III

Martin sat alone with his father at the dinner table within the same circle of yellow light which had enclosed the sleepy winter evenings of his childhood. Martin Birck and his father had seldom anything to say to each other. They thought differently about everything except the taxes on foodstuffs. This lack of agreement did not, however, cause them any sorrow; they attached no importance to it. They both knew that different generations think differently, and they found this natural. Nor did they find silence anything painful or oppressive; it was just the self-evident expression of the fact that nothing had happened which could give rise to an exchange of opinions. When they chatted together it was mostly about the improvement of government work and about new houses. For Martin’s father was interested in his city. On Sundays he often went for long walks to distant parts of the city and saw how new suburbs shot up out of the earth. He thought of how Stockholm had developed since his youth, and he found all the new houses handsome, especially if they were large and imposing with many windows and small towers at the corners. And when Martin heard his father speak of all these ugly houses and call them handsome, he thought of how unjust life was, since it remorselessly closed the way to the inner regions of beauty for the best and most useful members of the community. For the way thither went through melancholy, there was no other, and it was not idly that the Greek musician answered Alexander, “May the gods never make you so unhappy, my lord, that you may learn to understand music better than I.” Martin’s father had had a youth too full of worry and a manhood too full of strenuous responsibility to know anything of the mental depression with which life punishes those who think more about beautiful and ugly and good and evil than they do about their daily bread.

On this day, as usual, Martin’s father discoursed about one thing and another over his coffee and cigar. He spoke of a men’s dinner he had attended the day before, where he had felt embarrassed on account of his Vasa decoration; for he had gone with the large official medal, which was the only one he had, whereas the other men had had the small miniatures.

“So,” he finished, “I looked like the biggest fool of the company.”

“Yes,” observed Martin, “appearances were clearly against you. But in reality the miniature medals of the others gave the clearest proof that their foolishness was greater, since because of their decoration they went to more expense than was strictly necessary.”

“Yes,” his father answered, “I thought of that too, but I felt awkward, anyhow.”

The conversation died down. Martin was thinking of various stories about decorations which he had heard, such as that about a man who had been given the Vasa medal because he had sent flowers to the royal hospital on the days when the queen was to visit it, and about one who got the North Star because he had bought a house. But it never occurred to him to tell these, because when he thought the matter over he could see that these stories, which he found so amusing, might not have quite the same effect on the elder man, who had earned his decoration by forty years of ill-paid work in the government service and could therefore hardly fail to think of it without some respect, although in conversation he might make fun of it.

Silence spread out around them; the father smoked his cigar and looked out into the dark, and Martin sat in thought. He thought of the history of his home, how it, like other homes, had come into existence, grown and blossomed, and how afterwards the bonds had one after another been broken: his sister married, his mother dead. The best time, the blossom time, was mostly that when the children had just grown up and the elders were not really old. It was true he had heard old women say that the happiest time was when the children were small. Yes, that might well be⁠—for the mothers. But he remembered the years when his sister had just grown up and was about to be married. Then everything was glad in the home; they had youth, friends, music. The piano, which now was dumb, still held the waltzes and opera selections of the bygone years; and often when he lay awake at night, he could still hear the Norwegian songs they sang then: “He Leaned Above the Garden Bench” and “I Ask Thee Not for Roses from Thy Breast.” In these songs still lived a part of his youth, and they now seemed full of all the strange melancholy of the past. Then suddenly the house had became silent, more silent with every year, till one day the father sat alone with the son in an empty and shattered home.

Looking at his father, he asked himself, “What can I be to him?” “Infinitely little,” he had to answer, “almost nothing.” She whom he had loved from his youth up now lay under the earth, under a little snow-covered gray stone, and could not warm his age. The fire on the hearth was ready to die out. He was the one whose duty it was to kindle the new flame. He felt it was this which, in the normal course of things, the elders of the family had the right to expect of the young: to see the chain carried on, a new home, and grandchildren to rock on their knees. It was so that nature had arranged, she tried everywhere to hide the dead with new young life, as we ourselves cover corpses under flowers. Dissolution was thus more easily approached; the way went downward, to be sure, but one took it amid play and prattle, as when one started the journey. But to that great and simple craving he could answer nothing. It was true he could do several things: he did not think there was any sort of beauty in the world that was foreign to him, or any thought or shade of a thought that he could not follow, and furthermore he could look over government ledgers and inscribe signs in the margins, and drink a good deal of whisky without losing control of his mind, and perhaps a few other small matters. But he could not build a home. Not a chance, not a possibility of it. An artisan, a day laborer could do it, but not he. He could not conjure forth the four thousand crowns a year that a poor family of the middle class needed to live. If he could ever get to that point, as he well might with years, he would be old, his father dead, and she whom he loved⁠—what would have become of her?

But it was true, he realized, that the old man did not, at least not consciously, make any such demand on him. On the contrary his father understood clearly how impossible it was. He had no hope of seeing a continuation of his line, of being able to grow old in an environment of futurity and promise and new scions. But Martin realized that just this, the fact that he could have no such hope, weighed upon him like a dark sorrow and made his twilight even more gray and empty. He had had grief enough without that. He had received small pleasure from his daughter’s marriage. Her little boy was dead, and she had lately written home that she wanted a divorce from her husband.

“The fire is dying on the hearth. Who is to kindle the new flame?”

His father went into his room for his after-dinner nap.

It was five, and Martin dressed to go to her who was waiting for him. He put on an evening suit despite the fact that they were to be alone and unseen. He had promised her that, for it was their bridal anniversary.