, everything went its usual way, and no victory was won. Was this the time to sing? It was true that, when he looked more closely, he discovered ideas at the bottom of this new poetry also, and these ideas too were in open warfare against current morality. But only a few readers noted this and hardly anyone attached any importance to it. It was just verse.

It was verse, and as a form for ideas poetry was and remained on about the level of the royal opera. There too the baritone might bellow against tyrants without thereby running any risk of missing his Vasa decoration, there too seduction scenes were played by artificial light without anyone’s taking umbrage; what in ordinary life was called by ordinary citizens bestial was conceived of by the same people with regard to Faust and Romeo and Juliet as poetic and pretty and thoroughly suitable for young girls. It was the same with poetry. Ideas, when woven into verse and beautiful words, were no longer contraband; they were not even noticed.

Would a man never come who did not sing, but spoke, and spoke plainly!

He had come out on Strand Avenue. The ice on Nybro Inlet had just been broken, a tug was now forcing its painful way along between the cakes of ice. To the left several newly built millionaire barracks towered up in the snowy mist, in one of which the electric lights and polished glass prisms already gleamed from a long suite of rooms, and in a large hall a white shimmering maze of dancing couples moved behind the muslin curtains.

Several lonely wanderers had paused in a group as if rooted to stare at the paradise above them. Martin also stopped a minute and proceeded with his thoughts. Several measures of the waltz had reached his ears; it was the “Blue Danube”; he walked on humming it and couldn’t get it out of his head.

O Eros, Eros! The harlot’s room and the festal hall up there.⁠ ⁠… In both temples the same god was worshiped, and in both temples he was worshiped by the same men. But the women!

He did not dance, and yet he loved balls. He enjoyed standing in a doorway and watching the others whirl by. What atmosphere was there around all their festivals of youth which fascinated him and made him meditative and sick with longing after the impossible? Look at the women! Held close in the arms of the men, with eyes half-shut and mouths open, the most innocent young girls flitted past in dresses which exposed or emphasized their young panting bosoms. What were they thinking of, what were they dreaming of? There were some no doubt who thought of nothing, dreamed of nonsense, and had no other longing than to stir their legs and keep in motion, regular young girls after the hearts of their mothers and aunts. But they were surely not all so. The daughters of men could not have changed so extraordinarily since the not too remote times when youths and maidens carried phallic images in procession, singing holy songs. What did they talk about, these young girls, when they sat together and whispered in a corner? “She is secretly engaged to him”; “He’s in love with her, but she’s fond of someone else.” What was in the books they read? The same thing: People who were in love with each other, and how it turned out, and who got whom. To “get,” what did that mean? That one found out on the bridal night.

But the years passed, and the bridal might have to wait. The young girl got to be twenty-five, she was nearly thirty, and still she danced at balls with half-closed eyes, but her mouth was no longer open; she now knew that this looked unseemly, so she held it convulsively shut, a bloodred streak. Would it never come, the great, the wonderful experience? Her glance was that of a drowning woman. “Save me, I’m sinking, I’m going under! Youth is so short. Look! my color is already fading, my bosom is sinking in, and my young flower is withering!” She tried being provocative and bold, she was afraid she had been too timid before, perhaps that was not the right way.⁠ ⁠… But the gentlemen were already laughing at her covertly when they drank healths over their punch, and some of them mocked her in public. Others understood her better and thought within themselves that she might make a good wife and an ardent mistress. But they had no desire to marry, and to seduce a girl of family would be a risky business. When they left the ball they could easily and without any ado find the way to their old place, to the room with the smoking lamp, or with a red night-lamp hanging from the ceiling.

“What are we doing with our lives, we men, and what are we doing with theirs?”

Martin turned back into the city.

On a street corner he met a poet, who was freezing in a thin yellow-green ulster. He was a few years older than Martin and already a bit famous, for he wrote with fabulous ease the loveliest verses on any theme, mostly about girls and flowers and June nights on the lowlands of Scania, whence he had come. He had a pale face and a thin red beard; and when he met a fellow-artist, his great childlike eyes took on a wild and staring expression, as if he were considering within himself: “Shall I murder him, or shall we go in somewhere and consume alcohol?”

They went up to the “Anglais” and drank green chartreuse.

The poet talked about himself. He confided to Martin that he was a decadent. He worshiped everything that was disintegrating, rotten at the core, and doomed to destruction. He hated the sun and light⁠—here he shook a clenched fist at the gas candelabra on the ceiling⁠—he loved the night and sin and all alcoholic drinks of a green shade. He had most of the well-known venereal diseases and an insane fear of crowded squares. Nothing in the world could make him go diagonally across Gustavus Adolphus Place. This disease gave him a very special pleasure, for he took it as the forerunner of general paralysis. And general paralysis was the great sleep; it was nirvana.

Martin listened absently. “Light is good,” he said to himself, “and darkness is good too. But sometimes darkness is bad, and light too.”

“But how is it,” he asked, “that your poems are really not in any essential way different from those which generally get the prize in the Academy?”

At these words the poet’s glance darkened, his lips suddenly became thin and narrow. He took a dirty sheath-knife from his pocket, pulled it halfway out, and laid his index finger on the bare blade.

“How deep can you stand cold steel?” he asked.

“You misunderstand me entirely,” said Martin, laying his hand calmingly on the other’s arm. “I love your poems. Only I don’t see rightly the connection between them and your inner life as you have just pictured it.”

The poet laughed.

“It’s amusing to hear that you love my poems,” he said. “The things I’ve allowed to be published up to now, you see, are mere skits. Good enough for the mob. Look here!”⁠ ⁠…

He took a newspaper clipping from his pocket, a review of his last volume signed by a well-known critic. This authority mildly deplored that some of the poems could not be acquitted of a certain tinge of sensualism which gave an unpleasing effect. In others again the poet struck purer tones, such as were fitted to give rich promise for the future.

“Well, that was quite friendly,” observed Martin, when he had read it.

“Friendly!” The poet again made a convulsive grab in his pocket where the knife lay. “Friendly, you say? Shouldn’t such an insect creep in the dust before the wretchedest of my poems?”

“Oh, yes,” said Martin, “yes, naturally; but since it isn’t the custom for older folks with younger⁠—”

The poet was silent, took a drink, then was silent a long while.

Martin drank too. The strong green liquor burned in his palate and his brain. Thereupon the woman of the morning was there, the one who walked in the sunlight and smiled. Was she asleep now, did she dream, did she smile in her dreams? Or did she twist about sleepless on her bed in longing for a man?

Should he write to her? He could easily find out her name. No. She would only show the letter to her friends, and they would titter and laugh.⁠ ⁠…

The café was nearly empty. In the farthest corner a regular customer sat alone behind a newspaper. In a mirror on the opposite wall was the vision of an old gentleman with white whiskers and a red silk handkerchief sticking out of his breast-pocket. He was fat and red and white, red by nature and white with powder, and as he leaned his chest and arms against the bar, he looked like a sphinx.

The poet emitted a sigh. Martin studied him: the face of a child under the red-bearded mask of a pirate. It occurred to him that he had possibly hurt this man’s feelings just now, and he felt the need of saying something agreeable.

“Do you know,” he said, “if you shaved off your beard you would certainly look like the most profligate kind of monk?”

The poet brightened up.

“I dare say you’re right,” he said, trying to get a look at himself in a mirror. “What’s more, I’ve written poems with a leaning toward Catholicism. You ought to read my poems sometime, the real ones, the ones that can’t be printed.”

“Surely,” said Martin. “Where do you live?”

The poet declared that he didn’t live anywhere. He hadn’t had any dwelling-place for three weeks, and he didn’t need any. He wrote his poems on the table of the café and slept with girls. In the house of one of them he had his green-edged traveling bag with some extra collars and the poems of Verlaine, and there too were his own manuscripts.

Martin began to be really impressed, but he found no outlet for his thoughts, and silence once more spread itself between the two whom chance had driven together on a street corner.

The clock struck twelve, the gas was turned half down, and the poet, feeling the approach of inspiration with the darkness, began to write verses on the table.

Martin said good night.

Sture Square lay white and empty. The snow had ceased, the moon was up, and it was more bitterly cold than ever. To the east a new street without houses opened like a great hole in a wall. To the west a snow-covered jumble of old shanties and stone gables was spread out in the misty moonlight, and from one of the streets of sin which slunk between them echoed a woman’s laugh and the sound of a gate being opened and shut.