V

It was dark in the house, and Martin had pushed up the slatted shutters of the box. No one could see them, nor from where he sat in his corner could he see anything of what was happening on the stage. He only heard lines and responses thrown out in the dark, and saw, or fancied he saw, their effects on the curving rows of pale human masks⁠—a sloping flower bed full of large curious flowers, colorless as are plants that grow without sunlight, and not exactly beautiful as they waved gently, as if before an inaudible wind, or nodded on their stems from time to time.

He imagined he could recognize them all, whether because he had really met them so often on the street and in public places, where he had been one of them, that their faces had become fixed in his subconscious memory; or because of the tendency of human faces to group themselves into a few types, so that one rarely seems to encounter a really new face.

Some of these faces, furthermore, he knew very well. Over yonder sat Henrik Rissler, his friend from boyhood. They seldom met now, and that was a pity, for Martin knew of no one with a better appreciation of friendship, ideas, and cigars than he. But he had now been married for several years and led a migratory life. He had not yet finished the odyssey of the newly married couple from one damp abode to another, always on the outside edge of the city, from the Vasa Quarter to South Stockholm, and from there to Kungsholm. But Martin had the conviction that they would find each other again, if life would only grant them both a little more repose.

And there, a bit farther down, that little wrinkled face that reminded one both of a child’s and of an old man’s⁠—wasn’t that another old schoolmate, wasn’t it Josef Marin? He had never become a clergyman as he should have according to the ideas of his obstinate old mother. But he never got firm in his faith. It is often with faith as with appetite⁠—it comes with eating; but he had never got to where the eating began, and he had also at bottom perhaps a thirst for sincerity which made his course a bit too difficult. Now he covered the music halls and funerals for a large newspaper. He wrote unreservedly what he thought and took pains to think as he supposed the editor did; and the editor, who was the deuce of a fellow and could think whatever he wanted to, was careful to think as he imagined the educated and well-to-do folk of the community thought. And because these principles had set the tone of the paper, it had become popular and respected and very old, having a fixed reputation for incorruptible honesty and unpartisan love of truth.

“I might really just as well have become a clergyman,” he had said one day to Martin, rather mournfully, when they were exchanging a few words at a street corner.

And there, far up in the center, that pale slender woman⁠—was it not she who had been his flame on certain spring evenings many years ago, Harriet Skottë? He had written her a letter, too, which had never been sent. Ah! those days.⁠ ⁠… Life had gone a bit poorly with her since then; she did not look happy. She was married now, and her husband was beside her. He was fat, very well dressed and looked as if he had been varnished. Poor little child, she hadn’t been too lucky in her marriage choice⁠—one could tell that by a look at her husband.⁠ ⁠…

And he saw other faces, those of women whom he knew slightly although they didn’t know him, young women whom he kept in friendly remembrance because sometime without their being aware he had been a little richer and happier when they had floated past him on the street like sunlit clouds.⁠ ⁠… Down there was one whom he remembered well, for she had once noted his glance and had pulled her skirts around her and given him a look as if he were a murderer of the Jack the Ripper type. Poor little lady! the time had flown, she was no longer young, for she had then been in her late bloom, and now she would get no more such glances when she went down Sture Street.⁠ ⁠…

He grew tired of looking at one thing and listening to another. The deep and wonderful old words which sounded from the stage said nothing to him at the moment, and he thought he could read by the masks in the parquet that the words recoiled unheard from them too, and that they scarcely comprehended more of what occurred on the stage than the mere pantomime. It was the fifth act. He leaned back in his corner, letting the two gravediggers toss about skulls and witticisms as they chose, while he sought in the dark the glance of his mistress. But he did not catch it, because she could see everything from her place and never took her eyes from the stage. Then once more the words took on color and life to his ears, when he saw the eagerness in her face; and the whole churchyard scene, which he could not see but which he knew so well, seemed to be mirrored in her glance. He saw Hamlet stand there in his mantle of night and mystery with Yorick’s skull in his hand, he saw the funeral procession, the lowering of the coffin, and the queen as she strewed flowers on the grave: “Sweets to the sweet.” He saw the strange struggle in the grave, the two men wrestling down there, and he heard Hamlet’s voice, “I loved Ophelia.”

What did he want⁠—did he want to tear her out of the grave? Suppose she were not dead, suppose she should arise from the coffin now as if after a quiet sleep⁠—wouldn’t he take her in his arms and carry her away and love her to the end of days? No, it was not as he thought. He had said while she was still alive, “Lady, I loved you once.” He was no ordinary fickle cavalier, he had not forgotten her for another lady-in-waiting with a slenderer waist and a deeper bosom, and still he could say, “I loved you once.” He could possibly say that of many things. He had loved the sun, and the flowers and the trees. The blue heavens he had loved, and water and fire and the good brown earth. He had loved all that; to all the four elements and to life itself he might have said, “I loved you once.” But then things had changed, there was something which stole in between all this and him, something which took him in its grasp without asking any leave and drove away everything else, the sun and the flowers and the women and Woman, far away, so that he hardly saw it any more except as if through a mist.⁠ ⁠… And now when he saw the funeral procession come, and heard that it was for her whom he had had and had lost⁠—but he also knew that he had lost her and all the rest before she was dead, and the very loss seemed real to him only at the first moment; at the next he saw it far off, through a mist.

Martin had shut his eyes, and when he opened them again, he himself saw everything through a mist: the parquet and the white masks down there and her whom he loved.

She took his hand and caressed it softly between her two warm hands while she whispered to him, “Tell me, what are you thinking of?”

The winter night slept around them. It snowed no longer, and they went home in a white moonlit mist through the snowdrifts, in through her door and up the stairs. It got brighter and brighter the higher they climbed. They stopped at a stairway window and looked out. The greater part of the mist was now below them, it lay wrapped around the yards and open spaces beneath, but in the upper regions of the air everything was almost clear; it was bluish and bright as a night in August. A wide ring of light was around the moon, and in the pale glow the world lay as if icebound and petrified. Out of the ocean of mist down there arose a lonely gable wall without a window, which absorbed the cold glance of the moon and stared blindly and emptily back. A long shiver went through them both, they pressed hard against each other, closing their eyes, and everything was lost to them in a kiss.

It became a long and wonderful kiss. He felt all her being dissolve, while he heard in his ears the sound of distant bells from a little country church far away between hedges and wheat fields. It seemed to be a Sunday morning: he saw a neat gravel plot, red peonies were glowing from the flower beds, white and yellow butterflies were fluttering about the bushes and the lawn, and he heard the rustling of mighty trees. He was walking with her among the trees, but through their murmur passed a breath of autumn, the yellow butterflies were yellow leaves, and some were already dark with frost. The wind carried with it broken accents and words, which were sometimes like the dry words of everyday speech, sometimes like furtive whispers about something that had to be kept secret, with all of which was blended as it were the echo of the actor’s strange intonation a little while before when he said, “I loved Ophelia.”

But he did not relinquish her mouth. They sank ever more deeply into one another. He seemed to be voyaging through space: in the white moon-mist burned a red star, first faint and expiring, then more powerful and ever nearer, growing and broadening into a flaming spring of fire, to which he fastened his lips tightly. He seemed to burn without suffering, the flames cooled his tongue like a slightly bitter wine, until he felt that he was drinking in everything: satiety and hunger, thirst and coolness, the sun’s health and the midnight’s anguish, the lucid thought of day and the morbid brooding of moonlit dusk, all the joy and all the misery of the earth⁠—from this one spring.