I had known Paul Herbst over a year before I learned accidentally that he had been married and that his wife had been dead long since.

We used to meet at one place or another with common friends, and it sometimes happened, too, that we looked each other up to talk away an hour over a game of chess and a glass of wine, especially if it was getting on to the twilight of a long and gloomy day, when solitude began to feel oppressive. I was twenty or thereabouts, and he was a good bit over thirty; which is probably why he so seldom spoke to me of himself and his life.

One evening my glance fell on a woman’s portrait in the recess with the porcelain stove, a faded portrait behind a glass. I had presumably seen it many times before without its having tempted my curiosity or my even noticing it at all. This time it occurred to me to ask who it was.

Herbst looked up, a bit surprised.

“That is my wife,” he answered.

My astonishment made me embarrassed. There was a moment’s silence.

“I never knew you were married⁠ ⁠… Or that you⁠ ⁠…”

Herbst smiled meditatively in his sofa corner, while he gathered together the chessmen and laid them in a drawer, each in its place according to a regular scheme.

“Yes, I believe I was married.”

“You believe!”

“It’s so long ago. I’ve almost forgotten.”

His eyes stared into the dusk with a blind and empty look.

“If I didn’t know that I have a worn ring with her initials in a drawer somewhere, and a church certificate and some other trifles, I might sometimes believe the whole thing was a dream⁠—a bright and happy dream, whose contours break up and fade in my memory inch by inch, a shade more with every passing year.”

“A good many have passed since then,” he continued. “I was twenty, and she was eighteen. After two years she died.”

And he added, while he slowly stirred the fire, “Her name was Margot.”

I could not take my eyes from the portrait, which surveyed me with a faded and stiffened smile. But behind the smile I caught a glimpse in the half light of a sad and winsome girl’s face, almost a child’s, framed in long curls after the style of the time, with a wonderfully blue and bright glance.

Some days later I was in company with Herbst on the way home from a party.

He lived on the outskirts of Östermalm, and we went out there along Strandvägen. That was in the days when new and old flourished together on the street, two or three modern houses in the midst of gray dilapidation, outhouses and old wharf sheds.

It was a cool night in the early part of October. The moon was up; a cold, moist wind was blowing. The big buildings on Blasieholm formed a dark mass, whose broken and irregular edge seemed to be catching at the wisps of cloud that drove forward against a deep blue background. The still, heavy water of Nybro Inlet mirrored a broad glittering moon-path in oily rings, and along the wharves the lumber sloops raised a thin and motionless forest of masts and tackle. In the upper air was haste and tumult; the clouds hunted each other from west to east, till over the woods of Djurgården they congested into a low black wall. It was as if heaven were breaking camp for a journey, for a flight.

It was late, and Herbst seemed weary.

“Let’s hurry up a bit,” he said. “Moonlight isn’t healthy. One doesn’t sleep well after it.”

“Perhaps⁠ ⁠… But it’s beautiful just the same.”

“I suppose so. Sunlight’s more beautiful.”

We went on a stretch in silence. The city slept around us. A policeman’s rapid step rang on the pavement, iron heels against the stone; a shrill laugh came from an alley, a heavy carriage rumbled past somewhere in the distance.

Herbst picked up his thread of thought anew:

“The sun, you see, is healthier and above all more up-to-date. It celebrates the new, the fresh, the present, what we must admire so as not to be out of things⁠—even if it seems tiresome sometimes. Toward the old, the past, it is pitiless; it calls an old ruin straight out an old ruin.⁠—The moon, on the other hand, the moon is a reactionary. It reveres the dynasties of banished beauty. It makes us think of the beauty that enchanted us in our first youth, which we laugh at now or have forgotten; of voices that are silenced; of caresses under which we trembled long ago.”

His voice shook a little.

“⁠—And of the dead whom we loved.”

He was very pale, and his look had a sickly gleam. I had never seen him like that. I felt that I was walking beside a strange man whom I had never known and never seen by daylight. Was he drunk? His features had new lines, and his voice sounded with a new tone. I don’t know why, but at that moment it occurred to me that he was a passionate worshipper of music. I recalled that I had heard him play the violin one evening when I stood outside his closed door, and when I had rung, the violin ceased, but no one opened. Perhaps music was to him like a fair but depraved mistress, for whom he fevered in darkness and solitude, but for whom he blushed in daytime, in the sunlight.

We had come into the newly-planted avenues. All was silent and bare; not a human being was visible. The sparse, thin skeletons of the trees threw long shadows in the moonlight.

Neither of us spoke for a long while.

Finally Herbst took my arm: “Let us turn off! I have something to show you over there. It’s nothing remarkable, only an old house.”

We turned to the left into a dark side street. The houses stood sleeping in low irregular lines, and far away a lamp flared in the wind with a reddish light.

The street ascended sharply. Herbst stood still before a high-paled fence.

“Here is where we used to live,” he said.

It was an old dilapidated two-story house with a pointed gable and a high, steeply-inclined tile roof⁠—probably an old citizen’s residence of the last century⁠—shaded by five or six tall lindens and a gigantic chestnut. The moonlight burned white on the wavy glass of the gable windows. On the gray masonry the net of linden branches was outlined like the broken web of a monster spider, and from the round attic window with broken glass in its ragged frame stared the darkness.

The gate stood open, hanging on one hinge. We went into the yard.

The house appeared desolate, abandoned, dead.

“Yes,” repeated Herbst, “it was here; here we used to live. Through that door there she entered in her bridal dress one evening, when the stars were burning in the treetops. And through the same door they carried her out one winter day. They carried her out in a black chest and drove off with her in a grotesque wagon ridiculously gotten up, carried her off somewhere, God knows where. I doubt if I know where the grave is. I have never been there since.”

We sat down on a green bench which ran around one of the old tree trunks. We sat there a long while in silence. Paul Herbst was tracing flourishes in the sand and now and then spearing a withered leaf with his stick.

“You see that left gable window up there,” he went on. “There she sat when I came home and when I went away. There we both sat together as evening drew on. When the sunlight fell in aslant, it painted the shadow pattern of the chestnut’s leaves on the bright wallpaper and brought out a warm glow from her red mahogany sewing board. There we would sit in the bright May evenings with the window open. And in the dusk of December afternoons I used to unfasten her hair and let it run between my fingers⁠ ⁠… while the city down below there was sunk in wintry darkness⁠ ⁠… in silence and dream.

“She was a good child, Margot. I remember a New Year’s Eve, our last. We had gone to church together, she had wanted to. It was packed and fearfully warm. Margot went to sleep with her head on my shoulder. Suddenly the preacher broke out with a thunder; she awoke and was frightened at having been asleep. He was her spiritual adviser, and we had our pew right under the pulpit; she was positive that he had seen her. She thought he looked at her so sternly and coldly. She was depressed all the evening afterwards. She was afraid she had been too happy, she whispered to me; what if God had grown angry and would do her some harm?

“She was a guileless, conscientious little being. She knew little of the world’s evil, and my own knowledge was much the same⁠—at that time.⁠ ⁠… Toward spring she got brain fever and died. In three days it was over.”

There was a rustling in the trees. Herbst sat in silence and traced in the sand.

I sat and stared at the moon’s reflection in the left gable window. There one might have had some notion of happiness once. A peaceful nook, protected, remote.

“Who lives here now?” I asked so as to say something.

“Some artisans’ families, I believe. The house has run down.”

And he continued with a smile, “That must be their wash hanging out there. It reminds me of a story from the time when we lived here. Before us the house had belonged to an apothecary who had come to grief, I don’t know how, and gone bankrupt. More than once I saw him out on the street looking in through the palings. One night⁠—it was bright moonlight as now, and I was standing at the window with Margot⁠—one night I saw him steal into the yard. The tears came into Margot’s eyes when she recognized him. Our laundry was hanging out. He looked cautiously round; it was dark in our window, and he didn’t see us. When he thought he was unobserved, he hurriedly tore down all the clothes from the line and threw them higgledy piggledy on the ground. He acted as if he was on the rampage. The man obviously had a screw loose; he couldn’t stand seeing strangers’ clothes hanging to dry in the same yard where in the old days his own shirts and drawers had dangled in the moonlight.”

A cloud slipped over the moon. Herbst rose. “Well, let’s go! I’m freezing.”

He had won back his calm. When he was out on the street he lighted a cigarette and after a while resumed:

“So happiness passes from one to another. It’s no good shutting your hands on it with a convulsive grip; no matter what you do, some day you’ll be standing with your hands full of empty air. The only thing to do is to take everything with the same imperturbable equanimity as a well-conducted gambler when he loses the last thing he owns.⁠ ⁠… What if existence afterwards should be like a worn and faded coat which one would gladly give away to a beggar; it’s all one has anyhow. So one can only refrain from exposing his poverty too openly, one must keep close to the houses on the shady side of the street; and when one sees the stream of humanity billow forward on the opposite sidewalk, one may console himself with the knowledge that in time they will all come over to the shadow side⁠—one by one, sooner or later.”

“That’s a fine consolation, ‘A solace for a tiger heart.’ ”

“Yes, it leaves much to be desired, I grant⁠ ⁠… but there is no other. Furthermore there is a certain interest in seeing one after another of one’s friends and acquaintances slip into the freemasonry of the shadow side. One sees it on them when they have passed the line⁠—in their walk, their carriage, the lines around the mouth, and the corners of the eyes. After that nothing matters. The end will be the same, whatever happens: one will be carried out of his house by six fellows dressed in black, who smell of brandy and have white cotton gloves, and one will be buried in the ground amid reading and mumbling of incantations.”

We went along the street in silence; only our steps echoed between the rows of houses. A company of night revellers took a clamorous farewell at a street corner. A door with a rattling chain was pushed open and shut with a bang. Herbst turned up his coat collar and bade me a hurried good night.

“I shall wake up with a headache tomorrow,” he said. “I can’t stand moonlight.”