The Project Gutenberg eBook of Modern Swedish Masterpieces: Short Stories
    
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Title: Modern Swedish Masterpieces: Short Stories

Translator: Charles Wharton Stork

Author: Per Hallström
        Verner von Heidenstam
        Sigfrid Siwertz
        Hjalmar Söderberg

Release date: March 13, 2021 [eBook #64808]

Language: English

Credits: Chuck Greif & The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MODERN SWEDISH MASTERPIECES: SHORT STORIES ***




                      MODERN SWEDISH MASTERPIECES




                                MODERN
                         SWEDISH MASTERPIECES

                _SHORT STORIES SELECTED AND TRANSLATED_

                                  BY

                         CHARLES WHARTON STORK

     TRANSLATOR OF “ANTHOLOGY OF SWEDISH LYRICS,” “SELECTED POEMS
                       BY GUSTAF FRÖDING,” ETC.

                    Editor of _Contemporary Verse_

                            [Illustration]

                               NEW YORK

                        E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

                           681 FIFTH AVENUE




                            COPYRIGHT, 1923

                       BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

                         _All Rights Reserved_


                Printed in the United States of America

                                  TO

                            THORSTEN LAURIN

                           FRIEND OF ARTISTS

                          PATRON OF THE ARTS




ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


The special thanks of the translator are due to the
American-Scandinavian Foundation of New York City for permission to
include the stories by Verner von Heidenstam from the two volumes of
_The Charles Men_, as well as for stories by Söderberg and Siwertz which
appeared in the _American Scandinavian Review_.

Three stories by Söderberg were published in _Hearst’s Magazine_, and
others in _The Freeman_, _The Bookman_, _World Fiction_ and _The Wave_.
Hallström’s “Out of the Dark” appeared in _The Double Dealer_. We gladly
acknowledge our debt to the proprietors of these magazines for allowing
us to reprint from their pages.

Our chief debt is, however, to the original authors and to A. Bonnier
and Co., Stockholm, for the right to translate these specimens of
Swedish genius into another language.




PREFACE


It is curious that, despite the rapid growth of interest in Scandinavian
literature through the English-speaking world, there has been up to now
no book to represent one of the most brilliant fields of achievement,
the Swedish short story. The work of Selma Lagerlof is well known and a
volume of Per Hallström has appeared recently, but no attempt has been
made to represent a group of the leading masters. The present
collection, whatever its failings, will at least indicate the power and
variety of the Scandinavian genius in a new and important phase of its
expression.

The four authors here included are all living and active, from which it
may be rightly inferred that the Swedish short story is of recent
development. Verner von Heidenstam, born in 1859, winner of the Nobel
Prize for Literature in 1916, has an international reputation but is not
as yet widely known in America. The stories here selected are from his
historical novel, _The Charles Men_, set in the time of Charles XII; for
though the book has a clear unity, the separate chapters can be
understood perfectly by themselves. Per Hallström, somewhat younger, is
ranked even higher by Swedish critics as a master of short stories. The
volume of translations just published omits, quite unaccountably, the
two specimens here given which belong to his very best style. Hjalmar
Söderberg, also a writer in his fifties, has been called the Anatole
France of Sweden. Unknown in America up to now, his stories have won
marked favor on their appearance in magazines. Sigfrid Siwertz, but
slightly over forty, is the most promising of the younger generation.
Less outstanding than the others, he has nevertheless a fine balance and
much grace of detail. His chief novel, under the title _Downstream_, has
just appeared in translation.

As to the varying characteristics of these stories it seems best to
leave everyone to form his own opinions. It is not likely that writers
of such strong individuality will appeal equally to the general public.
Such authors, however, need no apology. This volume is, unless the
translator has failed badly, a challenge to American literary taste. It
is not the book that is on trial but the reader.

                                                               C. W. S.




CONTENTS


HJALMAR SÖDERBERG

                                                                    PAGE

THE CHIMNEY-SWEEPER’S WIFE                                             3

BLOOM                                                                 14

THE FUR COAT                                                          28

THE BLUE ANCHOR                                                       34

THE KISS                                                              44

THE DREAM OF ETERNITY                                                 48

THE DRIZZLE                                                           54

THE DRAWING IN INDIA INK                                              58

THE WAGES OF SIN                                                      61

COMMUNION                                                             66

THE CLOWN                                                             71

SIGNY                                                                 76

A MASTERLESS DOG                                                      80


SIGFRID SIWERTZ

THE LADY IN WHITE                                                     87

LEONARD AND THE FISHERMAN                                            104


VERNER VON HEIDENSTAM

WHEN THE BELLS RING                                                  125

THE FORTIFIED HOUSE                                                  145

THE QUEEN OF THE MARAUDERS                                           168

CAPTURED                                                             190


PER HALLSTRÖM

THE FALCON                                                           221

OUT OF THE DARK                                                      237




STORIES BY
HJALMAR SÖDERBERG




THE CHIMNEY-SWEEPER’S WIFE


This is a grim and sad story. I heard it told more than once in my
childhood, and it made me wonder and shudder.

In a side street stands an old middle-class house with a smooth gray
façade. Through a large round-arched door without any decorations--there
is, to be sure, a date, and perhaps too a couple of garlands with
fruit--one comes upon a narrow courtyard paved with cobblestones, and a
dark, stone-paved fountain like so many of its kind, where the sun never
strikes the path. An old linden with pollarded branches, blackened bark,
and leafage thinned with age stands in one corner; it is as old as the
house, older indeed, and is always a favorite resort for the children
and cats of the courtyard.

This was of old the yard of Wetzmann, the master chimney-sweep.

Sweeper Wetzmann must have been a very good-natured old fellow. He had
had success in life and had got together quite a large property. He was
kind to the poor, harsh to his prentices--for such was the custom; so
perhaps it needed to be, too--and drank toddy in the tavern every
evening, for he had a poor life at home.

His wife was likewise harsh to the prentices, but she was not kind to
the poor or to anyone else either. She had worked as maid-servant in
sweeper Wetzmann’s house before she became his second wife. At that time
Envy and Lust were the two of the seven deadly sins which were nearest
her nature; now it was rather Wrath and Pride.

She was large and strongly built and in her earlier days must have been
handsome.

The son Frederick was slim and pale. He was born of the first marriage,
and it was said that he resembled his mother. He had a good head and a
cheerful disposition, and was studying to be a minister. He had just
become a student when he fell into a long and severe illness which held
him to his bed a whole winter.

In a wing of the court lived a charwoman with her daughter Magda. Was
her name really Magda? I do not know, but I always called her so to
myself when as a child I heard the older people tell of her on a winter
evening in the twilight; and I pictured to myself a pale, shy little
child’s face, flooded about with an abundance of bright hair, and with a
very red mouth. She was fifteen and had just been confirmed. Perhaps it
was that “being confirmed” which made me represent her to myself as
serious and quiet, like the young girls I used to see in church on
Sunday, and which caused me to think of her as clad in a long shiny
black dress.

In the spring, when the student began to convalesce, the charwoman’s
daughter came by his desire to sit at his bedside a while in the
afternoon and read aloud.

Mrs. Wetzmann did not approve of this. She was afraid a liking might
grow up between them. Her stepson, for all she cared, might fall in love
with whomsoever he wished and might betroth himself, too--that did not
concern her; but at least it must not be with a charwoman’s daughter!
She kept a mistrustful eye on Magda, but had to put up with the
arrangement. An invalid should of course be diverted in some way or
other; and the doctor had forbidden him to read in bed, because he had
weak eyes and was not to overstrain himself.

So the girl sat by his bedside and read aloud both religious and secular
books, and the student lay there pale and weak, listening to her voice
and looking at her, too, in which he found pleasure.

Such a red mouth she had!

They were nearly of the same age--he was not over seventeen or
eighteen--and they had often played together as children. Soon enough
they grew confidential.

As often as possible Mrs. Wetzmann found some excuse to go into the
sick-room to see how things were getting on there. The two young folks
ought to have noticed this and been on their guard; but then one does
not always do as one ought. One day, when she noiselessly and cautiously
opened the door, matters were in the following state: Magda had left her
chair, which had been set at some distance from the bed, and now stood
leaning over the head-board with her arms around the young man’s neck.
He in turn had raised himself half up with his elbows propped on the
pillow and was caressing her hair with a thin white hand, while they
kissed each other fervently. From time to time, also, they whispered
certain broken words without meaning.

The sweeper’s wife grew dark red. Notwithstanding, she could not keep
from smiling inwardly: hadn’t everything turned out exactly as she knew
it would! But now there was going to be an end to it. Wrath and Pride
rose up within her, till they swelled and glowed from her cheeks and
eyes, which sent out sparks; and who knows--while she stood there silent
and unseen, regarding the two young people, who had neither eyes nor
ears for anything but each other--who knows if Envy and Lust, too, did
not covertly slink forth from their retreat and play each on its own
hidden string within her soul?

She did not reflect long, but stepped hastily forward to the bed, seized
the girl’s slender wrist in an iron grasp, gave her a disgraceful
epithet, and flung her out of the door with a stream of the foulest
abuse. Afterwards, in the interested presence of the servants and
prentices, she swore a solemn and luscious oath that if the young girl
ever again dared to set foot within her threshold, she should get her
skin full of so many blows that she would not be able to stir a fin for
fourteen days.

There was no one who doubted that she meant to keep her word.

The invalid made no reproaches to his stepmother. Every time she went
through the room he turned his face to the wall; he did not wish to see
or speak to her after her performance with Magda. But one day he
confided to his father in private that he could not live unless Magda
might be his bride. The old chimney-sweeper was surprised and vexed, but
dared not immediately set up any serious opposition: his son was the one
person he cared for and who showed him any tenderness in return, and he
could not endure the thought of losing him.

He put the matter aside for future action and gave his wife a share in
his anxiety.

       *       *       *       *       *

How can I describe what occurred next? It sounds like an evil dream or
a story made to frighten children when they are naughty, and yet it is
true.

It is supposed to have been on a Sunday evening in May that it happened.

The courtyard is still, the street is still. Maybe someone hums a song
through a kitchen window, or some children play down in the alley....
The invalid is alone in his room. He is counting the quarter-hours and
the minutes. It is spring outside now. Soon it will be summer. Shall he
never get up from his bed, never again hear the woods murmur and rustle,
never as before be able to measure the day in periods of activity and
periods of rest? And Magda.... If only he did not always see before him
her face with the wild alarm in her look that came there when his
stepmother seized her by the wrist! She had not needed to be afraid. The
wicked woman would not have dared to do her any serious harm, for she
knew that he had chosen her for his bride.

So he lies there dreaming, now awake, now half-awake, while he lets his
pupils suck in the light of the sunbeam on the white door. When he shuts
his eyes, there swims out an archipelago of poisonously green islands
surrounded by an inky black sea. And as he dozes, the green passes over
into blue, the black brightens to bluish red with ragged dark edges,
and at last everything grows black together....

He feels a light hand stroking his forehead, and he starts up in bed.

It is Magda. Magda stands before him, small and slender, with a smiling
red mouth, and lays a bunch of spring flowers in front of him on the
cover. Anemones and almond blossoms and violets.

Is it true, is it really she?

“How did you dare?” he whispers.

“Your stepmother is away,” she answers. “I saw her go just now, dressed
to go out. I heard she was to go to South Stockholm, and it will surely
be long before she comes home. So then I slipped up the stairs and in to
you.”

She stays a long while with him, telling of the woods where she has
walked alone and listened to the birds and picked spring flowers for him
whom she loves. And they kiss each other as often as possible and caress
like two children, and both are happy, while the hours run and the
sunbeam on the floor becomes burning gold and then red, then pales and
fades away.

“Perhaps you ought to go,” says Frederick. “She may soon be home. What
should I do if she wanted to beat you, I who am lying here sick and
weak, who grow dizzy if I get up out of bed. Perhaps you ought to go.”

“I’m not afraid,” says Magda.

For she wants to show unmistakably that she loves him and that she will
gladly suffer for her love’s sake.

Only when twilight comes does she kiss him for the last time and steal
out of the house. She stops a minute in the courtyard and looks up at
the window of the room where he is lying with her almond blossoms and
violets on the bed-cover. When she turns to the little room in the wing
of the court, she stands face to face with Mrs. Wetzmann, and she utters
a little scream.

There is no living human being in the courtyard, none but these two.
Round about stand the walls, staring at them in the darkness with empty,
black windows, and the old linden trembles in its corner.

“You’ve been up there!” says the sweeper’s wife.

As a child I always believed that she smiled when she said this, and
that her teeth shone as white in the darkness as those of her husband’s
prentices.

“Yes, I have been with him,” Magda may perhaps have answered, defiant
and erect even in her chalk-pale terror.

What happened then? No one really knows, but probably there was a
desperate pursuit round the courtyard. At the foot of the old linden
the girl tripped and fell. She dared not call for help, for fear the
invalid might hear; and besides, who would have helped her? Her mother
was away at work. The infuriated woman was above her--she had meanwhile
got hold of a weapon, a broomstick or something of the sort,--and blow
followed blow. A couple of half-strangled screams from a throat
constricted by the dread of death, and then nothing more.

A couple of prentices who had just come home stood down in the dark
doorway and looked on; they did not move a finger to help the girl.
Perhaps they did not dare; perhaps, too, they were led by a faint hope
of seeing their mistress carried off in a police wagon some day.

When Mrs. Wetzmann went into the house after exercising her right of
mastery--for she felt by instinct that she naturally had proprietary
right to all over whom she could and would exercise it--she stumbled
against something soft in the stairway. It was Frederick. He had heard
the faint screams, had sprung from bed and gone out, and had fallen on
the stairs.

Magda lived three days; she then died and was buried.

Sweeper Wetzmann paid a sum of money to the charwoman, her mother, and
there were no legal proceedings on the matter. Nevertheless the old man
took it hard. He went no more to the tavern to drink toddy, but
generally sat at home in a leather-covered chair and spelled in an old
Bible. He fell into a decline, grew silent and peculiar, and it was not
a year before he too was dead and laid in earth.

The son Frederick grew slowly better; but he never passed his
examination as minister, for both his grasp of intellect and his memory
had become weakened. He was often seen going with flowers to Magda’s
grave; he walked leaning forward and very rapidly, indeed he almost ran,
as if he had many important errands to attend to, and he mostly had a
couple of books under his arm. To the end he remained wholly
weak-minded.

And the sweeper’s wife? She seems to have had a strong nature. There are
people who are not exactly conscienceless, but who never of their own
accord hit upon the idea that they have done anything wrong. It may
happen that a fellow with bright buttons on his coat may clap them on
the shoulder and request them to come along with him; then their
conscience awakens. But no one came to Mrs. Wetzmann. She sent her
stepson to an asylum when he became too troublesome at home, she mourned
her husband, as was proper and customary, and then she married again.
When she drove to church on the bridal day, she wore a jacket of
lilac-colored silk with gold braid and was “fixed up fit to kill”--so
said my grandmother, who was sitting at her window in the house
opposite and saw the whole display while she was turning a leaf in her
book of sermons.




BLOOM


On a brilliant August morning at eight o’clock precisely the gates of
the establishment of Langholm were opened for three boarders of the
establishment, who had come there for various causes and sojourned for
various periods. These periods were exactly suited to the grade and kind
of their differences with the law-abiding community as proved by their
conduct. They did not know each other, and having no feeling of
brotherhood through their common misfortune, they said to one another
neither good-morning nor good-bye.

The man who came out first was a thick-set fellow with a beast-like
forehead and heavy wrists. One dark evening he had fallen upon an old
workman whom he did not like, knocked out some of his teeth, and kicked
him in the chest so that he coughed blood for several days. He had been
given a month for assault and battery, which did him little harm, and he
betook himself hastily to the nearest tavern.

Next came a man who had swindled an impersonal entity known as a bank of
a fairly large sum of money. The three months he had spent indoors had
not overly bleached his fresh brandy complexion. He had a well-fitting
summer suit of dark blue with narrow white edgings; on his feet he wore
new yellow shoes, and in his hand he held an elegant little satchel of
the same color as the shoes, so that he most nearly resembled a
traveling salesman who comes whistling softly out of a hotel. He did
not, however, whistle, but mounted into a cab with a lowered hood, under
which a black-clad woman with pale and anxious features awaited him. He
then tossed an address to the coachman, and vanished in a cloud of dust.

Last came the former tailor’s apprentice Bloom, Oscar Valdemar Napoleon.
His complexion inclined more to gray, for he had had to atone with a
nine months’ sentence for the theft of a jacket hung out for show--this
being, to be sure, his second trip to the establishment. He had in his
right breast pocket, besides his birth certificate with its less
flattering annotations, the sum of eighty crowns inserted in a blue
envelope, together with a certificate of good conduct at Langholm from
the prison director.

That was not much to represent nine months’ work, but he had also had
his board and lodging meanwhile. For him it was in any case a
considerable sum, and it had been besides a lever for many future plans,
most of which rested on clear improbabilities, for many dreams of a new
life, for happiness and prosperity and general respect. This had been
especially the case during those last weeks when, in consideration of
his rapidly approaching freedom, he had been spared the humiliation of
being shaved, for he had felt his manly self-esteem sprout afresh and
grow in rivalry with the bristles on his upper lip and chin. But now,
when he was actually free, when he felt the light, cool breeze of the
summer morning fan about his temples and heard it rustling in the big
trees, all of these plans were pushed somewhat into the background as if
of themselves, of course only until a later time, only for a few hours
or perhaps a day, and a single great emotion of happiness rose up in him
and swept him along as though in a vertigo. Furthermore he was very
hungry, because he had hardly touched his Langholm fare on that last
morning, and he thought with yearning and satisfaction of a little
restaurant on Brenchurch Street which he knew from of old, and of a
great beefsteak with onions and one or maybe two bottles of beer--only
think of it, beer!

On the Langholm Bridge stood a guard off duty, fishing for roach with
small bits of saffron bread. Bloom stood with his arms on the railing
and watched: it amused him to pretend that he was not in a hurry. Down
there in the deep green of the quiet water, in the shadow under the
bridge, big red-eyed roach swam back and forth around the bait, pointing
at it a while, turning around in hesitation and coming back again; now
and then came a rudd or two with red fins and yellow back, beautiful
fish, but tasting a little of clay, and once in a while came a glint
from the broad silver side of a bream. On both sides of the narrow
Langholm Bay large bending willows dipped their gray-green leaves into
the water, and the reeds waved gently in the morning wind. In the
background far away, the churches and towers of Stockholm stood in the
blue sun-haze as if cut with a fine needle.

“Yes,” remarked Bloom to the guard, “now one can begin to live again.”

“Yes, good luck to you, Bloom!” answered the guard without taking his
eyes from the float, which just then took a dip under the water. “That
was a bite, but the fish only took the bread and left the hook to the
landlord.”

A steam sloop came sputtering up under the bridge on its way to the city
and lay to at the nearest landing. For a moment Bloom was tempted to go
with it, but came back directly to his first idea: the restaurant on
Brenchurch Street, beefsteak, onions and beer, so he said good-bye to
the guard and went ahead on the Langholm Road. He felt himself from of
old most at home in the section of South Stockholm between
Skinnarviksberg, Lilyholm Bridge and Langholm.

       *       *       *       *       *

When Bloom emerged, full-fed and contented, from his restaurant, his
first impulse was to buy a new black felt hat, for the old one inclined
too much to yellow-brown, and he had heard sometime or other that the
hat makes the gentleman. After that he went to the nearest barber shop
on Horn Street and had them remove the stubble from his chin, together
with part of that on his cheeks; retaining, however--besides his
mustaches, of course--a couple of small mutton-chop whiskers next the
ears. After that he went slantwise across the street to a general
outfitter’s, whence he came out attired in a clean white collar, a
blue-edged dickey, and a brilliant light-blue necktie. A few steps
further up the street he stopped before a photographer’s show-case and
looked at himself in the glass. He was greatly moved at the
transformation he had undergone. A ribbon-like strip of paper was
picturesquely wound among portraits of serving-maids, dressmakers,
Salvation Army soldiers, recruits, and a parson with a parson’s collar;
and when he read on this that he could have half-a-dozen card-sized
pictures made for two and a half crowns, he felt an irresistible
temptation to go up and be photographed. It was partly that the day was
significant for him, so that the likeness he had taken now would be a
memento for the rest of his life; partly, too, that he had a dark
foreboding, which he tried to put by, that it might be long before he
would again be in a condition equally worthy to be immortalized in a
picture. Furthermore, he had had himself photographed at various times
previously, and he remembered with satisfaction the agreeable feeling he
had experienced in seeing his ego in an, as it were, glorified aspect,
without spots on his coat or damaging inequalities in his complexion,
handsomely shaved and with a dignified and engaging expression. He went
up to the photographer, combed his hair solicitously before a mirror,
and sat down motionless before the camera with his hands on his knees.

“Will it be good?” he asked, when the sitting was over.

“The gentleman will look like a bank director,” answered the
photographer after he had glanced at the plate.

When he stood on the street again, he became conscious of his good
intentions calling more strongly and clearly than before. He ought to go
down to the city, look up a couple of God-fearing and kindly people to
whom the prison director and the pastor had given him directions, get
work, and procure himself a cheap lodging. But it was still early in the
day, the clock-maker’s time-piece over there on the corner did not yet
point quite to ten, the sun shone heart-warmingly in the blue heavens,
and the air was mild and still. He could give himself a little time, he
could go a piece toward Lilyholm out in the woods.

Yes, the woods--he had thought of them many times while he sat caged off
there behind the grating.

He had grown up in a village on a wooded slope half a mile south of
Stockholm. After he had been confirmed, he had been set as prentice to a
pious little tailor in South Stockholm. The tailor was a Baptist; Bloom
also became a Baptist and submitted to total immersion. But when he went
to another tailor, who belonged to the national church and constantly
misused the name of the Devil, his new faith gradually waned. He made
new acquaintances and became the betrothed of a middle-aged serving-maid
who had a bank-book and gave him money. In that way he grew accustomed
to amusements, not great, but nevertheless more than are good for poor
folks. On fine summer evenings he often sat in Mosebacke’s café or on
the river terrace drinking punch, sometimes with his intended, but
sometimes with a little dark-haired dressmaker, whom he had got to know
at Tekla’s one afternoon when she had given a tea in the maid’s room.
She was called Edith; she had thick dark hair and very red lips. She
went for long periods without work, but always knew how to provide for
herself notwithstanding. Bloom often wished that Tekla’s faithful love
for him, together with her bank-book, might by some magic means be
transferred to Edith. But Edith’s heart was inconstant and never to be
relied upon, and the bank-book still remained Tekla’s. So, as the case
was, he at least got a little enjoyment from the money of the one and
the red lips of the other.

But then came the end. The tailor with whom he worked went bankrupt, and
he was out of work. Tekla promised to help him and took out money from
the bank; he was to have the loan of thirty crowns till he found work.
On the evening when he was to get the money she forced him to stay
longer than he cared to, and when at last he was to go and only waited
for the money, the crash came. She was all the more angry because she
had to speak low for fear of waking the family. Edith had been up in her
room that afternoon, they had fallen out about something, and Edith had
talked about all manner of things with Bloom to spite and annoy her. But
Tekla was not the kind to let anybody make fun of her. She called him a
cur and many other names, waving the three tenners under his nose and
declaring that he should never again get a farthing from her. Thereupon
he snatched them with a sudden grab and went off. He knew that she dared
not make any disturbance at night; the family might wake.

But next day in court she accused him of theft. He first denied it, but
afterwards confessed and related the circumstances. The plaintiff’s
version of the affair, however, was altogether different: the thirty
crowns had lain on the table, he had taken them without her seeing it,
and she had never promised them to him. The one thing that became wholly
clear was that he had taken them.

That gave him his first trip.

Afterwards he had lived as best he could--had worked sometimes, and
sometimes starved and begged, till one evening he got the idea of
stealing a jacket on East Street so as to escape the poor-house.

       *       *       *       *       *

He had come down to Lilyholm Bridge. Milk-wagons rattled and shaggy
peasant horses toiled painfully with their home-made carts up the steep
abutment. From the hundred factory chimneys around the shore of Arstavik
the smoke ascended quietly toward the welkin in straight columns, as
from a sacrifice well-pleasing to the Lord. The Continental Express
rushed southward along the railway embankment, its dining car full of
breakfasting travelers with anchovies on their forks. But in the
peaceful nook between the bridge and the shore a family of ducks swam to
and fro; some white, some speckled with the suggestion of a wild duck’s
plumage, while in the middle of the flock the drake stood on a floating
plank on one foot with his head under his wing, asleep.

Bloom took a roll that he had brought with him from the restaurant on
Brenchurch Street, crumbled it to pieces, and threw the pieces to the
ducks. The flock at once grew more lively; even the drake lifted his
head and opened one eye, but shut it again. He was quite white, and his
shut eyelid was also white, so that Bloom had to think of the blank,
uncanny marble eyes he had seen in the National Museum one Sunday many
years ago. The others snapped among the bits of roll. One of them had
got hold of a piece that was too big, so she dipped it into the water
time after time in order to soften it and break it. Meanwhile another
followed all her motions constantly with watchful eyes, and when at last
the bit of roll slipped from the bill of the first, the other was
instantly there and got it. There was no conflict; the first contented
herself with following in turn and watching for a chance to recover the
lost piece.

Bloom laughed aloud with delight.

Yes, that’s right, he thought; he who has got something must look out
for what he has, or someone else will come and take it. He felt it
almost as a consolation to see the innocent white creature perform with
impunity and entire naturalness an act which in the language of mankind
is known as theft, and for which he had had to suffer severely.

A speckled duck, enticed by the bits of roll, came swimming out from the
shore at the apex of a flock of little ones, gray-brown fellows with
hairy fluff and small, black, pearly-bright eyes like rats. Several
small girls on the way to school with books in their hands stopped and
surveyed them with delight and astonishment. “Look there! are those
rats?” “No, can’t you see? They’re birds.” “Only think, they aren’t
afraid of the water!”

“Those are ducklings,” explained Bloom, adding a didactic tone: “They
are formed to go in the water. It’s no more remarkable for them to go in
the water than for fish to swim.”

“Really!” said the largest girl. And they bounded off on their way with
little skips.

Bloom recalled a story which he had once read in a school book about an
ugly duckling that was transformed into a swan. He sought for an
application of this to himself and partly found it in his recent
transformation at the barber shop and the photographer’s, but it did
not seem to him fully satisfactory, and he muttered to himself as he
passed on over the bridge: “Wait, I’ll show them! Just wait.”

It was very warm, and when he came to the other side of the bridge where
nettles and burdocks were standing, gray with dust, by the edge of the
road, he took off his jacket, stuck the crook of his stick through the
loop, slung it over his shoulder, and went on out along the Lilyholm
Road whistling a cheerful tune.

A little in front of him went a young woman with a bundle in her hand,
and he hurried his steps so as to see how she looked from in front. As
he came nearer, all at once his heart nearly stood still in his breast,
for he thought it must be Edith. At the same moment she turned.

“No, if it isn’t Valdemar!”

After the first expression of surprise had vanished from her face, she
smiled affably and seemed not unpleasantly affected at seeing him. She
was going to see an acquaintance who lived a little further out, and
they went on together. He found her changed, fuller than before and
redder in complexion, as if she had drunk a good deal of beer. She asked
where he had been all the long time that they had not seen each other.
He felt a certain satisfaction in her not seeming to know of his
“second trip,” and he improvised something about a lengthy illness and
employment for a while with a tailor in a neighboring town.

Edith chattered incessantly. She talked of common acquaintances and
lamented over wrongs she had suffered. Tekla had been worst of all to
her. But now she was married to a street-cleaner who had already drunk
up her money and who beat her every day; and it served her right. She
related besides a great deal about herself, but in a style that hardly
seemed to make any pretence to veracity.

Bloom let her prattle and for his own part did not say much. He thought
of the nine months he had spent in solitude.

He took her gently by the arm and guided her in on a path that led into
the wood, and she grew silent in the midst of her talk and followed him
without saying anything. The path led into a deep covert along a fence
and hedge that enclosed a solitary orchard. From this orchard several
big silver poplars spread their wide and lofty crowns. On the other side
rose a fir-clad slope with mosses and ferns and dusky thickets. Over the
tops of the firs a white summer cloud sailed slowly.

       *       *       *       *       *

Bloom was awakened by a big raindrop which fell heavily on his right
eyelid. He half raised himself and rubbed his eyes--had he been asleep?
He was alone, and it was raining. It did not rain hard as yet; these
were only the first big drops, but a black cloud was hanging directly
over him.

Where was Edith?

He had thrown his jacket with the stick a little to one side; he got up
and put it on. Suddenly a horrible thought came over him and he made a
swift grab at the breast pocket.

It was empty. The blue envelope was gone--the envelope with the money
and the prison director’s recommendations.

He felt a choking in his throat and a difficulty in breathing.

A sudden gust of wind shot through the leafage of the poplars like a
lightning flash, and a raging squall of rain whipped him in the face.




THE FUR COAT


It was a cold winter that year. People shrank up in the chill and grew
smaller, all except those who had furs. Judge Richardt had a big fur
coat. It almost belonged, moreover, to his official position, for he was
managing director of a brand-new company. His old friend Dr. Henck, on
the contrary, had no fur coat: he had instead a pretty wife and three
children. Dr. Henck was thin and pale. Some people grow fat with
marriage, others grow thin. Dr. Henck had grown thin, and remained so on
this particular Christmas Eve.

I’ve had a bad year this year, said Dr. Henck to himself, as he was on
his way to his old friend John Richardt to borrow money. It was three
o’clock of Christmas Eve, just the hour of the mid-day twilight.--I’ve
had a very bad year. My health is fragile, not to say broken. My
patients, on the contrary, have picked up, almost the whole lot of them,
I see them so seldom nowadays. Presumably I’m going to die soon. My wife
thinks so, too; I’ve seen it in her looks. In such a case it would be
desirable that the event should happen before the end of January, when
the cursed life insurance premium has to be paid.

By the time he had reached this point in the process of his thoughts he
found himself on the corner of Government and Harbor Street. As he was
about to pass the street-crossing in order to proceed down Government
Street, he slipped on a smooth sleigh track and fell, and at the same
moment a sleigh drove up at full speed. The driver swore and the horse
instinctively turned aside, but Dr. Henck received a blow on the
shoulder from one of the runners, and furthermore a screw or nail or
some similar projection caught his overcoat and tore a big rent in it.
People gathered around him. A policeman helped him to his feet, a young
girl brushed the snow off him, an old woman gesticulated over his torn
overcoat in a way that indicated she would have liked to sew it up on
the spot if she could, and a prince of the royal house, who happened to
be going by, picked up his cap and set it on his head. So everything was
all right again except the coat.

“Lord! what a sight you are, Gustav,” said Judge Richardt, when Henck
came up to his office.

“Yes, I’ve been run over,” answered Henck.

“That’s just like you,” said Richardt, laughing good-humoredly. “But you
can’t go home like that. You may gladly have the loan of my fur coat,
and I’ll send a boy home after my ulster.”

“Thanks,” said Dr. Henck. And after he had borrowed the hundred krona he
needed, he added, “We shall be glad to have you for dinner.”

Richardt was a bachelor and was accustomed to spend Christmas Eve with
Henck.

       *       *       *       *       *

On the way home Henck was in a better humor than he had been for a long
time.

That’s on account of the fur coat, he said to himself. If I had been
smart, I should have got myself a fur coat on credit long ago. It would
have strengthened my self-esteem and raised me in the popular opinion.
One can’t pay such a small fee to a doctor in a fur coat as to a doctor
in an ordinary overcoat with worn button-holes. It’s a bother that I
didn’t happen to think of that before. Now it’s too late.

He walked a stretch through King’s Garden. It was dark already, it had
begun to snow again, and the acquaintances he met did not recognize him.

Who knows, though, whether it’s too late, Henck went on to himself. I’m
not old yet, and I may have been mistaken about the question of my
health. I’m poor as a little fox in the woods; but so was John Richardt
not so long since. My wife has grown cold and unfriendly toward me in
these latter times. She would surely begin to love me afresh, if I could
earn more money and if I were dressed in furs. It has seemed to me that
she cared more for John since he got himself a fur coat than she did
before. She was certainly a bit sweet on him when she was a young girl,
too; but he never courted her. On the contrary he said to her and to
everybody that he wouldn’t dare to marry on less than ten thousand a
year. But I dared, and Ellen was a poor girl who wanted to marry. I
don’t believe she was so much in love with me that I should have been
able to seduce her if I had wished to. But I didn’t want to, either; how
could I have dreamed of that sort of love? I haven’t thought of that
since I was sixteen and saw Faust the first time at the opera with
Arnoldson. I’m sure, though, she was fond of me when we were first
married; one can’t be mistaken about such a thing as that. Why couldn’t
she be again? In the first days after our marriage she always said
spiteful things to John whenever they met. But then he built up a
company, invited us often to the theatre, and got himself a fur coat.
And so naturally in time my wife grew tired of saying spiteful things to
him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Henck had still several errands to do before dinner. It was already half
past five when he came home laden with parcels. He felt very tender in
his left shoulder, otherwise there was nothing that reminded him of his
mishap in the afternoon except the fur coat.

It’ll be fun to see what my wife will do when she sees me in a fur coat,
said Dr. Henck to himself.

The hall was quite dark; the lamp was never lighted unless visitors were
expected.

I hear her in the parlor now, thought Dr. Henck. She walks as lightly as
a little bird. It’s remarkable that I still get warm around the heart
every time I hear her step in the next room.

Dr. Henck was right in his supposition that his wife would give him a
more loving reception when he had on a fur coat than she was otherwise
wont to do. She stole up close to him in the darkest corner of the hall,
twined her arms about his neck, and kissed him warmly and intensively.
Then she burrowed her head into the collar of his fur coat and
whispered: “Gustav isn’t home yet.”

“Yes,” answered Dr. Henck in a voice that trembled slightly, while he
caressed her hair with both hands, “yes, he’s home.”

       *       *       *       *       *

A big fire flamed in Dr. Henck’s work-room. Whisky and water stood on
the table.

Judge Richardt lay stretched out in a large leather easy-chair and
smoked a cigar. Dr. Henck sat huddled in a corner of the sofa. The door
was open on the hall, where Mrs. Henck and the children were busy
lighting the Christmas tree.

Dinner had been very quiet. Only the children had twittered and prattled
to one another and been happy.

“You’re not saying anything, old fellow,” said Richardt. “Is it that
you’re sitting worrying over your torn overcoat?”

“No,” answered Henck, “it’s rather over the fur coat.”

There was a few minutes’ silence before he continued:

“I’m thinking of something else, too. I’m sitting thinking that this is
the last Christmas we shall celebrate together. I’m a doctor and I know
I’ve not many days left. I know it now with full certainty. I want,
therefore, to thank you for all the kindness you’ve shown me and my wife
in these last times.”

“Oh, you’re mistaken,” muttered Richardt, looking away.

“No,” replied Henck, “I’m not mistaken. And I want also to thank you for
lending me your fur coat. It has given me the last seconds of happiness
I have known in my life.”




THE BLUE ANCHOR


I

There was dancing in the salon, but in the darkened smoking-room sat
several men who did not dance. The younger ones had white flowers in
their button-holes, the older ones had decorations. In the corner of a
sofa sat a man a little apart from the others; he sat very silent and
smiled as at a happy dream. His face was brown, but his forehead was
white. His frock coat was as correct as anyone else’s, and he had also a
white flower in his button-hole; but his left hand, which hung over the
arm of the sofa, was tattooed with a blue anchor.

As a matter of fact it was not a ball; there had merely been a dinner,
and afterwards there was dancing.

A man with a decoration was standing in front of him.

“You don’t dance, Mr. Fant?” he inquired.

Fant replied, “I’ve just been dancing with Miss Gabel.”

But as he said this, he felt that he blushed. Why should he have added
“with Miss Gabel.” It was surely a matter of indifference with whom he
had danced. Because he believed he had said something stupid, he was
annoyed with the man to whom he had said it, and set to staring at his
decoration without saying anything. Since this was a bogus foreign
decoration of the worst sort, the man grew embarrassed, coughed drily,
and passed on.

Fant remained seated and stared into a mirror which faced him on an
oblique wall. But it was not himself that he saw in the mirror, it was
the flooding light of the dancing hall and the sinuous lines of the
women. They seemed to move silently in time with the music. Look at
their red lips, look at the white curves of their arms!--

There she was again! For the third time she glided past across the
mirror. It was her cousin she was dancing with, a boy, lately a
student--ah, well!

No, he could not sit still, he could not look on any more. It surely
signified nothing that the boy danced with his own cousin, but he could
not look on. He rose and went out of the room.

Someone asked, “Who is this Mr. Fant?”

“He has invented something--a gas-burner, I believe. He is already on
the way to make a fortune.”

“But did you see,” said the man with the foreign order, “did you see
that he has a blue anchor tattooed on one hand?”

They suddenly burst into guffaws.


II

He sauntered back and forth through the rooms. He went out into the
corridor. A couple of Knights of Vasa were sitting on the wood-box
talking about business while they gesticulated with two big cigars, on
which they had left the labels. They grew silent as he passed.

He came into a greenish room that was half dark. From the roof on a
narrow cord hung a single electric light, its glow shaded by blue and
green fringes. On a dressing-table with a marble top an old Chinese
mandarin of porcelain sat sleeping on his crossed legs.

How strangely far off the music sounded, as if from underneath!

He set the mandarin’s head in motion with a little punch of his little
finger. Two mirrors repeated in unending succession the pale and
lethargic nods of the yellow head.

Now it was quiet, the music.

All at once she stood there, in the middle of the room. He had not heard
her enter. She held out both hands to him. He took them and drew her to
him for a kiss, but she freed herself almost immediately.

“Somebody’s coming,” she said.

They listened. Voices approached and moved away again.

When all was quiet around them, he pressed her to him in a long kiss.
And he thought while she kissed him: This is life! This is eternity!

Far away in the green darkness nodded the pale head of the mandarin.

“No one kisses like you,” he muttered.

“Many kiss like you,” she responded, smiling.

He thought to himself: she’s smiling so that I shall know she’s jesting
and that she has never kissed anyone else.

While he caressed her two small hands between his, he noticed that she
was looking at his left hand.

“You are looking at the anchor,” he said. “It’s true that it is not
handsome. And it won’t come off.”

She took his hand and surveyed inquisitively the blue dots that formed
an anchor. But she said nothing.

“It was in Hamburg that was done,” he said. “I was a ship’s boy on a
vessel. We had come ashore and gone into a tavern by the harbor. I
remember it all so well: the fog, the many masts in the harbor, and the
smell of the grease. My comrades were tattooed, on the hands, arms and
body, and they thought I ought to have myself tattooed also. I couldn’t
refuse, or they would have thought I was afraid of the pain, for it hurt
a great deal. But I thought, too, it was stylish; I was hardly fourteen,
you know.”

“Are you tattooed on the body as well?” she asked.

Smilingly and somewhat unwillingly he answered, “Yes, I have on the
breast a ship and a bird, which is supposed to be an eagle, though it’s
more like a rooster.”

She looked long into his eyes, then slowly raised his hand to her lips
and kissed the blue anchor.


III

Years passed, and one day Richard Fant said to his wife as they were
dressing to go out to dinner, “Do you know, I think the blue anchor is
beginning to fade. Perhaps it’s on the way to vanish entirely.”

“Oh, it’s not as bad as that,” she answered.

In reality her thoughts were in another direction. She was thinking of
her cousin, Tom Gabel, who was an attaché at the embassy in Madrid. He
had now been home for two months on a visit and had promised to come and
fetch them so as to go together to the dinner.

“Hurry up,” she said, “so that Tom won’t have to wait for you.”

“I’m all ready,” he replied.

He had sat down in a corner in the shadow, fully dressed. She turned and
scanned his attire.

“You’ve forgotten your decoration,” she remarked.

“I don’t want my decoration,” he responded.

“But Richard! could you be so discourteous to Tom, who got it for you?”

He went after his decoration. It was not one of the very worst, not an
order of Christus or a Nichan Iftikar; it was a medium good decoration,
a quite nice decoration. He fastened it on the lapel of his coat with
the feeling that perhaps he really needed it, seeing that he had a blue
anchor on his left hand.


IV

There was a dance after the dinner, but Fant remained sitting in a sofa
corner of the smoking-room. By his side sat the man whom he had formerly
annoyed by staring at his foreign decoration, but he was now a Knight
Commander. They had become good friends and called each other by their
first names when they said anything to each other, but they said
nothing. They merely sat each in his corner of the sofa and smoked big
cigars with labels and understood each other perfectly.

The doctors had forbidden Fant to smoke strong cigars, because he had a
bad heart. But he had just lighted the third since dinner.

In the mirror on the middle of the opposite wall he saw the revolving of
the dancers and the flood of light from the hall. He had often wondered
how it was that they seemed to dance as though on felt or soft
greensward, soundlessly. He understood now that it came from his seeing
them in the mirror. Because the picture struck him from another quarter
than the clatter and the music, he did not connect them, and over the
flooring reflected in the mirror the dance appeared to go without noise.
Look at the girls’ white dresses! behold their panting bosoms!----

He recollected that he had once seen her who was now his wife float
past, as they did, in a girl’s plain white ball-dress. She was
differently clad now.

See! there she was, sure enough, with him, her cousin. She remained
standing a moment in the doorway, erect, slender, and delicate as
always. She seemed as if quite naked under the stiff, variegated silk in
which she had wrapped her body, and which was only held together by
clasps at the shoulders and waist. They bent their heads together and
whispered.

No, he must move about a bit, stretch his legs a little.--It is not good
to sit still too long after a big dinner and smoke three black cigars.

He lighted the fourth and began to saunter back and forward through the
room.

He went out into the corridor. Three young men with white flowers in
their button-holes sat on the wood-box with cigarettes in holders and
talked about women, but they became silent as he went past. He opened
the door to the little green cabinet and went in. It was empty. He set
the mandarin’s yellow head in motion with a push of his knuckle and
passed on to the window.

The window-pane breathed frost and wintry chill. He blew on it till
there was a peep-hole between the ice-flowers, put his eye to the glass,
and looked out. The sky was dark and glittering with stars. Highest up
stood the Dipper with its handle aloft.

It was late, then.

He could not force himself to leave the room, because he felt a bitter
and devouring desire for his wife and the kiss of old times, the kiss
under the blue-green light from pearl fringe of the single electric
light, the kiss which the mandarin had beheld in his nodding
half-slumber. If she would only come now, precisely now! No one could
kiss as she did, no one. He had kissed other women since she no longer
loved him; but he had forgotten them all, he would not recognize them if
he met them on the street. If she would only come! Yes, even if she but
came to meet the other, even then he would take her forced and
treacherous kiss as a boon, even then--

He listened. Whispering voices were audible outside the door, but they
grew silent all at once and remained so.

He had a strange sensation at his heart, he felt that in a couple of
seconds he would lie stretched on the carpet, unconscious, but he held
himself upright, and suddenly he heard from the entry where the young
men were smoking their cigarettes a very clear voice which said: “Well,
after all it’s only natural. One can’t expect her to be in love with
someone who has a blue anchor tattooed on his hand.”


V

The coffin stood in the middle of the room. The black-clad woman walked
back and forth, back and forth.

“No, he’s not coming----”

When he finally did come, he said, “Pardon me, beloved. I was delayed by
someone who came to call----”

She nodded stiffly. She did not believe him, because he had not kissed
her.

When he felt that they had stood too long silent, he said, “I must be
off tomorrow. I’ve had a telegram from the minister.--But I swear to
you that I’ll come back,” he added in a somewhat lowered voice as if he
did not wish that the dead man should hear.

She comprehended that he was lying and that he never meant to see her
again. And she nodded.

“Good-bye,” she said.

When he had gone, she went forward to the head of the coffin and looked
at the dead man without thinking any further, for she was too weary. But
as she stood there she remembered suddenly that she had loved him. She
had loved other men too, but it came to her now that she had loved this
one most. At that thought she felt the tears rise from deep down in her
heart; she took his left hand, the one with the blue anchor, and wetted
it with her kisses and her tears.




THE KISS


There was once a young girl and a very young man. They sat on a stone on
a promontory that ran out into the lake, and the waves splashed at their
feet. They sat silent, each wrapped in thought, and watched the sun go
down.

_He_ thought that he should very much like to kiss her. When he looked
at her mouth, it occurred to him that this was just what it was meant
for. He had, to be sure, seen girls prettier than she was, and he was
really in love with someone else; but this other he could surely never
kiss, because she was an ideal, a star, and what availed “the desire of
the moth for the star”?

_She_ thought that she should very much like to have him kiss her, so
that she might have occasion to be downright angry with him and show how
deeply she despised him. She would get up, pull her skirts tightly round
her, give him a glance brimmed with icy contempt, and go off, erect and
calm, without any unnecessary haste. But in order that he might not
divine what she thought, she asked in a low, soft voice, “Do you think
there is another life after this?”

He thought it would be easier to kiss her if he said yes. But he could
not remember for certain what he might have said on other occasions
about the same subject, and he was afraid of contradicting himself. He
therefore looked her deep in the eyes and answered, “There are times
when I think so.”

This answer pleased her extraordinarily, and she thought: At least I
like his hair--and his forehead, too. It’s only a pity his nose is so
ugly, and then of course he has no standing--he’s just a student who is
reading for his examinations. That was not the sort of beau to vex her
friends with.

He thought: Now I can certainly kiss her. He was, nevertheless, terribly
afraid; he had never before kissed a girl of good family, and he
wondered if it might not be dangerous. Her father was lying asleep in a
hammock a little way off, and he was the mayor of the town.

She thought: Perhaps it will be still better if I give him a box on the
ear when he kisses me.

And she thought again: Why doesn’t he kiss me? Am I so ugly and
disagreeable?

She leaned forward over the water to see her reflection, but her image
was broken by the splashing of the water.

She thought again: I wonder how it will feel when he kisses me. As a
matter of fact she had only been kissed once, by a lieutenant after a
ball at the town hotel. He had smelt so abominably of punch and cigars
that she had felt but little flattered, although to be sure he was a
lieutenant, but otherwise she had not much cared for the kiss.
Furthermore she hated him because he had not been attentive to her
afterwards or indeed shown any interest in her at all.

While they sat so, each engrossed in private thoughts, the sun went down
and it grew dark.

And he thought: Seeing that she is still sitting with me, though the sun
is gone and it has become dark, it may be that she wouldn’t so much
object to my kissing her.

Then he laid his arm softly around her neck.

She had not expected this at all. She had imagined he would merely kiss
her and nothing more, and with that she would give him a box on the ear
and go off like a princess. Now she didn’t know what she should do; she
wanted of course to be angry with him, but at the same time she didn’t
want to lose the kiss. She therefore sat quite still.

Thereupon he kissed her.

It felt much more strange than she had supposed. She felt that she was
growing pale and faint, she entirely forgot that she was to give him a
box on the ear and that he was only a student reading for his
examination.

But he thought of a passage in a book by a religious physician on “The
Sex Life of Woman,” which read: “One must guard against letting the
marital embrace come under the dominion of sensuality.” And he thought
that this must be very difficult to guard against, if even a kiss could
do so much.

       *       *       *       *       *

When the moon came up, they were still sitting there and kissing.

She whispered into his ear: “I loved you from the first hour I saw you.”

And he replied: “There has never been anyone in the world for me but
you.”




THE DREAM OF ETERNITY


While I was still very young I believed with entire certainty that I had
an immortal soul. I regarded this as a holy and precious gift and was
both happy and proud over it.

I often said to myself: “The life I am living is a dark and troubled
dream. Some time I shall awaken to another dream which stands closer to
reality and has a deeper meaning than this. Out of that dream I shall
awaken to a third and afterwards to a fourth, and every new dream will
stand nearer the truth than the one before. This approaching toward
truth constitutes the meaning of life, which is subtle and profound.”

With the joy of knowing that in my immortal soul I possessed a capital
which could not be lost in play or distrained upon for debt, I carried
on a dissipated life and squandered like a prince both what was mine and
what was not mine.

But one evening I found myself with some of my cronies in a large hall,
which glittered with gilt and electric light, while from its flooring
rose a smell of decay. Two young girls with painted faces and an old
woman whose wrinkles were filled with plaster were dancing there on a
platform, accompanied by the wail of the orchestra, cries of applause,
and the clink of broken glass. We watched the women, drank a great deal,
and conversed on the immortality of the soul.

“It’s foolish,” said one of my comrades who was older than I, “it’s
foolish to believe that it would be a blessing to have an immortal soul.
Look at that old harridan dancing there, whose head and hands tremble if
she stays still a moment. One sees directly that she is wicked and ugly
and entirely worthless, and that she’s getting more and more so every
day. How ridiculous it would be to imagine that she had an immortal
soul! But the case is just the same with you and me and all of us. What
a mean joke it would be to give us immortality!”

“The thing that I dislike most in what you say,” I answered, “isn’t that
you deny the immortality of the soul, but the fact that you find a
pleasure in denying it. Human beings are like children that play in a
garden surrounded by a high wall. Time and again a door is opened in the
wall, and one of the children disappears through the door. People then
tell them that it is taken to another garden bigger and more beautiful
than this, whereupon they listen a moment in silence and afterwards
continue to play among the flowers. Assume now that one of the boys is
more inquisitive than the others and climbs up on the wall so as to see
where his comrades go, and when he comes down again tells the rest what
he has seen; namely, that outside the gate sits a giant who devours the
children when they are taken out. And they all have to be taken out
through the gate in due turn! You are that boy, Martin, and I find it
unspeakably ridiculous that you tell what you think you’ve seen, not in
a spirit of despair, but as if you were proud and glad of knowing more
than the rest.”

“The younger of those girls is very pretty,” replied Martin.

“It’s dreadful to be annihilated, and it’s also dreadful not to be able
to be annihilated,” remarked another of my friends.

Martin continued this line of argument.

“Yes,” he said, “one should be able to find a middle course. Gird up
your loins and go out to look for a midway degree between time and
eternity. He who finds it may found a new religion, for he’ll then have
the most enticing bait that a fisher of men ever possessed.”

The orchestra stopped with a clash. The gold of the hall glittered more
faintly through the tobacco smoke and through the floor boards pressed
continuously a smell of decay.

The party broke up and we separated, each in his own direction. I
wandered a long while back and forth on the streets; I came upon streets
which I did not recognize and which I have never seen since, remarkably
desolate and empty streets, where the houses seemed to open their lines
to give me space whithersoever I turned my steps, and then to close up
again behind my back. I did not know where I had got to, before all of a
sudden I stood in front of my own door. It stood wide open. I went in
through the door and up the stairs. At one of the stair windows I
stopped and looked at the moon: I had not previously noticed that there
was moonlight that evening.

But I have never either before or after seen the moon look so. One could
not say that it shone. It was ashen-gray and pallid and unnaturally big.
I stood a long while and stared at yonder moon, despite the fact that I
was dreadfully tired and longed to get to sleep.

I lived in the third story. When I had gone up two flights I thanked God
there was only one left. But as I came up this flight, it struck me that
the corridor was not dark, as it had always used to be, but faintly
lighted like the other corridors where the moon glimmered in through the
stair windows. But there were only three flights of stairs in the house
besides the attic stairs; for that reason the uppermost corridor was
always dark.

“The door of the attic is open,” I said to myself. “The light is coming
from the attic stairway. It’s unexcusable of the servants to leave the
door of the attic open, for thieves might get up into the attic.”

But there was no attic door. There was only an ordinary stairway like
the others.

I had counted wrong, then; I had still a flight to go up.

But when I had mounted this flight and stood in the corridor, I had to
control myself so as not to shriek aloud. For this corridor, too, was
light, neither was there any attic door open, but a new stairway led up
just as before. Through the stair window the moon glimmered in, and it
was ashen-gray and lustreless and unnaturally big.

I rushed up the stairway. I could no longer think. I tottered up
another, and yet another; I did not count them any longer.

I wanted to cry out, I wanted to wake that accursed house and see human
beings around me; but my throat was constricted.

Suddenly it occurred to me to try if I could read the names on the
door-plates. What kind of people could it be that lived in this tower of
Babel? The moonlight was too faint; I struck a match and held it close
to a brass plate.

I read there the name of one of my friends who was dead.

Then the bonds of my tongue were loosed and I shrieked: “Help! help!
help!”

       *       *       *       *       *

That cry was my salvation, for it waked me up out of the terrible dream
of eternity.




THE DRIZZLE


Autumn is here again with its dismal days, and the sun is hiding himself
in the darkest corner of the heavens so that no one shall see how pale
and aged and worn he has grown in this latter time. But while the wind
whistles in the window-chinks and the rain purls in the rain-spouts and
a wet dog howls in front of a closed gate down below on the street and
before the fire has burned down in our tile stove, I will tell you a
story about the drizzle.

Listen now!

For some time back the good God had become so angered over the
wickedness of men that he resolved to punish them by making them still
wickeder. He should, in his great goodness, have liked above all things
to have drowned them all together in a new Deluge: he had not forgotten
how agreeable was the sight when all living creatures perished in the
flood. But unfortunately in a sentimental moment he had promised Noah
never to do so again.

“Harken, my friend!” he therefore said to the Devil one day. “You are
assuredly no saint, but occasionally you have good ideas, and one can
talk things over with you. The children of men are wicked and do not
want to improve. My patience, which is infinite, has now come to an end,
and I have resolved to punish them by making them wickeder still. The
fact is I hope they will then collectively destroy each other and
themselves. It occurs to me that our interests--otherwise so far
apart--should here for once find a point of contact. What advice can you
give me?”

The Devil bit the end of his tail reflectively.

“Lord,” he answered finally, “Thy wisdom is as great as Thy goodness.
Statistics show that the greatest number of crimes are committed in the
autumn, when the days are dismal, the sky is gray, and the earth is
enveloped in rain and mist.”

The good God pondered these words a long while.

“I understand,” he said finally. “Your advice is good, and I will follow
it. You have good gifts, my friend, but you should make better use of
them.”

The Devil smiled and wagged his tail, for he was flattered and touched.
He then limped home.

But the good God said to himself: “Hereafter it shall always drizzle.
The clouds shall never clear; the mist never lift, the sun never shine
more. It shall be dark and gray to the end of time.”

The umbrella makers and the overshoes manufacturers were happy at the
start, but it was not long before the smile froze upon even their lips.
People do not know what importance fair weather has for them until they
are for once compelled to do without it. The gay became melancholy. The
melancholy became mad and hanged themselves in long rows or assembled to
hold prayer-meetings. Soon no one worked any more, and the need became
great. Crime increased in a dizzying scale; the prisons were
overcrowded, the madhouses afforded room for only the clever. The number
of the living decreased, and their dwellings stood deserted. They
instituted capital punishment for suicide; nothing did any good.

Mankind, who for so many generations had dreamed and poetized about an
eternal spring, now went to meet their last days through an eternal
autumn.

Day by day the destruction went on. Countrysides were laid waste, cities
fell in ruins. Dogs gathered in the squares and howled; but in the
alleys an old lame man went about from house to house with a sack on his
back and collected souls. And every evening he limped home with his sack
full.

But one evening he did not limp home. He went instead to the gate of
heaven and straight on to the good God’s throne. There he stood still,
bowed, and said:

“Lord, Thou hast aged in these latter days. We have both of us aged, and
it is for that reason we are so dull. Ah! Lord, that was bad advice I
gave Thee. The sins that interest me need a bit of sunlight once in a
while in order to flourish. Look here! you’ve made me into a miserable
rubbish-gatherer.”

With these words he flung his dirty sack so violently against the steps
of the throne that the cord broke and the souls fluttered out. They were
not black, but gray.

“That’s the last of the human souls,” said the Devil. “I give them to
Thee, Lord. But beware of using them, if Thou intendest to create a new
world!”

       *       *       *       *       *

The wind whistles in the window chinks, the rain purls in the
rain-spouts, and the story is done. He who has not understood it may
console himself with the thought that it will be fair weather tomorrow.




THE DRAWING IN INDIA INK


One day in April many years ago, in the time when I still wondered about
the meaning of life, I went into a little cigar booth on a back street
to buy a cigar. I selected a dark and angular El Zelo, stuffed it into
my case, paid for it, and made ready to go. But at that moment it
occurred to me to show the young girl who stood in the booth, and of
whom I used often to buy my cigars, a little sketch in India ink, which
I happened to have lying in a portfolio. I had got it from a young
artist, and to my thinking it was very fine.

“Look here,” said I, handing it to her. “What do you think of that?”

She took it in her hand with interested curiosity and looked at it very
long and closely. She turned it in various directions, and her face took
on an expression of strained mental activity.

“Well, what does it mean?” she asked finally with an inquisitive glance.

I was a little surprised.

“It doesn’t mean anything in particular,” I answered. “It’s just a
landscape. That’s the ground and that’s the sky and that there is a
road--an ordinary road----”

“Yes, I can see that,” she interrupted in a somewhat unfriendly tone;
“but I want to know what it _means_.”

I stood there embarrassed and irresolute; I had never happened to think
that it ought to mean anything. But her idea was not to be removed; she
had now got it into her head that the picture must be some sort of
“Where is the cat?” affair. Why otherwise should I have shown it to her?
At last she set it up against the window-pane so as to make it
transparent. Presumably someone had once shown her a peculiar kind of
playing card, which in an ordinary light represents a nine of diamonds
or a knave of spades, but which, when one holds it up against the light,
displays something indecent.

But her investigation brought no result. She gave back the sketch, and I
prepared to leave. Then all at once the poor girl grew very red in the
face and burst out, with a sob in her throat:

“Shame on you! it’s real mean of you to make a fool of me like that. I
know very well I’m a poor girl, and haven’t been able to get myself a
better education, but still you don’t need to make a fool of me. Can’t
you tell me what your picture means?”

What was I to answer? I should have given much to be able to tell her
what it meant; but I could not, for it meant precisely nothing.

       *       *       *       *       *

Ah, well, that was many years ago. I now smoke other cigars, which I buy
in another shop, and I no longer wonder about the meaning of life--but
that is not because I think I have found it.




THE WAGES OF SIN


This is the story of a young girl and an apothecary with a white vest.

She was young and slim, she smelled of pine woods and heather, and her
complexion was sunburned and a trifle freckled. So she was when I knew
her. But the apothecary was a quite ordinary apothecary; he wore a white
vest on Sundays, and on a Sunday this attracted attention. It attracted
attention in a place in the country so far away from the world that no
one in that region was so sophisticated as to wear a white vest on
Sundays except the apothecary.

This, you see, was how it happened that one Sunday morning there was a
knock at my door, and when I opened it, the apothecary stood outside in
his white vest and bowed several times. He was very polite and very much
embarrassed.

“I beg your most humble pardon,” he said, “but Miss Erika was here
yesterday with her sisters while you were away, and when she went, she
left her poetry book for you and me to write something in it. Here it
is. But I don’t know at all what to write. Could you perhaps
kindly----?” And he bowed again several times.

“We will think the matter over,” I answered in a friendly tone.

I took the book therefore and for my own share inscribed a translation
of “Du bist wie eine Blume,” which I had made myself and which I always
use for that purpose. I then began to search among my papers to see if
by any chance I had some old verses from my school days which would suit
for the apothecary. Finally I came upon the following bad poem:

    You set my thoughts in turmoil,
    I wither in longing’s blight.
    In solitude you haunt me,
    I dreamed of you in the night.

    I dreamed that we walked together
    Side by side in the twilight dim,
    And through your lowered lashes
    I saw the bright tear swim.

    I kissed your cheek and your eyelids,
    I saw the tear-drop fall,
    But oh, your red, red lips, love--
    I kissed them most of all.

    One cannot always dream sweetly.
    Small rest since then have I known,
    For, sorrowful oft and weary,
    I watch through the night-hours alone.

    Alas! your cheeks so soft, love,
    I touch but with glances trist,
    And those red lips, my darling,
    I never, never have kissed.

I showed the apothecary this poem and offered to let him use it. He read
it through attentively twice and blushed all over with delight.

“Did you really write that yourself?” he inquired in his simplicity of
heart.

“Yes, I’m sorry to admit.”

He thanked me very warmly for the permission to use the poem, and when
he went out of the room I imagine we both had the feeling that we must
drop the formality of “mister” at the first opportunity.

       *       *       *       *       *

That evening there was a little party at the girl’s house. Young folks
were there. We drank cherry syrup on a veranda festooned with hop-vines.

I sat and looked at the young girl.

No, she was not like herself. Her eyes were bigger and more restless
than usual and her mouth was redder. And she could not sit still on her
chair.

From time to time she cast a furtive glance at me, but more often she
looked at the apothecary. And the apothecary looked that evening like a
turkey-cock.

When the punch was passed around, we dropped the “mister.”

       *       *       *       *       *

We young people went down on the meadow to play games. We tossed rings
and played other games, and meanwhile the sun went down behind the hills
and it grew dark.

We had laid the rings and the sword in a heap on the ground and were now
standing in groups, whispering and smiling, while the dusk came on. But
the young girl came up to me through the dusk and took me aside behind a
shed.

“You must answer me a question,” said she. “Did the druggist really
write his verses himself?” Her voice trembled, and she tried to look
away as she spoke.

“Yes,” I said. “He wrote them last night. I heard him going back and
forth in his room all night.”

But when I had said that, I felt a sting in my conscience, for I saw
that she was a pretty and lovable child and that it was a great sin to
deceive her so.

Who knows, I said to myself, who knows? Perhaps this is the sin of which
the Scripture says that it cannot be forgiven.

       *       *       *       *       *

The twilight deepened, it became night, and a star burned between the
trees in the wood, where we were walking in pairs.

But I was alone.

I do not remember any more where I went that evening. I separated from
the others and went deeper into the wood.

But deep within the wood among the firs I saw a birch with a shining
white stem. By the stem stood two young people kissing, and I saw that
one of them was the young girl who smelled of pine woods and heather.
But the other was the apothecary, and he was a quite ordinary apothecary
with a white vest. He held her pressed against the white stem of the
birch and kissed her.

But when he had kissed her three times, I went away and wept bitterly.




COMMUNION


It happened when I was hardly more than a boy.

It was on a blustering autumn evening on board a coast steamer. We had
not yet come in from the country, and I had to go in and out of town to
school. I had been lazy as usual and was to be examined in several
subjects in order to be promoted into a higher class.

I went back and forward on the deck in the darkness, with collar turned
up and hands in my coat pockets, thinking of my reverses at school. I
was almost sure to flunk. As I leaned forward over the railing and saw
how the foam hissed whitely and the starboard lantern threw sparkling
green reflections on the black water, I felt tempted to jump overboard.
Then at least the mathematics teacher would be sorry for the way he had
tormented me--then, when it was too late----

But in the end it grew cold outside, and when I thought I had been
freezing long enough, I went into the smoking cabin.

In my imagination I can still see the warm, comfortable interior which
met my view when I opened the door. The lighted ceiling-lamp swung
slowly back and forth like a pendulum. On the table steamed four whiskey
toddies, four cigars puffed, and four gentlemen were telling smutty
stories. I recognized them all as neighbors of our summer sojourn: a
company director, an old clergyman, a leading actor, and a button
dealer. I bowed politely and threw myself down in a corner. I had, to be
sure, a slight feeling that my presence might perhaps be superfluous;
but on the other hand it would have been asking too much of me to go out
into the wind and freeze when there was so much room in the cabin.
Furthermore I knew within myself that I might very well contribute to
the entertainment if necessary.

The four men looked askance at me with a certain coolness, and there was
a pause.

I was sixteen and had recently been confirmed. People have told me that
at that time I had a guileless and innocent appearance.

The pause, however, was not long. A few swallows from the glasses, a few
puffs at the cigars, and the exchange of opinions was once more in full
swing. A peculiar circumstance struck me, though: all the stories that
were told I had already heard innumerable times, and for my part I found
them comparatively flat. Smutty stories may, as is well known, be
divided into two chief groups, one of which concentrates itself mostly
about digestive processes and circumstances related to them, whereas, on
the contrary, the other, which stands incomparably higher in degree, has
preferably to do with woman. I and my schoolmates had long since left
the former group behind us; I was therefore the more surprised to hear
these mature gentlemen give it their liveliest interest, while the
other, much more appealing group was passed over in silence. I did not
understand it. Could this possibly be out of any undue consideration for
me? I need not say to what extent the suspicion of such a thing provoked
me. The lively tone of the cabin had affected me and made me
venturesome, so that I resolved to put an end to this childishness.

“Look here, uncle,” I burst out quite impulsively during a silence after
a story which was so harmless that even the clergyman guffawed at it,
“don’t you remember the story the captain told day before yesterday?”

“Uncle” was the company director, who was a friend of my father.

I continued undismayed: “That was the choicest I’ve heard in all my
days. Couldn’t you please tell it?”

Four pairs of astonished eyes were directed upon me, and a painful
silence set in. I already regretted my rash courage.

The company director broke the ice with a skittish little chuckle,
which was but a faint echo of the thunder he had allowed to roll out a
couple of days before when the captain had told the story.

“Tee-hee!--yes, that wasn’t so bad----”

He then began to tell it. It was very highly seasoned and had to do with
woman.

The leading actor at first hid his feelings behind his customary mask of
dignified seriousness, whereas on the other hand the button dealer, an
old buck who had grown gray in sin, regarded me with a sort of furtive
interest, in which was an element of increased respect for my
personality.

But when the anecdote began to take a somewhat precarious turn, it was
suddenly interrupted by the clergyman, a kindly old man with a pious and
childlike expression on his elderly smooth-shaven countenance.

“Pardon the interruption, my good brother, but”--and he turned a little
in his chair so that he could direct his words at me--“how old, may I
ask, is this young man? Has he been to Our Lord’s--to Communion?”

I felt that I flushed blood-red. I had forgotten that there was a
clergyman in the company.

“Y-yes,” I stammered almost inaudibly. “I was confirmed last winter.”

“Indeed!” returned the old clergyman, while he slowly stirred his glass
of toddy.

Then without looking up, in a voice which forty years of mediation
between God and the world had impressed with the mild tone of tolerance
and indulgence, he continued:

“Go on, my dear brother! Excuse the interruption!”




THE CLOWN


Yesterday a familiar face flitted by me on the street. It was pale and
had a tired expression, but the features were sharp and strongly marked.

I did not recall his name. I was sure I had seen him sometime, perhaps a
long while ago, but I could not remember when or under what
circumstances. His face had aroused my interest without my being able to
explain why, and I dug all sorts of old recollections out of the
junk-room of my memory in order to identify him, but in vain.

In the evening I was at the theatre. There to my surprise I found him
again on the stage in a minor rôle. He was but little disguised; I
recognized him at once and looked for his name on the program. I found
it, but it was unknown to me. I followed his acting with tense interest.
He took the part of a miserably stupid and ridiculous servant, whom
everybody made fun of. The rôle was as wretched as the piece, and he
played it mechanically and conventionally; but in certain intonations
his voice assumed a sharp and bitter character which did not belong to
the part.

They re-echoed in my ear, those tones, till late into the night, as I
went back and forth in my room. And with their help I at last succeeded
in digging up the recollection with which they belonged. I discovered
that we had been schoolmates, but he was many years younger than I; when
I was in the highest class, he was in one of the lowest.

       *       *       *       *       *

When I was in the top class of the school, I was one day standing at the
window toward the end of a lunch recess. Recesses at the school were an
especial abomination of mine; I could never find anything to do. I knew
that I did not know my lesson, and I could not set myself to going over
it. The slight vexation I felt about the coming lesson always faded
before a greater: a vexation about life, a gnawing premonition that the
days to follow would be as empty and meaningless as those which had
passed.

So I was walking back and forth with my hands in my jacket pockets, now
and then stopping at the window, which was open. As I stood there, my
attention was caught by a peculiar occurrence which was taking place
down in the yard just below the window. A little boy in one of the
lowest classes, a lad of ten or eleven, lay stretched on his back,
surrounded by a crowd of other boys in a ring. Their faces, most of them
at any rate, had the expression of evil curiosity which children and
uncultured people do not know how to conceal. A little broad-shouldered
fellow with high cheekbones, who gave the impression of being very
strong for his age, stood in the ring with a whip in his hand.

“You are my slave,” he said to the boy on the ground, “aren’t you? Say:
‘I am your slave!’”

“I am your slave,” answered the child without hesitating; which
indicated that this was not the first time he had said it.

“Get up,” ordered the other.

The boy got up.

“Imitate B., the way he looks when he comes into class!”

B. was a teacher who went on crutches. The boy went a couple of steps
outside the ring, which opened to give him space; then he came back on
the improvised stage and executed as he did so the movements of a man
walking on crutches. He did his part very well; the illusion was
complete, and the onlookers applauded, but the little actor stood there
with a serious expression. He had a pallid little face and black
clothes; perhaps he had just lost his father or mother.

“Laugh!” ordered the other with a light flick of the whip which he had
in his hand.

The boy tried to obey, but it did not come easily. The laugh sounded
forced at the start, but it was not long before he succeeded in
laughing himself into a genuine, quite natural guffaw, and with that he
turned toward his “master,” as if it was at him that he laughed. But the
latter already desired to have his slave show off new accomplishments.

“Say: ‘My farsher is a damned scoundrel!’”

The boy looked around the circle with a helpless glance. When he saw
that no one gave a semblance of wanting to help him, and that, on the
contrary, all stood in eager expectation of something really amusing, he
said as low as he dared:

“My farsher is a damned scoundrel.”

That drew unbounded applause.

“Laugh--Cry!”

The child began to simulate weeping, but with that he now came into the
mood he was ordered to imagine. The weeping stuck in his throat, and he
shed actual tears.

“Let him be!” said an older boy in the circle, “he’s crying in earnest.”

And with that the school bell rang.

       *       *       *       *       *

Some days afterwards he ran past me on the way from school. I noticed
that his jacket was ripped open in the back.

“Wait a bit!” I said to him, “your jacket has split open in the back.”

“No,” he said, “it hasn’t split open, they have cut it open with a
penknife.”

“Have they dirtied your book for you, too?” I asked.

“Yes, they’ve laid it in the gutter.”

“Why are they so mean to you?”

“I don’t know. They are stronger than I am.”

He knew of no other reason. But of course that was not the only one;
they must have found something in him that irritated them. I saw it in
him that he was not like the others. The exceptional, the divergent
always irritates children and mobs. A school-boy’s eccentricities are
punished by the teacher with a well-intended monition or a dry satiric
smile; but by his comrades they are punished with kicks and cuffs and a
bloody nose, with a torn jacket, a cap carefully laid under a
rain-spout, and his best book thrown into the gutter.

Well, he is an actor now; that was surely his natural predestination. He
now talks from the stage to a large public. It would be strange if
sometime he did not make his way; I believe he has talent. Perhaps he
will gradually transform his peculiarity to a pattern, according to
which others try to conform as to an inoffensive regular verb.




SIGNY


Signy was a little girl about as old as I, with a pink dress and a pink
ribbon in her hair. Her hair was dark, with curly locks, and she had
dark blue starry eyes with long lashes. She was not at all angelic. I
didn’t care a great deal for angels, perhaps in especial because they
always had fair hair. I had fair hair myself at that time, like most
children, and light hair wasn’t much, I thought.

But I thought an awful lot of Signy. I could go about thinking of her
for whole days. It was not seldom that she did something naughty, which
I was blamed for, and sometimes I myself took the blame voluntarily. I
cared no less for her on that account, but only wished that she would do
more naughty things and I get the blame for them. But what was that bit
of deviltry she hit upon? Let me think.--She ran off and hid somewhere
where we were forbidden to go, in some dangerous place where there might
be trolls and spooks. One time I remember clearly that she wheedled me
into playing with matches--playing with fire, the most dangerous and
most strictly forbidden thing there was. Didn’t she set fire to an old
dry bush in the garden? Why, to be sure she did; and I got the switch
from mother. Oh, how I cared for Signy. And sometimes she said words
that shouldn’t be said. The shivers went up and down my back, but I only
wanted her to say them again.

I don’t know just where she lived. It wasn’t in the same house as we
did; the other children whom I played with didn’t know her. But she must
have lived in the same street--I suppose--in a little home with a garden
surrounded by a fence. Or did she live in a garret cupola obliquely
across the street, with flowers on the window-sill?--I may just as well
say right out that she didn’t live anywhere. She existed only in my
imagination.

Signy was the first creation of my fancy, at least the first I can
recall. I was a good six or seven years old, and at the age (just as,
besides, at sixty, seventy or more) one often thinks aloud. To be brief,
I went about prattling to myself as I imagined things about Signy, and
one fine day it happened, of course, that my mother heard me.

“Listen to the boy,” she said to my father. “Listen how he goes around
talking to himself!”

And to me she said, “What is it you go around talking about? What are
you thinking about?”

Grown-ups have a terrible passion for asking children the most
inconsiderate questions. I ran off and hid.

Another day it was the same story, and still another day. Pain and
embarrassment, questions that couldn’t be answered.

My father said to me, “Other children talk to themselves up to four and
five years old; you are too big for that.”

I perceived that things couldn’t go on any longer so; something must be
done. It occurred to me that it was the sibilant sound that betrayed me:
Signy, Signy; that wouldn’t do. So I changed Signy’s name to Ida. In
that way I succeeded in having her sometimes in peace, but Ida never
really got the same power of enchantment over me as Signy. One fine day
we became enemies, I quarreled with her and called her a silly girl, and
perhaps I even went so far as to scratch her. I regretted it to be sure
but wouldn’t ask her pardon, and soon after I let her go to the deuce.
At the same time I learned to think in silence--and with a few
exceptions have continued to do so.

But whence had I got Signy? In the same house with us lived a little
girl, with whom I sometimes played. Her mother was in the ballet, and
once she dressed herself in one of her mother’s ballet skirts. But she
was neither Signy nor Ida, she performed no deviltries and had none of
Signy’s magic power over my heart. I must, then, at the age of seven
have created Signy as the German creates a camel: out of the depths of
my consciousness.

Then, too, I was predestined.

After that the years rolled on, and my genuinely literary impulses
arrived, only quite late. The first strong urge came when one of my
schoolmates--it was the present Professor Almqvist at the Caroline
Institute--during a lesson in Mother Tongue declaimed with powerful
effect Viktor Rydberg’s “Flying Dutchman.” I became wild with enthusiasm
and for months afterwards dreamed of nothing else than being able at
some period in the remote future to write something equally fine.

So far I haven’t succeeded, but why should one give up hope?




A MASTERLESS DOG


A man died, and after he was dead no one looked after his black dog. The
dog mourned him long and bitterly. He did not, however, lie down to die
on his master’s grave; possibly because he did not know where it was;
possibly, too, because he was at bottom a young and happy dog, who
considered that there was still something left for him in life.

There are two kinds of dogs: dogs that have a master, and dogs that have
none. Outwardly the difference is not material; a masterless dog may be
as fat as others, often fatter. No, the difference lies in another
direction. Mankind is for dogs the infinite, providence. To obey a
master, to follow him, rely upon him--that is, so to speak, the meaning
of a dog’s existence. To be sure, he has not his master in his thoughts
every minute of the day, nor does he always follow close at his heels.
No, he often runs about of his own accord with business-like intent,
sniffs around the corners of houses, makes alliance with his kind,
snatches a bone, if it comes in his way, and concerns himself about
much. Yet on the instant that his master whistles, all this is out of
his canine head more quickly than the scourge drove the hucksters out of
the temple, for he knows that there is but one thing he must attend to.
So forgetting his house-corner and his bone and his companions, he
hurries to his master.

The dog whose master died without the dog’s knowing how, and who was
buried without the dog’s knowing where, mourned him long; but as the
days passed and nothing occurred to remind him of his master, he forgot
him. He no longer perceived the scent of his master’s footsteps on the
street where he lived. As he rolled about on a grass plot with a
comrade, it often happened that a whistle pierced the air, and in that
instant his comrade had vanished like the wind. Then he pricked up his
ears, but no whistle resembled his master’s. So he forgot him, and he
forgot still more: he forgot that he had ever had a master. He forgot
that there had ever been a time when he would not have regarded it as
possible for a dog to live without a master. He became what one would
call a dog that had seen better days, though it was in the inner meaning
of the expression, for outwardly he got along fairly well. He lived as a
dog does live: he now and then stole a good meal in the square, and got
beaten, and had love affairs, and lay down to sleep when he was tired.
He made friends and enemies. One day he thoroughly thrashed a dog that
was weaker than he, and another day he was badly handled by one that was
stronger. Early in the morning one might see him run out along his
master’s street, where out of habit he mostly continued to resort. He
ran straight forward with an air of having something important to attend
to; smelt in passing a dog that he met, but was not eager to follow up
the acquaintance; then continued his journey; but all at once sat down
and scratched himself behind the ear with intense energy. The next
moment he started up and flew right across the street to chase a red cat
down into a cellar window; whereupon, re-assuming his business manner,
he proceeded on his way and vanished around the corner.

So his day was spent. One year followed close in the track of another,
and he grew old without noticing it.

Then there came at last a gloomy evening. It was wet and cold, and now
and then there came a shower. The old dog had been all day on an
expedition down in the city. He walked slowly along the street, limping
a little; a couple of times he stood still and shook his black hide,
which with the years had become sprinkled with gray about the head and
neck. According to his wont he walked and sniffed, now to right, now to
left. He took an excursion in at a gateway, and when he came out had
another dog in his company. Next moment came a third. They were young
and sportive dogs that wanted to entice him to play, but he was in a bad
humor, and furthermore it began to sleet. Then a whistle pierced the
air, a long and sharp whistle. The old dog looked at both the young
ones, but they paid no attention; it was not one of their masters that
whistled. Then the old masterless dog pricked up his ears; he felt all
at once so strange. There was a fresh whistle, and the old dog sprang
irresolutely first to one side, then to the other. It was his master
that whistled, and he surely had to follow! For the third time someone
whistled, sharply and persistently as before. Where is he then, in what
direction? How could I have been separated from my master? And when did
it happen, yesterday or day before yesterday, or perhaps only a little
while ago? And what did my master look like, and what sort of smell had
he, and where is he, where is he? He sprang about and sniffed at all the
passers-by, but none of them was his master, and none wanted to be. Then
he turned and bounded along the street; at the corner he stood still and
looked around in all directions. His master was not there. Then he went
back down the street at a gallop; the mud spattered about him and the
rain dripped from his fur. He stood at all the corners, but nowhere was
his master. Then he sat down on his haunches at a street crossing,
stretched his shaggy head toward heaven, and howled.

Have you ever seen, have you ever heard such a forgotten, masterless
dog, when he stretches his neck toward heaven and howls, howls? The
other dogs slink softly away with their tails between their legs; for
they cannot comfort him and they cannot help him.




STORIES BY
SIGFRID SIWERTZ




THE LADY IN WHITE


The little town slept in the noonday sunlight. Even the flowers leaned
slumberously against the lowered blinds of the open windows. Not a human
being remained in the courthouse square. Down at the harbor it was
equally quiet. A little beyond the big bridge lay a lumber barge with
limp sail. It seemed that it would be hours before she could get in.

From a dressing room of the bath-house came a middle-aged man of rather
spare figure, with a very white and delicate skin. He carefully hung his
eye-glasses on a nail, sat down on the sunny side of a bench, blinked at
the light and smiled to himself.

With that, there emerged into the vista toward the bay a veritable
walrus head; a coarse, hairy body shone through the green shimmering
water; and with several sharp, panting strokes the giant plunged forward
to the stairway, climbed up, and threw himself blinking upon the hot
bridge of the bath-house.

The small white-skinned man surveyed anxiously but with interest the
face of the other; the eagle nose, the bushy eyebrows, and the bristly
drooping mustache.

Where the deuce had he seen that face before?

Thereupon the walrus suddenly got up and stretched out his flipper.

“Why, devil’s in it if that isn’t little Modin!”

“Yes, I surely thought it was someone I knew. Good-day, Brother Axelson!
Lord! but it’s hard to recognize folks out of their clothes.”

“Aye, your own dog barks at you when you’re naked. I’m scared to death
of myself when I look at myself in a glass.”--Axelson surveyed his
new-found acquaintance with the critical look of a doctor.--“You seem to
be in good condition, Modin. Aren’t you going to plunge in?”

“No, thanks; I’m just enjoying a sun bath. I love to sit here like this
and take in the special bath-house smell of water and sun-steeped wood.
It has a holiday scent, don’t you think?--Well, do you know, I hadn’t a
notion it was in this town you were a doctor. That’s how folks lose
sight of each other.”

“Aye, I’ve stuck it out here these seventeen years now, you faithless
little devil.--And you’ve taken over your father’s big antiquarian book
business.”

“Oh, you know everything of course. The same horse’s memory as ever. I
taught a while, but that didn’t suit me at all. And so when my father
died”----

“Your catalog is always prized by connoisseurs.”

“The first assistant, old Salin, deserves the credit of that. He’s a
faithful martinet. It’s really the etchings and engravings that interest
me. There’s certainly a bad feeling among our regular customers because
I can’t let the finest things go away from me. I’m here to look at the
collection of the deceased banker. I was here once fifteen years ago,
while I was still a teacher. I didn’t suspect then either that you were
in the neighborhood. That visit is connected with an exquisite memory, a
fleeting yet pervasive experience, which I can only compare with the
fragrance of certain delicate perfumes.”

“You’re very keen about perfumes, my dear Modin; I remember that from of
old. Is it because the sense of smell is the weakest of the senses?”

Modin made the gesture of pushing up his absent spectacles.

“The weakest? On the contrary, smell is an extraordinarily fine sense.
We can distinguish the smallest nuances with it. The truth of the matter
is simply this, that we have only fixed a few of these nuances in
words.”

“True. But at any rate smell belongs to those senses which have least to
do with our thought.”

“It has infinitely much to do with all that lies above or below our
comprehension. It is in the highest degree a poetic sense, and I am
sorry for anyone who has a weak power of smell.”

Axelson turned over with a grunt so as to be burnt evenly all over.

“Well, my dear Modin, now for your experience! This isn’t ordinarily a
town for great experiences.”

“Very good. I came here by accident on a vacation trip. The ticket was
good for a longer journey, but the train stopped, it looked pretty, and
I got off. I left my knapsack at the hotel of Comfort and betook myself
to strolling along the select avenues of Peace.”

“Hm! Traveling is nothing but trying to get away from yourself with
lies.”

Modin seemed not to hear. He looked down into the water, which tossed up
a thousand splinters of sunlight.

“It was a royal day in June: lofty blue heavens, a light breeze,
transfiguration in the air. The gardens blossomed within their red
palings and the daws cried merrily around the high church steeple. It
was a day when one suddenly stands still in the blue shade, looks over
the crosses in the churchyard grass, and finds that even death is
gentle.”

“Hm, hm!”

“Well, so I ate a light dinner and adventured out along the road into
the wide land of summer leafage. I have never in my life seen so much
white bloom: hedge, sloe, apple, pear, cherry. I recall too a linden
avenue--the gravel was quite yellow with the rain of blossoms--and the
branches murmured solemnly.”

Axelson twisted himself over on his back again.

“Excuse me, my dear brother, but did you meet anything?”

“Everything and nothing, old friend. Without meeting a living soul I had
got out into a landscape of billowy grain fields and meadows with islets
of splendid old oaks. I walked along a blossoming ditch side and sat
down on a mossy stone close to a fence that ran around one of the knolls
of oak. It began to draw on a bit towards evening. The light had not yet
the garish colors of sunset; it was merely a thought more golden than
before. And in the low, warm light the green of the fields took on a
full-toned richness, a vehement intensity, which I shall never forget.
One speaks more often of an intense blue, but green too can take on such
a tone toward evening.

“I don’t know how long I had sat absorbed in all this, when for some
reason or other I turned around and on the other side of the
half-dilapidated fence discovered a young lady dressed in white who was
sitting on the same slope with me. She had let the book she had been
reading sink down on her knees and was gazing similarly out into the
wondrous living sea of color.

“At first I was almost taken aback at not being absolutely alone with my
emotion, which was so overpowering. But I soon came to myself. Very
good, thought I, at any rate there are at this moment no more than two
persons in the world, she and I. And--can you imagine it?--I, who am
ordinarily so shy and embarrassed in ladies’ society, began a
conversation: ‘Here we are sitting, we two, as _staffage_ for the
loveliest picture in the world.’ Words glided off my tongue of
themselves with a sort of gentle irresistibility which I have never felt
before or since. Perhaps my words fitted in in some way with what she
had just read in her book. She nodded with a slight smile: ‘Yes, it’s
wonderfully lovely.’ I leaned against the fence. ‘How insignificant is
all that _happens_ in life compared to such a moment of afternoon as
this?’ I said. ‘Even fate seems old and dusty, dusty with stage dust.’

“This was the introduction to a long conversation, at the beginning very
lively--a conversation about everything and nothing, of various colors,
of flowers and perfumes, of the flight of the swallows that wheeled
above our heads.”

Axelson pricked up his ears.

“Swallows,” he muttered; “then there was a barn or a dwelling-house in
the neighborhood.”

But Modin meanwhile heard only his own voice.

“Gradually the evening grew utterly quiet. I can still hear the soft
incessant rustling among the dry leaves heaped up in the ditch, a
rustling that told of minute unknown lives. And I can still see her
white skirt against the green hillside. Behind her the thick blossoms of
the hawthorn shone mysteriously under black, dead branches in the green
half-darkness of the oak wood. It was in truth a wood for the
imagination, a Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden. And the young woman I
talked with was Rosalind. I told her so, and she seemed to appreciate
it.

“Gradually our conversation grew more serious. We spoke of special,
intimate, personal memories and of our common interests in life. We
weighed life and death with swift, light sensitive words. What we said
was simple, frank, stamped with the most eager and honest wish to give a
living impression of our true character. It was a genuine contact of
soul with soul.

“Well, then the shadows of the trees on the field began to grow long and
contemplative, so we said good-bye. She picked up her book and gave me
her hand across the fence, for I had kept on standing on the other side.
‘Thanks and good evening,’ she murmured, ‘thanks and farewell.’ With
that she was gone into the woods. As for me, I went home to the hotel
and lay down in my clothes with my hands under my head, and there I lay
awake all night. That was the loveliest night of my life, I may tell
you. I felt myself marvelously cleansed and exalted, lonely and yet not
alone.--Next day I went on where my ticket was made out for. And that
was the whole thing.”

Axelson smiled:

“That wasn’t so terribly much.”

“It was much to me, my dear friend. You have, to be sure, a more robust
appetite.”

“But why the devil did you go on? Why didn’t you go back to your Forest
of Arden?”

Modin blinked at the sun with a smile of quiet fanaticism:

“I am no fool.”

“But it might have been something for your whole life.”

“As it is it’s something for my whole life, though of course you can’t
understand it. I dare affirm that never has a meeting of two persons
been so unconstrained, so deep and free. People talk of intuitive
thought, but here was an intuitive companionship without selfish purpose
or social barrier. Never a second time would such a flood of clear and
radiant ideas have surged through my consciousness. I tell you, the most
involved concatenation arranged itself automatically with lightning
speed like nodal figures at the stroke of the bow. And the memory of our
communion remains always equally fresh and pure just because I did not
wear it stale with further acquaintance. I don’t lie when I say that I
have lived in a sort of spiritual wedlock with that unknown woman. Who
can prove that the long years give more than one exquisite hour?
Humanity is so brittle and changeful that a long life together must
always be precarious. I have no idea whether she was married or became
married later. But it may very well be that I know that woman better
than her husband does. Strong impressions wear away. People can’t be
true to each other over a long period. For truth the great requisite is
freshness, immediateness. Truth must always be new, according to my
philosophy. Habit is truth’s worst enemy. How then can a lifelong
marriage be true?”

Axelson raised his eyebrows:

“Wait a bit. I must strike in and put a few questions before I get
angry. For instance, it would be nice to hear a closer description of
this lady with whom you have lived in such a remarkable wedlock.”

“Very good, I can answer you, since I’m fully armed against all
sarcasms. She was a woman of an altogether unusual feminine spirit. In
her archness there was a delicate acknowledgment of her womanly
limitations. And he who knows his bounds is already beyond them. She
had, perhaps, no thoughts that were actually her own, but she had a
quick, gentle receptivity which gave one the pleasant feeling that
everything fell upon good ground and bore fruit a hundredfold. I begot
thoughts and dreams upon her and enjoyed a sort of intellectual
fertilization.”

“But may I permit myself to doubt whether this glorified bridal mood
really made such a permanent impression on the other person?”

“What right have you to do that?”

“Oh, one might suppose it was only for a moment that she reverted to the
usual flighty sentimentality which lies like a broken husk around a
woman’s realism. The realism is genuine because it is rooted in
suffering and the hard limitations of nature. No, woman is not what the
bachelor thinks, not what either the ethereal or the crude bachelors
think. It may well be that her instinct was whispering all the time in
the depths: Look out for this man, because he is in reality a damned
little egoist.”

Modin did not seem to be impressed.

“That’s just like you, Axelson,” he muttered. “You were in the landscape
then, too. You were the corncrake. Just a harsh, obstinate noise.”

Axelson grew all the more contentious. He strode back and forth over the
hot bridge, unconsciously holding his fists where his trousers pockets
should have been. At last he halted in front of Modin:

“My dear brother, we have come into a condition of moral nakedness.
Permit me to be wholly frank. It looks from your body as if you had
never tried a tussle with life. I take back the term bachelor, for, with
your pardon, there is more of the old maid about you. Yes, don’t be
angry. But, you see, you keep irritating me damnably with your misuse of
the word marriage. For me marriage is a deep word, deeper even than the
word love. Marriage is something big, hard; even rough, if you like. It
is brimmed with sweetness and suffering and bitter necessity as
inescapable as the fact that you as a little delicate creature have lain
crumpled up in your tortured mother’s body. One may say in a certain
manner that a fleeting, loose relation is purer and finer than marriage,
but that is a desertion from reality, an unorganic arabesque, a petty
splendor. Marriage is an heroic word. Yes, because man and woman must
inflict heavy suffering upon each other. Sex, which frets them both,
must at certain times be felt as a curse. Between even the best and most
sober couples there are times of despair and hate. There is a disease of
hatred which is inborn in man. But still it is great to endure together.
And an honest and deep despair is something quite different from a
little cold and limp aversion without marrow in its bones. Everything
that’s honest, everything that doesn’t falsify the fundamentals of life,
has a worth, let it look as devilish bitter as it may.”

Modin looked away, troubled by the other’s confidence.

“My dear friend, I haven’t desired to hear all this. From your
experience you will hardly succeed in making an apology for marriage.”

Axelson gave a jump.

“On the contrary, you little idiot, my marriage is an uncommonly good
one. We have five children and are inseparable till death. I tell you
this: Cut out woman from your life and you are only half a man! But
that’s enough of this. I’m now--deuce take it!--roasted through. Shall
we get dressed?”

“All right.”

Axelson dove into his cabin. But he had scarcely got on his shirt and
trousers before he came rushing into Modin’s compartment.

“Listen! Excuse a question. You were telling about an avenue of lindens
and a grove of oaks. Do you happen to remember anything more definite
about the road out?”

“I don’t know of what use all this is. For the matter of that I remember
less about localities than of my own feelings.”

“Come, try now, or I’ll think you are tricking me.”

“I’ve a notion that I passed over a little bridge and under a high red
shaky gable, that somehow made me think of Almkvist’s story, _The Mill_.
That was surely just before my digression.”

Axelson’s eyes gleamed.

“My good fellow, you must have taken a remarkable circuit, because the
mill lies just two and a half minutes’ journey outside the town. Do you
by any chance remember a giant oak almost dead, which stood down on the
slope away from the others?”

“Yes, I think I do.”

“Good, good! Then I may tell you that about a hundred yards from the
place of your meeting stood a dwelling-house, though you could not see
it; an ordinary, white-plastered, fire-insured, fairly well mortgaged,
decent two-story house with young folks and servants and a croquet
ground. So the wonderful loneliness didn’t amount to much.”

Modin carefully tied his necktie.

“You’re making a fantastically vain attempt to rob me of my illusions.”

“Just one more question: Do you remember something special in the white
lady’s appearance?”

“By something special you mean of course a blemish. Yes, I was really
fascinated by a little scar she had on her forehead. It was a very
decorative scar, because it drew up one eyebrow a trifle and at first
glance gave her a lively and somewhat mocking appearance.”

Axelson’s whole countenance glowed.

“Splendid, splendid! I sewed that scar together. I know as much as you
like of the lady in question. The doctor is the whole town’s father
confessor.”

Modin made a gesture of refusal with both hands.

“I wish to know absolutely nothing, I beg you, nothing!”

But Axelson was merciless.

“This much you must know at any rate, that she got the scar when she
fell off a bicycle. And that she lived with her parents in the
white-plastered two-story house. And that she worked at the post office
from nine to one. And furthermore that she had probably just been
betrothed in that very dress. You see that I know my community.”

“But all this is most uninteresting, my dear Axelson.”

“Not altogether, my dear brother, not altogether.”

Axelson dived back into his cabin.

The two men were soon ready. Despite the summer heat Modin was attired
in black, and very jauntily; Axelson on the other hand wore a gray check
suit. The walrus looked very masterful and imposing when he was dressed.
One understood directly that he amounted to something in his community.
He stood forth on the quay and slapped the other man on the shoulder.

“Hope you’ll do me the honor of eating dinner with me.”

Modin as a matter of fact was much disinclined but did not see how he
could refuse. Axelson lived a little way out of the town. They passed
through an avenue of lindens. The doctor from time to time ogled his
friend sidewise. Modin walked slowly and often looked about him. He
seemed irresolute. They passed a bridge and the high red gable of a
mill. They branched off on a somewhat narrower by-road by the side of
the pond. They rounded a hillside with oaks and soon stood before a
fruit orchard, behind which rose a white-plastered two-story house.
Axelson hastened to open a gate at the gable end.

“Be so good as to come in, my dear brother.”

Modin hesitated, paled and grew faint, but Axelson took him by the arm
and drew him hastily along.

Up on the veranda stood a robust lady of middle age, and on the lawn
played several bare-legged boys.

Modin just saved himself from falling on the steps. He looked toward the
edge of the woods with a helpless glance. But his host introduced him
with a grim quiver of the mustache.

“Doctor Amadeus Modin--my wife.”

With that Axelson’s commanding voice rang out across the lawn, “Come
children, aren’t you going to say how-do-you-do to uncle?”

The five boys came forward and bowed in turn. It was agony to Modin. He
sank down on a sofa and cast an anxious sidelong glance over their
close-cropped heads at the lady of the house. She was still dressed in
white, and the scar over her eyebrow was still visible. It became her as
well as ever, though in a different way. Her figure was full but firm.
She had in her something of the matron, in the proud Roman significance
of the word. They were a seasoned and vigorous couple, she and her
husband. A noticeably stern matrimonial resemblance had arisen between
these two persons, whom it never would have occurred to him to associate
with each other. Their mouths had the same expression of sharp humor.
Two veterans who had fought their battles side by side, they might have
been marching along together for many years.

All of this passed like lightning through poor Modin’s brain. He no
longer believed actually that he knew more about the lady in white than
did her husband.

Axelson was on the watch when his wife went in to arrange about dinner
and pounced on his guest.

“Beware of white ladies, dear brother. So far it seems that she doesn’t
recognize you. But at dinner I may perhaps make her memory clearer. It’s
uncanny when the dead come to life, eh?”

And with that if the brutal dog didn’t go on to hum:

    “Look out, my boy, look out, look out!
     ’Tis the White Lady beyond a doubt.”

He then hurried in for a moment after his wife, presumably to order the
wine. But Modin used the moment. He had no wish whatever to be
recognized by the bride of his dreams. On the contrary he seized his
hat, bounded away over cucumber frames and strawberry patches, and swift
as the timid doe threw himself among the sheltering trees of the wood.




LEONARD AND THE FISHERMAN


After a dinner consisting of an anchovy and four cold potatoes Leonard,
a needy artist in wood-cuts, wandered about aimlessly through the city.
It was a May day of the grand and dangerous sort. Over the heavens
voyaged festal white clouds of giant size, bulging with undefined
expectations. And the cool, prickly wind whistled with seductive mockery
of all that lay behind the horizon: explorations, adventures, visions of
beauty. It was a day of lightness and oppression; of futile longing for
action; of cold, far-reaching perfidy; and deep, exhausting unrest. How
can the breast expand to bursting and at the same time feel so horribly
empty? thought Leonard. Spring is the time when we not only make solemn
confession but are merged into a new vital existence; whence, then, in
the name of all the devils, is this emptiness, this lack in the midst of
plenty, this criminal tendency to put all the glory behind one as
quickly as possible?

Brooding painfully over these things, Leonard reeled about half blind
and with aching eyes through Gustavus Adolphus Place. Finally he
succeeded in making a resolution: to go down to the River Terrace and
see whether the apple trees had begun to blossom yet.

It proved that they had not gone beyond the budding stage.

Leonard then dragged himself up to the railing and stood there a long
while under the branches of a large poplar, watching the Northstream
tumble its waters between the piers.

There is a certain immobility in the midst of motion in rushing water.
The same foaming, roaring wave stays there hour after hour, year after
year, indicating a stone in the uneven bed of the torrent. Leonard
sought to calm himself with philosophizing over this wave. So does life
go on through its forms, he thought. Yonder fettered wave corresponds to
the ripple of a flower petal, the curve of a chin. Then some spring day,
maybe, the stone is undermined, an unknown obstruction in the furrow of
the stream of life is cleared away, and the wave is transformed, the
flower petal changes, the curve of the chin becomes different and
softer.

Leonard was not the first man who had philosophized above the running
stream. But he found no rest thereby. His thoughts merely played on the
surface; they served only to sharpen his feeling of uncertainty. The
fettered wave irritated him with its feeble trembling, its futile
tossing. The continuous roar was like an indefinite warning, a dark
threat. A warning of what? A threat of what? Ah, thou wonderful month of
May!

Leonard clenched his empty fists and sank down on a bench in complete
despair.

With that his eye fell on a little old man of the fisher trade. He was
smoking in great repose a short pipe, muttering to himself, and picking
at his clasp-knife, which he had taken apart and hung on the railing to
dry. Leonard observed him a long time with secret envy. In winter it’s
all very fine to be young, he thought, but in spring a man ought to be
as old as possible--or at least to have rheumatism that lets up in fair
weather. He got up laboriously and pushed his way to the fisherman.

“What have you to say to a day like this?” he grumbled.

“Eh, well, just that I think there are bream under the bridge piers
today,” the old man said reflectively and puffed out a little blue
cloud.

Leonard was struck by the answer. He began a long conversation with the
fisherman, whose name was Lundstrom. The best fishing was spring and
autumn, he learned. It was mostly smelt and bream. Perhaps a perch now
and again. And before Christmas everybody got a burbot or two in
eel-pots a little further up the Malar.

He doesn’t make any too much, thought Leonard. But he doesn’t talk about
his fishing in the surly tone that poor men mostly use in growling about
their scanty earnings. He is proud of his catches, he fondles his
tackle, and his eyes rest confidently and patiently on the water. I
gather from that that he is a true fisherman, which a man isn’t very
likely to become unless he has left much behind him.

This quiet fisher person had a strange and enigmatical charm for
Leonard. The old man had pulled together the large iron rings, and
already the dip-net was swinging festively at its gallows on his low
green-painted craft. There was only the grapnel to be pulled in.
Thereupon Leonard reached over the railing and pled touchingly to be
taken along for once.

Yes, that would be all right enough.

The boat was first hauled along the stone quay to the bridge and then
out with the stem set straight into the roaring whirlpool. A few quick,
well-directed oar-strokes, and they floated calmly in the back eddy from
the nearest pier of the bridge with the foaming surge to right and left
and the dusky arches of the bridge ringing and singing over their heads.
There was a dizziness in the suction between the bridge piers, a
sensation of rapid movement and yet of rest.

Lundstrom made fast to a ring and sat down at the crank by means of
which he lowered and raised his net.

“Now the job is to sink the net straight down,” he said; “and to do that
one must manage so that it is half taken by the current and half by the
back eddy. Perhaps the gentleman will give a pull at the oars. There,
bring her in a little and it’ll be fine!”

Leonard brought the boat in and the net descended solemnly.

The old man sank into meditation for a while, and this was a good time
to study him. He was by no means ill to look at.

Why should the upper classes be condemned to appear correct and banal?
Why should fine folk go about as a monstrosity to every practised and
sensitive eye? Look at Lundstrom’s jacket here! The sun and rain of all
seasons has given it the most delicate shade of green. His hat with its
admirable patina might be of bronze. And his trousers!--what a
combination of characteristic wrinkles, telling of age, experience and
strife well sustained. What a treasure for an artist in wood-cuts!
Lundstrom’s custom had grown as one with him. It was no wretched
accident. Is there anything more agonizing than a tired, grumpy
scarecrow that peers out of a brand new summer suit, glittering with
naïve optimism? Or red-cheeked, pious rusticity sewed up in cautiously
gray, pessimistic duds from a distant, smoky, rain-dripping, overcrowded
factory district? But out of Lundstrom’s worn collar grew a face covered
with moss-gray stubble over a network of friendly wrinkles and furrows.
And out of the stubble shot up a two-story nose with room for many a
pinch of reflective snuff. Large noses may be either volcanic or placid.
Lundstrom’s was placid. It separated genially but firmly two small gray,
liquidly bright eyes, which never seemed to have fastened on anything
that burned too hot, never to have stared at anything helplessly, never
to have wavered anxiously about over empty, exhausting horizons.

Lucky man, sighed Leonard. He sits peacefully under the voyaging clouds,
in the midst of the Northstream swollen with spring freshets he sits
peacefully at his crank. He is on the far side of indefinite
expectations and adventure and drifting about in the inane. He has
happily left his future behind him.

“But for heaven’s sake it must surely be time for you to haul up.”

“No hurry, no hurry,” opined Lundstrom, who nevertheless began gently to
turn the crank. The net came up with a good sediment of silver-white
splashing smelts.

With a quiet pursing of the lips the old man emptied his cargo into the
fish-well.

Next time there was a bream, a plump rascal.

Beyond the bridge railing and the stone barrier over by Gustavus
Adolphus Place it was already black with people. A little boy in a blue
embroidered blouse tried very cleverly to spit on Leonard’s hat. But
Leonard began to find the folk up there altogether ephemeral, them and
the whole muddle of palace, Parliament House, churches, theatres,
prisons and banks which chance had collected along the river; the river
which had run when there were only a few islands here inhabited by
fishermen, and which would continue to run when all the splendor was
dust again.

But Lundstrom, who grew cheerful with his good luck, began little by
little to express his opinion about one thing and another. It may as
well be said first as last that he regarded with slightly ironic
disapproval a good deal of the bustle up there in the city. Ministerial
crises, election campaigns, debates, law-suits, theatre intrigues, and
things of that sort struck him as mere nonsense.

“Folks babble and gad about so they get tired and cross,” he said. “They
ought to fish a little more than they do. All the ministers ought to
come down here and pull the net a couple of times a week. And the party
leaders and the soloists and the other star actors as well. That would
make them really good. And if there wasn’t room for them all here, let
the government hire a big boat and carry them all out to the coast. It’s
right astonishing how folks can work things out when they are together
in a boat. And likewise how it can thaw one’s head to sit and look at a
dipsy. I don’t know how it is, but there’s surely something specially
particular about water.

“Yes, I need only think about myself,” continued Lundstrom. “How should
I have ever got straight without this here boat and net? It doesn’t help
how quiet a man is; he gets stage fright sometimes just the same, in my
opinion. First night is first night, and that’s just how it feels in the
pit of the stomach many weeks ahead. The gentleman may imagine that it’s
a job to turn a wild and desolate wood into a fine castle hall with roof
chandeliers and a marble floor and pillars and pictures and chairs. And
all that must be done in less time than the gentleman needs to empty a
glass of punch. It was specially hard with that fellow Shakespeare, who
was hard on account of all his scenes. Imagine if a piece of cliff
scenery should come dancing down into the middle of a little petite
French boudoir, as they call it. That would look fine! Aye, if a man
went off and worried over all the misfortunes that could happen, it was
a good thing to have fishing to turn to. Down here it was as if all a
man’s troubles ran off him. Lord! a man would think, it isn’t the only
thing in life if a piece of building should go wrong up in that play-box
there. Yes, I’ve been in the theatre line over fifty years, I have. So a
man has his memories. ‘A Traveling Troupe’ was a crazy piece, for there
a man had to turn the wings hindside front, as the gentleman should
know, so that only the gray cloth could be seen from the hall. I believe
I know all the fine lines by heart from that day to this, and Hamlet too
at a pinch. One time Yorick’s skull was to have been brought out. The
public got impatient and began to cough and stamp. But we couldn’t raise
the curtain for the church-yard scene, because Hamlet had to have the
skull to make his speech about. There was the skull of a man who had
killed his wife and child and one and a half bailiffs; we had got the
loan of it from the Charles Institute. We hunted and hunted. At last I
came upon the skull in a trunk. The actor who was playing Hamlet was so
glad that he promised to give me a supper at Stromsholm. He kept his
word, too: steak and vegetables and fizzy pearls. Afterwards it came out
that somebody had hid the skull on purpose. It was somebody who wanted
to have the rôle and was nearly bursting with jealousy. He certainly
needed to get out and fish a little, eh?

“Well, that was Hamlet. Afterwards I went over to the opera. I didn’t
regret it; music suited me better. That comes about as a man gets older,
you see. A man gets tired of the many words. But with music one can
think anything at all. I was with the opera upwards of twenty years, up
to last Christmas--Aye, aye, a man gets old.... Well, so now I get to
amuse myself with the boat here and tramping for the organ at Jacob’s
Church. Yes, that affair of the organ tramping is a special particular
story which we shan’t talk over now,” said Lundstrom, who seemed to
touch with some shyness his transition to the churchly vocation.

Hereupon the old man again grasped his crank, and up came another
splendid batch of fat breams. With friendly, approving comment he let
them vanish into the well.

Look here, today is turning out better than I supposed, thought Leonard,
who could hardly keep from rubbing his hands. My life and trade seem
really prosperous from the frog’s-eye view of this old fisherman.

But Lundstrom cast a knowing, sidelong look at him.

“No, I steal up into the theatre garret sometimes and hear a little of
this world’s music yet, as old as I am. Though it doesn’t give me
sleepless nights any more, you see. A man sleeps well when he has a big
organ to turn to.”

Leonard smiled more broadly and sat quiet, struck by the old man’s
repose. This contented frog’s-eye view of the drama of life spread out
into a wider perspective than he had supposed at the start.

The old man pointed to a paper sticking out of the artist’s pocket.

“Should you perhaps care to look what they’re giving up there tonight?
‘Tristan and Isolde.’ Indeed! that’s a fine thing. Then I’ll go up a
while. You see I’ve been with them and set scenes for that opera, so
it’s an old acquaintance. Well, and so I’ll thank you for your help.
It’s past eight and that will have to be enough of the breams till
tonight.”

It was in fact drawing on towards evening. Heaven’s great voyaging
clouds had ceased to move, saturated with the newly-won warmth of the
light, and had sunk nearer to earth. In the stealthy silence of the
early twilight the roaring of the river grew suddenly stronger, and its
whirlpools more suckingly mysterious. It was evident that the spring day
had determined to show the last and most dangerous phase of its power.

But Lundstrom cast loose from the ring unconcernedly. His craft was
slung some fifty yards down with the surge but glided neatly into the
smooth water under the River Terrace, where it was moored at its usual
place.

It did not occur to Leonard to say good-bye. And yet as he went up the
granite steps he felt that now he was passing out of the worthy
Lundstrom’s perspective. Here ashore the fisherman’s power of giving
certitude was no longer the same.

No, for up on the bridge went Woman. Nothing could save one from her.
Ah, this delicate shiver in the air, this trembling in the nerves of the
invisible which sent its waves through coat and Sunday paper straight
into one’s heart! The restlessness of the day had deepened to a livelier
and more dangerous poison. That which in the morning was a sick longing
for distant horizons--what was it towards evening but the erotic urge?

Under the low rosy clouds too went Woman, she who grows with the shades
so as with night to overshadow the world.

A poor artist’s situation was again near to desperation.

The enviable Lundstrom was to go in a back way and listen to ‘Tristan
and Isolde.’ Leonard followed him shyly and irresolutely to the stage
entrance of the opera house. In his eyes lay a prayer not to be left
alone in the midst of the dreadful spring evening. Lundstrom did not
fail to see the young man’s helplessness.

“The gentleman may surely come with me,” he said. “I’m a good friend of
the porter from forty years back. He gets a bream or so now and then.
Just come along!”

Leonard passed a gray head which nodded at a rectangular peep-hole. He
then went into a long dark corridor, where a squire with brown kilt and
broadsword stood joking at a telephone. Next there were some steps,
where Leonard continually had to stand and wait for the puffing
Lundstrom. All was silent and empty here. They met only a fireman and a
scene-shifter in a blue coat, who called Lundstrom “uncle.”

Now a warm, dusky odor was perceptible and a muffled buzzing and
mumbling, which seemed to come from the very walls. That must be the
orchestra, which was tuning up somewhere in the depths. But Lundstrom
cautiously pushed up an iron door and they came out on the first gallery
of the stage. Down in the great cluttered space below ran workmen
arranging the ship’s deck for the first act, and some of the chorus men
stood in a laughing group waiting to take their places.

Lundstrom cast a searching glance below.

“Look at that!” he muttered with some disapproval; “they have made the
tent smaller. In my time it ran out to the fifth plank, mark H.”

It was still too noisy and disturbed where they were, so they went up by
a narrow ladder to the second gallery. Lundstrom sat down on a mighty
stage dragon of lath and plaster which was hoisted up in the back-scene,
and Leonard leaned against a great machine with handles, hexagonal
cylinders and heavy felt hammers.

“The old stage thunder,” whispered Lundstrom. “They have new, better
thunder now that goes by electricity.”

There was a fantastic play of light and shadow up through the enormously
high vault of the stage, which extended over their heads with five more
galleries. The electric footlights below threw splintered rays up
through the grilled flooring of the galleries, until the gleams were
lost in an incredible labyrinth of ropes, weights and pulleys. The whole
was like a giant skeleton, a fantastic loom.

This is where they weave dusty lies, thought Leonard, who found the rear
view of the drama grotesque and oppressive, so that he almost began to
long for the streets again. People must love illusion astoundingly, if
it can be made big business to such an extent.

But with this the trickling tones of the orchestra tuning up were
suddenly silent, and after a few moments the prelude broke out with a
voice of powerful earnestness. A thrill passed through Leonard’s nerves
and in a moment he was tense and expectant. Like a living, overwhelming
stream of actuality the music burst forth through all the dusty rubbish
of illusion.

Now the curtain was raised and the human voices came up, gushed up.
There was the sailor’s gay song of yearning on his billowy journey to
the land of King Mark, Isolde’s wildly surging hate and suffering,
Tristan’s timid, rock-firm defiance of death. So it went on to the magic
potion and the helpless, the irresistible love cry which is lost in
endless jubilation.

The curtain fell again.

Leonard looked at Lundstrom, wondering what he could possibly fish up
from such a stream. The old man seemed tranquil and unmoved, as he sat
on the scaly dragon and held in his mouth his unlighted pipe.

“Now they’ve got to hurry down there,” he said, “for now the ship must
become a park.”

Threads began to move on the giant loom, blocks creaked and giant
fabrics gave forth dust. With that the park was there, though it looked
very strange from the back, and the curtain solemnly came aloft once
more.

The two sat squatting again at the brink of the great music torrent.
Heavy, bottomless well of tone--dark purple, restlessly driving waves,
which now and then break into foam with a cry:

    “O thou spirit’s
     Highest, maddest
     Exquisite burning joy!”

Love rescued from the cold glance of day--night without
morning--yearning for death--the world’s redemption through passionate
ecstasy!

    “Quiet our trembling,
     Sweetest death,
     With yearning awaited,
     O love-blent Death!”

And so on to the end--the sinister dawn with the chill spectres of day,
the discovery, the crossed blades and Tristan’s wound.

Such things are too much for a poor lonely and hungry artist on a lovely
evening in May.

“The deuce is in it,” he muttered, “the very deuce! Why after that
should a poor devil sit and carve in wood?”

But Lundstrom sat with his chin on his hand and gazed out of the
distance, paying hardly any attention to Leonard’s violent gestures. The
old man’s shadow was outlined on a blue background, large, vague, as
though ready to merge in the dimness of the thousand recesses around it.

Leonard was no longer interested in him, he would have preferred to be
alone. Pshaw! the poor old codger hasn’t a notion of what is seething
down there, he thought. He’s just moidering around with old stage
properties. But thereupon Lundstrom lifted his gray head and said
something which indicated that he nevertheless could fish memories out
of the stream of tone.

“Sometimes when I sit here I get to be with them that lie out in the
church-yard,” he muttered. “Wife and children and friends. It’s as if
the music rinsed one out inside. Everything gets clearer and one sees
that what’s been is still.”

“I see only what will never come to pass in life for my part, and that’s
a cursed lot different,” burst out Leonard with greater bitterness than
he himself realized. In his heat he was constrained to use strong words.
But in reality he felt the beginning of a relaxation and release.

Then came the third act.

Tristan lies in feverish dreams by the shore of the sea. He waits for
his Isolde. But when she finally comes, he, in the wild joy of
desperation, tears open his unhealed wound and bleeds to death before it
is vouchsafed him to kiss her. So, too, it had to be. Passion has
overleaped all human bounds. It is a cool, wondrous alleviation that
finally his blood may pour forth with the poison of the potion, with all
the endless, tempestuous, lamenting, jubilating desire.

They got up softly and pressed out through the glowing dust over mighty
craters of tone.

Outside, the spring night was cool. Leonard grew pale and his eyes
shone.

“In old times people opened their veins,” he muttered, “but this is a
much finer way.”

He edged hurriedly across Gustavus Adolphus Place and took his stand at
the barrier by the river. The moon hung thin as a flower petal up in the
greenish-blue heavens, whose color seemed to consist only of coolness
and depth. The river rolled along pale mother-of-pearl dust.

Here assuredly some one passed one day in May and was empty and sad and
full of fiery moods, thought Leonard. But now he has loved and died with
Tristan, so that now he hardly touches the ground, and everything is
silent and all the world appears as a cool and lovely memory. Yes, what
have I, Leonard the artist in wood-cuts, not experienced, seeing that I
stand here with the fate of a mighty heart behind me! In this hour I
feel love as a great enrapturing memory, something that lives in my soul
but is not able to choke my freedom. I have come to drink the potion
without its fatal poison. Verily art can give appeasement even to the
most burning Now. In art is freedom!

Leonard had almost wholly forgotten his fisherman. But now he noted that
the old man stood steadily beside him at the rampart. His face appeared
smaller than before in the moonlight. Despite the two-story nose and the
gray stubble it was almost like a child’s. But it had always the same
stamp of repose. It peered out into the spring night, as if all this
illimitable canopy was a friendly home for brisk old folks. Naturally,
thought Leonard, the whole world is for him just a beautiful dream of
once on a time. The moon, the trees, and the rushing water here, all are
his memory, all have flowed into a great certitude, all are his
innermost self, as memories are.

Leonard gave the old man his hand:

“Thanks for your help!” he said.

“Aye, thanks and good-bye, then. Now I must down there again a bit, I
suppose. Fishing is best at night.”

Thereupon Lundstrom went to his net. But Leonard strolled without
uncertainty or restlessness up to his den on the crest of South
Stockholm. His thoughts played meanwhile with the same daring little
speech:

Why should infinity make us homeless? he said to himself. Infinity has
its middle point somewhere. Well, and I, woodcut artist Leonard, am
sitting in the centre. Should I not then with a good heart cut at my
boxwood blocks?




STORIES BY
VERNER VON HEIDENSTAM




WHEN THE BELLS RING


In southern Småland, just where the stony road to Scania branches into
several village paths and a muddy slope leads up to the parish church,
there stood a mill, painted red and with the largest wings that anyone
had ever seen in all that region. The miller was dead long since. His
widow, named Kerstin Bure, a woman who in her childhood had seen happier
days and eaten from shining plates of pewter, managed the mill after her
own fashion. She never made mention of her birth or of the love-dealings
that had enticed her from a well-to-do pastor’s home to the narrow
tower-room of a miller, where the axle-beam groaned directly over her
sleeping-place; but then she did not speak of other things either. The
husband had been too poor to possess a cottage of his own and had
instead built a chimney straight through the roof of the mill. There
year after year, with her sewing in her hand, the wife had silently
continued to watch the work of the men. If at any time she was asked for
advice, she answered preferably with a nod or a shake of the head, and
she seldom went away further than a stone’s throw from the mill. In
figure she was tall and slim with delicate hands, and her face under the
starched cap, which was always of the same invariable whiteness,
reminded one of Mary Magdalen’s on the picture at the altar, though it
was more yellowed and shrunken. She never took women into her service,
and so women in particular accustomed themselves to passing her in
silence. They did not rightly know whether she was proud or meek, but
most of them thought that she might well be both. When the sexton
appeared with his beadsmen and in his best Sunday attire to solicit the
hand of this woman, who was already old and gray, she became quite
confused and abashed. She blushed to the roots of her hair and merely
shook her head.

One morning she found an infant boy on a heap of twigs by the spring,
and as no one knew anything about the parents, she took the little one
to her with great tenderness.

“Nobody can tell whether there lies in that heart good or evil seed,”
she said, “but the day may come when I am to try it. You shall be called
Johannes, because you are to become devout as an angel of God. I have
been sore afflicted, but for you I shall lay by a pretty penny, so that
your life-days may sometime counterbalance the heavy ones I have known.”

The boy grew up, and when he prepared for confirmation, he surprised
everybody by his pious and godly answers. With his glossy flaxen hair
hanging over his shoulders he afterwards sat by his foster-mother on the
mill steps in the bright midsummer evenings and read diligently in the
books that he had borrowed from the pastor of the congregation. They sat
always taciturnly and quietly, but sometimes he pointed out with his
finger some line that seemed to him more beautiful than the others and
read it softly aloud.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hay-ricks and meadows were sending out their perfume of harvest and
pasture, and so too, though withered, did the clover--or
trefoil-blossoms that lay forgotten here and there between the leaves of
the book as markers. Even late at night only a single star burned, but
that was large and radiant. Everywhere people were awake and talking,
and the cottage doors stood open.

Many whispered to one another a dark rumor of how the Swedish army had
been beaten at Poltava and that now the Danes were to land and complete
the entire overthrow of Sweden.

One Sunday night a rider stopped at the stairs of the mill and asked for
lodging.

Johannes looked doubtfully at his foster-mother and asked the stranger
whether he would not rather go on up the hill to the provost’s place.

“No,” he answered, “I want first to see tonight how the people are
getting on.”

He managed to get his horse into the walled passage under the mill and
then settled down quite contentedly among the others to a plate of
beer-soup and a loaf of black bread.

He had let his hair and his goat-like beard grow, so that he looked like
a common peasant, but sometimes he pulled his mouth toward his ears and
talked harshly in the broadest Scanian, and sometimes he squeezed up his
eyes and lamented in the most sentimental Smålandish. He kept awake all
night continuing his merry discourse. Once he took a piece of charcoal
and drew a speaking likeness of Johannes on the wall. A little later he
gave Kerstin Bure shrewd advice as to how she should grease the
mill-axle. Or he would sing psalms and polka-tunes, to which he himself
set the words. In the morning he took from his traveling-sack a suit
with bright soldier’s buttons. When Johannes and the old woman peeped
wonderingly through the shutters to see whither he went, he was already
standing in the church square, and there was such a clatter and hubbub
among the populace that it echoed for miles.

“That’s Mons Bock!” clamored the crowd. “That is our valiant General
Stenbock. If we have him with us, we’ll go out and fight for our
country, every one of us, father and son, so God help us!”

“Johannes,” said Kerstin Bure then to her sixteen-year foster-son, with
a hardness in her voice that he had never heard before, “you are meant
to keep devoutly to your books and some day wear a pastor’s surplice as
my sainted father did, but not to lose your blood in worldly feuds.
Stick your tinder-box and clasp-knife in your jacket and tie your
leather coat at your belt! Go then out into the woods and keep yourself
well hid there until we have peace in the land! Before that I do not
wish to see you again. Remember that! You hear now how the men shout on
the church square, but mayhap their mouths will soon be stopped with
black earth.”

He did as she bade him and wandered off into the woods by unknown paths.
The firs became gradually more bristling and dense, so that for a long
distance he had to push through backwards with the leather coat over his
face. In the evening he came to a wide fen, and far out at the rim of a
black lake lay an island overgrown with alders.

“There I’ll build my den,” he thought. But the quagmire of the swampy
fen which floated over the twofold bottom, and the dark water where not
a glimmer of daylight broke through, sank beneath his feet, until,
exhausted and half-asleep, he sat down on a ledge.

A rustling still sounded from the ridges of the wood, but the lake lay
quiet, and the little yellow reflections of the fluffy clouds soon stood
motionless. In the infinite distance beyond the mist of the fen a
goat-bell from time to time struck a few short, unresonant strokes. Two
herd-girls blew quaveringly on their cow-horns, and on the forgotten and
dilapidated sepulchre-mound in the dip of the valley the glow-worms
kindled their lanterns in the grass.

“Are you one of those that have run away from war service?” a voice
asked him, and when he looked up, a goat-girl was standing among the
juniper bushes, knitting. She appeared to be one or two years older than
he, and her leather boots hung on her back.

“That’s right enough; but now the fen bars my way, and berries and ferns
get to be scant fare after a while.”

“It must be you don’t know the woods. Nobody suffers want there. Since
my ninth year I’ve spent every summer up here in the wilds with my
goats. Trim and cut down a couple of fir saplings and tie them to your
feet with withes, and you can go on the quagmire wherever you like.
Thatch your hut with fir bark and make yourself fishinggear.”

She carefully pulled a long basting-thread from her jacket and tied to
it a pewter pin, which she had taken from her head-dress and bent into a
hook.

“Here you have a hook and line,” she said and continued on her way,
still knitting.

That night he did not much heed her advice, but when the sun again shone
into his eyes, he pulled out his knife.

As soon as he had trimmed himself a couple of skis of the sort she had
taught him to make, he betook himself out on the fen to the island. When
he stamped on the grass there, the whole island swayed like a soft
feather-bed, but he opined that this was good, because if there was
moisture in the ground, he would not need to go far to find angleworms.
Hardly, too, had he dug under the grass-roots with his fingers, before
he found abundance. To be sure, the fishing went badly at the start, but
after he had mystically laid two blades of sedge crosswise on the water,
it became at once a different affair. As he carried a tinder-box in his
jacket, it was an easy matter to broil his savory capture.

Afterwards he began to build his hut with such haste that he did not
give himself leisure to sleep in the bright summer nights. He
understood that it might easily tumble in on the swaying ground if he
made it too high. Therefore he built instead a low turf-thatched
roof-tree, under which he could not stand upright but had to creep.
Every morning he fetched from the shore trimmed saplings, twigs, and
pieces of fir bark. Finally he built a hearth of stones, where he let
the juniper twigs smoulder and glow all night to drive off the midges.
During his work he sometimes talked to himself half aloud, pretending
that he was bailiff over a whole gang of workmen, and he called the
island Wander Isle.

He met the goat-girl quite often. Her name was Lena. She went about with
her knitting, feeding her charges on clearings and meadows. She taught
him to set nooses and traps. Eventually they met every morning to see
whether the fortune of hunting had been favorable to them, and she made
him a good friend to all the wild animals.

“Did you see that gorgeous bird?” she asked, pointing to a blue-black
black-cock that roused the whole wood with his thunderous wing-beats.
“Him I call the Rich Bachelor of Vaxjö, for he asks neither after his
home or his relatives, but just sits at the tavern in his fine
dress-coat and smoothes his ruffles.”

“And just hark now!” she said one night when an owl hooted in the
ravine. “Him I call the Tax Collector, who, when he turns his head in
his white collar and rolls his red eyes or snaps his bill, frightens
both man and beast. But if it’s a question of the little white harmless
eggs in his own nest, then you’ll see. Then he has a father’s heart in
the right place.”

But about nothing did she know so many traditions as about the cranes.

“Never yet,” she said, “have I got to see the long-legged bald-headed
cranes when from their mossy retreats they set up their trumpeting and
hold their autumn assembly for taking flight. Round their camp they have
outposts that sit with a stone in their one uplifted claw, so that it
may tumble down and wake them if they fall asleep. But the most
wonderful thing is that then if any human being sees the ashen-gray
birds go up, he himself begins to flap with his arms and longs to be
able to fly with them, so high that the lakes below on the earth are
only like little shimmering water-drops.”

“I want to see the cranes,” answered Johannes.

“Perhaps you may get to see them in the autumn, but then you must first
teach yourself a great deal. First, you must be able to stand so quiet
that you look like a dry juniper bush, and to bend down so that you look
like a stone, and to lay yourself flat on the ground so that no one can
tell you from a pile of rotten twigs.”

“All that I shall try to teach myself, but you must never go on my
island. It isn’t the way you think there. I have a high fireplace and
hangings on the walls, and the floor between the rugs is so shining and
slippery that you can’t walk on it but have to crawl.”

The pretty stories he had read in the dean’s books ran in his memory,
and he wanted to show the girl that he was not inferior to her but could
in turn rouse her to wonder and curiosity.

“If you’ll let me get a sight of that house, I’ll go down to the
settlement and fetch you a musketoon with bullets and powder-horn.”

“To my island you’ll never come.”

“If you’ll let me get a sight of that house, I’ll teach you in five days
to feed yourself on ferns and roots and nothing.”

“That’s why I’ve come hither. Keep that promise, and you shall see my
house, if you can really get there.”

With that he fastened the skis on his feet and vanished in the mist on
the fen.

“The enemy stands on the shore,” he said to his imaginary soldiers on
the island, “but they have neither axe nor knife for making skis. We may
feel secure, if only we always remain upright and good.”

But late in the evening when he was about to lay fresh juniper on the
hearth, he saw the goat-girl coming on the fen with the help of twigs
and dry branches.

“The enemy thinks to take us by storm,” he continued, “but there is a
secret which I have long suspected. I shall make the whole Wander Isle
sail to sea like a boat.”

He pressed a pole against the outermost tussocks of the fen, and the
floating island swam swaying further out on the water.

Then he laid himself calmly to sleep by the crackling embers, but when
after a while he suddenly opened his eyes, the goat-girl stood straight
before him and peeped in under the low roof on which fox-skins lay
spread inside out to dry.

She asked him nothing about the high fireplace or the hangings or the
slippery floor, but merely said, “A fresh breeze has blown up, so that
the island has driven to land on the other shore. But why do you let the
dry fox-skins lie on the roof instead of spreading them in here on the
ground? And we ought to stick in juniper around the island so that
people can’t see either us or the hut.”

He thought she spoke sensibly and went ashore at once to collect the
juniper. When it was already long after midnight, they still worked at
the strengthening and beautifying of his island. They even made of
birch-bark and pegs a door which they could set before the entrance, and
when they finally shoved the island off from the land again, they
anchored it out in the water with two piles.

“Now the drawbridge is raised,” said Johannes, “and we must see to
providing the new guests with entertainment such as is right.”

“The cook-maids and scullery-maids are always so slow,” she said and
turned the two fish upon the hearth.

The heather droned and the lake splashed so that the island and the
sedge and all the closed water-lilies swayed. As soon as mealtime had
passed, Johannes lay down at full length nearest the hearth, but Lena,
who did not yet feel that she possessed the right of ownership to Wander
Isle, huddled together outside at the entrance with one hand as a
pillow. She still heard the juniper sputter with heart’s delight, and as
she fell asleep she counted the small sparks that sailed forth above the
chink in the roof like stars through the night air. That was the
fifth--that was the sixth--that was the seventh----. So she was put in
mind of one of her songs:

    It was on the seventh morn of the week,
    When the prayer-bells rang, I ween,
    That the bitter tears ran a-down her cheek,
    Though her bride-wreath still was green.

Next day she no longer thought of leaving the island, and the third day
they began without noticing it to say “our island.” Every morning they
landed at the rock, and then she went up to the clearing with her goats
or followed him to examine nooses and traps. At last she began also to
teach him her art of feeding himself for many days on berries and ferns
and nothing, and she noticed that he soon won even greater aptitude in
this than she had herself. He grew thin and dry as a blown-off branch,
and yet his sinews knotted themselves all the harder. But he always
remained quiet and taciturn; and when she asked him what weighed on his
mind, he went off on his own paths and remained long away.

They no longer knew the names of the days, but on the Sabbath the wind
carried the distant sound of the bells far into the wilderness, and then
Johannes put on his embroidered leather coat and led her upon the
overgrown sepulchre-mound, from which they could see over fen and lake.
With her hand in his he spoke then of God’s love, which covered the
wretchedest crevices with its fairest bounties, and often they knelt in
the grass for long periods and prayed that He would likewise sow a few
grains of His seed in their souls.

After much conversation, however, Johannes was always doubly heavy in
mind and sought for solitude.

The nights became ever darker, and often when she turned back from her
herd she had to light her way with a torch between mountain walls and
the roots of overblown trees. The giant firs, heaven high, were like
tents, where black hands sprawled out from among the ragged leafage to
seize her by the braids; but she felt no fear, she thought only of one
thing. Wherever she went and whatever she busied herself with, she only
thought that the summer would soon be ended and that no one could know
what would then become of Johannes and her.

Then one October morning she was awakened by Johannes.

“Do you remember the cranes you spoke of?” he asked. “Now I can both
stand so quiet that I look like a dry juniper bush, and bend down so
that I look like a stone, and lie down flat on the ground so that no one
can tell me from a pile of rotten twigs. I have taught myself more than
that. I can feed myself on berries and roots, and if those are wanting I
can starve along on nothing.”

She sat up and listened to a far-off noise.

“That is no cranes.”

“Then I’ll investigate what it is.”

He washed himself in the lake, put on his leather coat as on a Sunday,
and pushed her gently aside when she wanted to hold him back.

“Don’t go, Johannes!” she begged. “I won’t let you go from me without
following.”

In silence they came ashore with the island at the ledge and went down
through the woods toward the settled land to a bare clearing, from which
there was a free outlook over the mossy heath and meadows as far as
Kerstin Bure’s mill and the church.

“Johannes!” she burst out with almost a scream, and seized him tightly
by the coat-tails. “Come back with me to our place!”

He answered her meekly: “My conscience has pained me long enough. Do you
see down there on the heath the gray creatures with thin legs? And the
outposts that you told about are standing there too. It’s Mons Bock, who
is out again on his recruiting. In that crane-dance I’d like to play
myself.”

He walked violently away from her, so that the coat-tail was torn off at
the cracking seam, and began to run down to the heath between the ferns
and charred stumps.

She followed irresolutely after him, but when she saw how he spoke to
the outposts and stepped straight into the assembled crowd of armed
peasants, she went at a warm pace to get to him.

When she came into the ring, he already stood before Mons Bock and was
taking his recruit penny.

“Where have you stuck your knapsack, Smålander?” asked the general.

“I have no knapsack, but I can feed myself for five days on nothing.”

Lena pressed forward between him and the general’s dark-brown horse.

“He, Johannes here, is no serving-boy, but we have a place of our own up
in the woods.”

“As to the marriage I should like to see the certificate in black and
white,” answered Mons Bock, and the hot color rose and fell on her
forehead as he spoke.

Then Lena held out in her two hands the torn-off coat-tail and let him
see that it fitted to the leather coat.

“I call that a parson’s certificate on real sheepskin,” he broke out.
“The recruit money may therefore be yours, my good young lady, but the
boy has clean perjured himself. And now, ye worthy yeomen of Småland,
forward in Jesus’ name! Drums we have none, but we can still in our
poverty stamp with wooden shoes the old Swedish march that it makes me
warm at heart to hear.”

Staves and wooden shoes banged and clattered on rocks and ledges. Even
the riders had wooden shoes tied fast to their feet, so that they tried
in vain to use their stirrups.

When the last farmers had vanished across the heath, Lena went on to the
mill. She dared not relate that Johannes had gone along to the war, but
only told of how she had met him in the woods, exhibiting the coat-tail,
which was carefully inspected and turned over.

“That’s the right coat-tail, sure enough,” said Kerstin Bure, “and
though I don’t like to see women in my service, you may as well stay
with me till Johannes comes. I really need a pair of strong arms, for I
am well on in years and all my men have been bitten with madness and
have run off with Stenbock. There is hardly an able-bodied man left in
the parish, except the sexton, the idiot!”

After she had said this she spoke no more to Lena of what had passed in
the woods and asked nothing about Johannes, but silently continued her
occupations, as was her custom. The mill stood with unmoving wings,
because there was no meal to grind, and through the long snowy months of
winter there was heard in it neither steps nor voices. Beggars who went
past on the road supposed it was unoccupied and deserted.

       *       *       *       *       *

When the spring began to re-appear and white trailing clouds swept
across the heavens, there came one day a boy hot and panting, who ran
along the road and to each and all whom he met shouted a single word,
until he vanished in the woods on the other side of the heather. Some
hours later a rider came at a gallop and shouted in the same manner on
all sides until he was gone. The women gathered in crowds on the hill by
the church. Sweden, Sweden was saved, and Mons Bock and his goat-boys
had beaten the whole enemy’s army at the Straits of Öresund!

Kerstin Bure alone asked nobody what had happened but sat every noon on
the mill stairs in the glorious sunshine and carded wool with Lena. All
at once as they were sitting silent and busy, while the spring freshet
purled in ditches and brooks, they heard that the bells were ringing in
the neighboring parishes to the south, although it was Wednesday.
Expectantly the people ranged themselves along the road on both sides
and from the wide-open door of the church advanced the stumbling pastor
of the congregation, followed by his chaplains and in full ceremonials.

Once more the well-known march of the wooden shoes clattered on ledges
and stones, but now to bag-pipes and shawms. It was the returning army
of farmers. There were deep lines of shaggy beards and slashed
sheep-skin coats and noble blue eyes. With staves in hand, muskets in
the strap, and wide hats over their flowing hair, the homeward-bound
troops marched back from their victory. Far in the van the fiery cross
went from church to church as far as the northernmost wooden chapels,
where the Lapps tied their reindeer to the steeples, and all the sunny
springtime of Sweden was filled with the song of praise that re-echoed
from the bells.

Just in front of the hay-wagons with the wounded rode Mons Bock in his
gray overcoat with his riding-whip instead of a sword. Calling down
blessings upon their saviour, the peasants hailed him with waving aprons
and caps, but he turned to his ensigns and shouted that they should
sing.

When the voices ceased, Mons Bock went on alone and sang stanza after
stanza which he himself had put together.

Kerstin Bure had risen on the mill stairs and looked and looked beneath
her lifted hand, but Lena, who had broken her way forward so fearlessly
in the thickets of the wilderness, did not dare this time to wait and
look about any longer, but stole away and threw herself sobbing among
the empty meal-sacks.

Step by step Kerstin Bure withdrew up the stairs until she stood at the
very top with her back against the wall of the mill. Then she pressed
her hands like opera-glasses to her eyes. In the last wagon Johannes
sat on the hay among the wounded, as merry and quiet as always, but
paler and with bandages around his arm and shoulder.

She pressed her hands even harder to her eyes.

“So after all he was what I thought him, though to prove his soul
thoroughly I commanded him otherwise. Then, though he is Kerstin Bure’s
foster-son, he shall still keep for his life long her whom he himself
has chosen, even if she is the poorest of goat-girls.”

But at the moment she heard how the sexton and his ringer clattered at
the trap-doors of the steeple, and the great bell gave forth its first
stroke.

She knitted her brow and went into the mill, saying: “I’ve no meal to
grind, but if he lets his bell sound, though he has had no son in the
war, my mill shall play, too.”

Creaking, the dust-white axle-beam began to move and purr, and while the
peasant army marched singing by, the empty mill kept turning its great
wings faster and faster.




THE FORTIFIED HOUSE


Surprised by the winter cold, the Swedes in crowded confusion had taken
up their quarters behind the walls of Hadjash. Soon there was not a
house to be found that was not filled with the frost-bitten and the
dying. Cries of distress were heard out in the street, and here and
there beside the steps lay amputated fingers, feet, and legs. Vehicles
stood fastened to each other so tightly packed from the city gate to the
market-place that the chilly-pale soldiers who streamed in from all
sides had to crawl between the wheels and runners. Fastened in their
harness and turned away from the wind, the horses, their loins white
with frost, had already stood many days without food. No one took care
of them, and several of the drivers sat frozen to death with hands stuck
into their sleeves. Some wagons were like oblong boxes or coffins, where
from the chink of the flat lid stared out mournful faces, which read in
a prayer-book or gazed longingly with feverish delirium at the
sheltering houses. A thousand unfortunates, in muffled tones or
silently, cried to God for mercy. Under the sheltered side of the city
wall dead soldiers stood in lines, many with red Cossack coats buttoned
over their ragged Swedish uniforms and with sheepskins around their
naked feet. Wood-doves and sparrows, which were so stiff with frost that
they could be caught with the hand, had fallen on the hats and shoulders
of the standing corpses and fluttered their wings when the chaplains
went by to give a Last Communion in brandy.

Up at the market-place among burnt areas stood an unusually large house,
from which could be heard raised voices. A soldier delivered a fagot to
an ensign who stood in the doorway, and when the soldier went back into
the street, he shrugged his shoulders and said to whomsoever cared to
hear him: “It’s only the gentlemen quarreling in the chancellery.”

The ensign at the door had lately arrived with Lewenhaupt’s forces. He
carried the fagot into the room and threw it down by the fireplace. The
voices within ceased immediately, but as soon as he had closed the door
they began with renewed heat.

It was His Excellency Piper who stood in the middle of the floor, his
countenance wrinkled and furrowed, with glowing cheeks and trembling
nostrils.

“I say that the whole affair is madness,” he burst out, “madness,
madness!”

Hermelin with his pointed nose was constantly twitching his eyes and his
hands, while he sprang back and forth in the room like a tame rat; but
Field Marshall Rehnskiöld, who with his handsome, stately figure was
standing by the fireplace, only whistled and hummed. If he had not
whistled and hummed, the quarrel would have been finished by this time,
because for once they were all fully agreed; but the fact that he
whistled and hummed instead of being silent or at least speaking, that
could be endured no longer. Lewenhaupt at the window took snuff and
snapped shut his snuff-box. His pepper-brown eyes protruded from his
head, and it looked as if his comical peruke became ever bigger and
bigger. If Rehnskiöld had not continued to whistle and hum, he would
have controlled himself today as yesterday and on all other occasions,
but now wrath rose to his brow.

He shut his snuff-box for the last time and mumbled between his teeth,
“I do not desire that His Majesty should understand statesmanship. But
can he lead troops? Does he show real insight at a single encounter or
attack? Trained and proved old warriors, who never can be replaced, he
offers daily for an empty bravado. If our men are to storm a wall, it is
considered superfluous that they bind themselves protecting fagots or
shields, and therefore they are wretchedly massacred. To speak freely,
my worthy sirs, I can forgive an Upsala student many a boyish freak, but
I demand otherwise of a general in the field. Truly it avails not to
carry on a campaign under the command of such a master.”

“Furthermore,” continued Piper, “His Majesty at present incommodes no
general with any particularly hard command. At the beginning, when one
succeeded in distinguishing himself more than another, it went better;
but now His Majesty goes around mediating and reconciling with a foolish
smile so that one could go crazy.”

He raised his arms in the air with a wrath which had lost all sense and
bounds, notwithstanding he was altogether at one with Lewenhaupt. While
he was still speaking, he turned about and betook himself impetuously to
the inner apartments. The door slammed with such a clatter that
Rehnskiöld found himself yet more called upon to whistle and hum. If he
only had chosen to say something! But no, he did not. Gyllenkrook, who
sat at the table and examined departure-checks, was blazing in the face,
and a little withered-looking officer at his side whispered venomously
into his car: “A pair of diamond ear-rings given to Piper’s countess
might perhaps even yet help Lewenhaupt to new appointments.”

If Rehnskiöld had now ceased to whistle and hum, Lewenhaupt would still
have been able to control himself, to take up the roll of papers he
carried under his coat and sit down at a corner of the table; but
instead, the venerable and at other times taciturn man grew worse and
worse. He turned about undecidedly and went toward the entrance door,
but there he suddenly stood still, drew himself up and smacked his heels
together as if he had been a mere private. Now Rehnskiöld became quiet.
The door opened. An icy gust of wind rushed into the room, and the
ensign announced with as loud and long-drawn a voice as a sentry who
calls his comrades to arms: “Hi-s Majesty!”

The king was no longer the dazzled and wondering half-grown youth of
aforetime. Only the boyish figure with the narrow shoulders was the
same. His coat was sooty and dirty. The wrinkle around the
upward-protruding over-lip had become deeper and a trifle grin-like. On
the nose and one cheek he had frostbite, and his eyelids were red-edged
and swollen with protracted cold, but around the formerly bald vertex of
his head the combed-back hair stood up like a pointed crown.

He held a fur cap in both hands and tried to conceal his embarrassment
and diffidence behind a stiff and cold ceremoniousness, while bowing and
smiling to each and all of those present.

They bowed again and again still more deeply, and when he had advanced
to the middle of the floor, he stood still and bowed awkwardly toward
the sides, though with somewhat more haste, being in appearance wholly
occupied with what he was about to say. Thereupon he remained a long
while standing quite silent.

Then he went forward to Rehnskiöld and, with a brief inclination, took
him by one of his coat-buttons.

“I would beg,” he said, “that Your Excellency provide me with two or
three men of the common soldiers as escort for a little excursion. I
have already two dragoons with me.”

“But, Your Majesty! the country is over-run with Cossacks. To ride in
here to the city from Your Majesty’s quarters with so small an escort
was already a feat of daring.”

“Oh, nonsense, nonsense! Your Excellency will do as I have said. Some
one of the generals present, who is at leisure, may also mount and take
one of his men.”

Lewenhaupt bowed.

The king regarded him a trifle irresolutely without answering, and
remained standing after Rehnskiöld hastened out. None of the others in
the circle considered it necessary to break the silence or to move.

Only after a very long pause did the king bow again to everyone
separately and go out into the open air.

“Well?” inquired Lewenhaupt and clapped the ensign on the shoulder with
the return of his natural kindliness. “The ensign shall go along! This
is the first time the ensign has stood eye to eye with His Majesty.”

“I had never expected he would be like that.”

“He is always like that. He is too kingly to command.”

They followed after the king, who clambered over wagons and fallen
animals. His motions were agile, never abrupt, but measured and quite
slow, so that he never for a moment lost his dignity. When he had
finally made his way forward through the throng to the city gate, he
mounted to the saddle with his attendants, who were now seven men.

The horses stumbled on the icy street, and some fell, but Lewenhaupt’s
remonstrances only induced the king not to use his spurs yet more
heartlessly. The lackey Hultman had read aloud to him all night or had
related sagas, and had at length coaxed him into laughing at the
prophecy that, had he not been exalted by God to be a king, he would for
his whole life have become an unsociable floor-pacer, who devised much
more wonderful verses than those of the late Messenius of Disa on
Bollhus, but especially the mightiest battle stories. He tried to think
of Rolf Gotriksson, who ever rode foremost of all his men, but today it
did not please him to bound his thoughts within the playroom of a saga.
The restlessness which during the last few days had struck its claws
into his mind would not let go of its royal prey. At the chancellery he
had just seen the heated faces. Ever since the pranks of his boyhood he
had been rapt in his own imaginary world of the past. He had sat deaf to
the piercing cries of distress along the way, while he became
distrustful of each and all who exhibited a more sensitive hearing.
Today as at other times he hardly noted that they offered him the
best-rested horse and the freshest cake of bread, that in the morning
they laid a purse with five hundred ducats in his pocket. He challenged
the horseman at the first mêlée to form a ring about him and offer
themselves to death. On the other hand he noticed that the soldiers
saluted him with gloomy silence, and misfortunes had made him suspicious
even of those nearest to him. The most cautious opposition, the most
concealed disapproval, he made a note of without betraying himself, and
every word remained and gnawed at his soul. Every hour it seemed to him
that he lost an officer on whom he had formerly relied, and his heart
became all the colder. His thwarted ambition chafed and bled under the
weight of failure, and he breathed more lightly the farther behind him
he left his headquarters.

Suddenly Lewenhaupt came to a stand, debating within himself how to
exercise an influence upon the king.

“My heroic Ajax!” said he, and tapped his steaming horse, “you are
indeed an old manger-biter, but I have no right to founder you for no
good cause, and I myself am beginning to get on in years as you are. But
in Jesus’ name, lads, let him who can follow the king!”

When he saw the ensign’s anxious sidelong look toward the king, he spoke
with lowered voice: “Be faithful, boy! His Majesty does not roar out as
we others do. He is too kingly to chide or bicker.”

The king feigned to notice nothing. More and more wildly over ice and
snow he kept up the silent horse-race without goal or purpose. He had
now only four attendants. After another hour one of the remaining horses
fell with a broken fore-leg, and the rider out of pity shot a bullet
through its ear, after which he himself, alone and on foot, went to meet
an uncertain fate in the cold.

At last the ensign was the only man who was able to follow the king, and
they had now come among bushes and saplings, where they could proceed
but at a foot-pace. On the hill above them rose a gray and sooty house
with narrow grated windows, the garden being surrounded by a wall.

At this moment there was a shot.

“How was that?” inquired the king, and looked around.

“The pellet piped nastily when it went by my ear but it only bit the
corner of my hat,” answered the ensign without the least experience of
how he ought to conduct himself before the king. He had a slight Småland
accent and laughed contentedly with his whole blonde countenance.

Enchanted by the good fortune of being man by man with him whom he
regarded as above all other living human beings, he continued: “Shall we
then go up there and take them by the beard?”

The answer pleased the king in the highest degree, and with a leap he
stood on the ground.

“We’ll tie our steeds here in the bushes,” he said exhilaratedly and
with bright color on his cheek. “Afterwards let us go up and run through
anybody that whistles.”

They left the panting horses and, bending forward, climbed up the hill
among the bushes. Over the wall looked down several Cossack heads with
hanging hair, yellow and grinning as those of beheaded criminals.

“Look!” whispered the king, and smote his hands together. “They’re
trying to pull shut the rotten gate, the fox-tails!”

His glance, but recently so expressionless, became now flickering and
anon open and shining. He drew his broadsword and raised it with both
hands above his head. Like a young man’s god he stormed in through the
half-open door. The ensign, who cut and thrust by his side, was often
close to being struck from behind by his weapon. A musket shot blackened
the king’s right temple. Four men were cut down in the gateway and the
fifth of the band fled with a fire-shovel into the garden, pursued by
the king.

Then the king wiped off the blood from his sword on the snow, while he
laid two ducats in the Cossack’s shovel and burst out with rising
spirits, “It is no pleasure to fight with these wretches, who never
strike back and only run. Come back when you have bought yourself a
decent sword.”

The Cossack, who understood nothing, stared at the gold-pieces, sneaked
along the wall to the gate, and fled. Ever further and further away on
the plain he called his roving comrades with a dismal and lamenting
“Oohaho! Oohaho!”

The king hummed to himself as if chaffing with an unseen enemy: “Little
Cossack man, little Cossack man, go gather up your rascals!”

The walls around the garden were mouldering and black. From the
wilderness sounded an endlessly prolonged minor tone as from an æolian
harp, and the king inquisitively shouldered in the door of the
dwelling-house. This consisted of a single large and a half-dark room,
and before the fireplace lay a heap of blood-stained clothing, which
plunderers of corpses had taken from fallen Swedes. The door was thrown
shut again by the cross-draught, and the king went to the stable
buildings at the side. There was no door there, and a sound was now
heard the more plainly. Within in the darkness lay a starved white horse
bound to the iron loop of a wagon.

A lifted broadsword would not have checked the king, but the uncertain
dusk caused the man of imagination to stand on the threshold, fearful of
the dark. Yet he gave no sign of this, but beckoned the ensign. They
stepped in down a steep stairway to a cellar. Here there was a spring,
and as a stop-cock to the singing wind which stirred the water, a deaf
Cossack with whip and reins, and without an idea of danger, was driving
a manly figure in the uniform of a Swedish officer.

When they had loosed the rope and had bound the Cossack in the place of
the prisoner, they recognized the Holsteiner, Feuerhausen, who had
served as major in a regiment of dragoon recruits, but had been cut off
by the Cossacks and harnessed as a draught animal for hoisting water.

He fell on his knees and stammered in broken Swedish: “Your Majesty! I
gan’t pelief my eyes.... My gratitude....”

The king cheerily interrupted his talk and turned to the ensign: “Bring
up the two horses to the stable! Three men cannot ride comfortably on
two horses, and therefore we shall stay here till a few Cossacks come
by, from whom we can take a new horse. Let the gentleman also stand
guard at the gate.”

After that the king went back to the dwelling-house and shut the door
after him. The horses which, desperate with hunger, had been greedily
gnawing the bark from the bushes, were meanwhile led up to the stable,
and the ensign went on guard.

Slowly the hours went by. When it began to draw towards dusk, the storm
increased in bitterness, and in the light of sunset the snow whirled
over the desolate snow-plain. Deathly yellow Cossack faces raised
themselves spying above the bushes, and long in the blast sounded the
roving plunderers’ “Oohaho! Oohaho! Oohaho!”

Then Feuerhausen stepped out of the stable, where he had sat between the
horses so as not to get frost in his wounds from the ropes with which he
had been bound. He went forward to the barred doors of the
dwelling-house.

“Your Majesty!” he stammered, “the Cossacks are gathering more and
more, and darkness is coming soon. I and the ensign can both sit on one
horse. If we delay here, this night will be Your Mightiest Majesty’s
last, which Gott in His secret dispensation forbit!”

The king answered from within, “It must be as we said. Three men do not
ride comfortably on two horses.”

The Holsteiner shook his head and went down to the ensign.

“Such is His Majesty, you damt Swedes. From the stable I heard him walk
and walk back and forvart. Sickness and conscience-torture will come.
Like a _pater familiæ_ the Muscovite czar stands among his subjects. A
sugar-baker he sets up as his friend and a little serving-boy he raises
on his glorious imperial throne. Detestable are his gestures when he
gets drunk, and he treats women _à la françois_; but his first and last
word always runs: ‘For Russia’s good!’ King Carolus leafs his lands as
smoking ash-heaps and does not possess a single frient, not efen among
his nearest. King Carolus is more lonely than the meanest wagon-drifer.
He has not once a comrade’s knee to weep on. Among nobles and fine
ladies and perukes he comes like a spectre out of a thousand-year
mausoleum--and spectres mostly go about without company. Is he a man of
state? Oh, have mercy! No sense for the public. Is he a general?
Good-bye? No sense for the big masses. Only to make bridges and set up
gabions, clap his hands at captured flags and a couple of kettle-drums.
No sense for state and army, only for men.”

“That may be also a sense,” replied the ensign.

He walked vigorously back and forward, for his fingers were already so
stiff with cold that he scarcely could hold his drawn blade.

The Holsteiner shifted the ragged coat-collar around his cheeks and went
on with muffled voice and eager gestures: “King Carolus laughs with
delight when the bridge breaks and men and beasts are miserably drownt.
No heart in his breast. To the deuce wit him! King Carolus is such a
little Swedish half-genius as wanders out in the worlt and beats the
drum and parades and makes a fiasco, and the parterre whistles Whee!”

“And that is just why the Swedes go to death for him,” answered the
ensign, “that is just why.”

“Not angry, my dearest fellow. Your teeth shone so in a laugh when we
first met.”

“I like to hear the Herr Major talk, but I’m freezing. Will not the
major go up and listen at the king’s door?”

The Holsteiner went up to the door and listened. When he came back he
said, “He only walks and walks, and sighs heavily like a man in anguish
of soul. So it always is now, they say. His Majesty nefer sleeps any
more at night. The comedy-actor knows he is not up to his part, and of
all life’s torments, wounded ambition becomes the bitterest.”

“Then it should also be the last for us to jest at. Dare I beg the major
to rub my right hand with snow; it is getting numb.”

The Holsteiner did as he desired and turned back to the king’s door. He
struck his forehead with both hands. His gray-sprinkled, bushy mustaches
stood straight out, and he mumbled, “Gott, Gott! Soon it will be too
dark to retreat.”

The ensign called, “Good sir, I should like to ask if you would rub my
face with snow. My cheeks are freezing stiff. Of the pain in my foot I
will not speak. Ah, I can’t bear it.”

The Holsteiner filled his hands with snow. “Let me stand guard,” he
said, “only for an hour.”

“No, no. The king has commanded that I stay here at the entrance.”

“Och, the king! I know him. I will make him cheerful, talk philosophy,
tell of gallant exploits. He is always amused to hear of a lover who
climbs adventurously through a window. He often looks at the beautiful
side of womankint. That appeals to his imagination, but not to his
flesh, for he is without feeling. And he is bashful. If the fair one
ever wishes to tread him under her silken shoe, she must herself
attack; but if she pretends to flee, then all the other women must
strive against a _liaison_. The most mighty lady his grandmother spoiled
everything with her shriek of ‘Marriage, marriage!’ King Carolus is from
top to toe like the Swedish queen Cristina, though he is genuinely
masculine. The two should have married each other on the same throne.
That would haf been a fine little pair. Oh, pfui, pfui! you Swedes. If a
man gallops his horses and lets people and kingdom be massacred, he is
still pure-hearted and supreme among all, only his bloot is too slow for
amours. Oh, excuse me! I know pure-hearted heroes who were faithfully in
love with two, three different maidens or wives in one and the same
week.”

“Yes, we are so, we are so. But for Christ’s pity you must rub my hand
again. And excuse my moaning and groaning!”

Just inside the gate, which could not be shut, lay the fallen Cossacks,
white as marble with the hoarfrost. The yellow sky became gray, and ever
nearer and more manifold in the twilight sounded the wailing cries:
“Oohaho! Oohaho! Oohaho!”

Now the king opened his door and came down across the garden.

The pains in his head, from which he was accustomed to suffer, had been
increased by his ride in the wind and made his glance heavy. His
countenance bore traces of lonely soul-strife, but as he drew near, his
mouth resumed its usual embarrassed smile. His temple was still
blackened after the musket-shot.

“It’s freshening up,” he said, and producing from his coat a loaf of
bread, he broke it in three, so that everyone had as large a piece as he
did. After that, he lifted off his riding-cape and fastened it himself
about the shoulders of the sentinel ensign.

Abashed over his own conduct, he then took the Holsteiner forcibly by
the arm and led him up through the garden, while they chewed at their
hard bread.

Now if ever, thought the Holsteiner, is the time to win the king’s
attention with a clever turn of speech and afterwards talk sense with
him.

“The accommodation might be better,” he began, at the same time biting
and chewing. “Ah, good old days! That reminds me of a gallant adventure
outside of Dresden.”

The king kept on holding him by the arm, and the Holsteiner lowered his
voice. The story was lively and salacious, and the king grew
inquisitive. The roughest ambiguities always lured out his set smile. He
listened with a despairing and half-absent man’s need of momentary
diversion.

Only when the Holsteiner with cunning deftness began to shift the
conversation over to some words about their immediate danger did the
king again become serious.

“Bagatelle, bagatelle!” he replied. “It is nothing at all worth
mentioning, except that we must behave ourselves well and sustain our
reputation to the last man. If the rascals come on, we will all three
place ourselves at the gate and pink them with our swords.”

The Holsteiner stroked his forehead and felt around. He began to talk
about the stars that were just shining out. He set forth a theory for
measuring their distance from the earth. The king now listened to him
with a quite different sort of attention. He broke into the question
keenly, resourcefully, and with an unwearied desire to think out new,
surprising methods in his own way. One assertion gave a hand to another,
and soon the conversation dwelt on the universe and the immortality of
the soul, to return afresh to the stars. More and more flickered in the
heavens, and the king described what he knew about the sun-dial. He
stood up his broadsword with its scabbard in the snow and directed the
point toward the Polestar, so that next morning they might be able to
tell the time.

“The heart of the universe,” he said, “must be either the earth or the
star that stands over the land of the Swedes. No land must be of more
account than the Swedish land.”

Outside the wall the Cossacks were calling out, but as soon as the
Holsteiner led the talk to their threatened attack, the king was
laconic.

“At daybreak we shall betake ourselves back to Hadjash,” said he.
“Before then we can hardly secure a third horse, so that each of us can
ride comfortably in his own saddle.”

After he had spoken in that strain he went back into the dwelling-house.

The Holsteiner came down with a vehement stride to the ensign, and
pointing at the king’s door, he cried out, “Forgif me, ensign. We
Germans don’t mince words when a wound oozes after a rope, but I lay
down my arms and give your lord the victory, because I also could shed
my bloot for the man. Do I love him! No-one efer understands him that
has not seen him.--But ensign, you cannot stay any longer out in the
weather.”

The ensign replied, “No cape has warmed me more sweetly than the one I
now wear, and I lay all my cares on Christ. But in God’s name, major, go
back to the door and listen! The king might do himself some harm.”

“His Majesty would not fall on his _own_ sword but longs for another’s.”

“Now I hear his steps even down here. They are getting still more
violent and restless. He is so lonely. When I saw him in Hadjash bowing
and bowing among the generals, I could only think: How lonely he is!”

“If the little Holsteiner slips away from here alife, he will always
remember the steps we heard tonight and always call this refuge Fort
Garden.”

The ensign nodded his approval and answered, “Go to the stable, major,
and seek rest and shelter a while between the horses. And there through
the walls you can better hear the king and watch over him.”

Thereupon the ensign began to sing with resonant voice:

    “O Father, to Thy loving grace....”

The Holsteiner went back across the garden into the stable and, his
voice quavering with cold, intoned with the other:

    “In every time and every place
     My poor weak soul would I commend.
     Oh, Lord, receive it and defend.”

“Oohaho! Oohaho!” answered the Cossacks in the storm, and it was already
night.

The Holsteiner squeezed himself in between the two horses and listened
till weariness and sleep bowed his head. Only at dawn was he wakened by
a clamor. He sprang out into the open air and beheld the king already
standing in the garden, looking at the sword that had been set up as a
sun-dial.

By the gate the Cossacks had collected, but when they saw the motionless
sentry, they shrank back in superstitious fear and thought of the rumors
concerning the magic of the Swedish soldiers with blow and shot.

When the Holsteiner had gotten forward to the ensign, he grasped him
hard by the arm.

“What now?” he asked, “Brandy?”

At the same instant he let go his grip.

The ensign stood frozen to death with his back again the wall of the
gate, his hands on his swordhilt, and wrapt in the king’s cloak.

“Since we are now only two,” the king remarked, drawing his weapon out
of the snow, “we can at once betake ourselves each to his horse, as it
was arranged.”

The Holsteiner stared him right in the eyes with re-awakened hate and
remained standing, as if he had heard nothing. Finally, however, he led
out the horses, but his hands trembled and clenched themselves so that
he could hardly draw the saddle-girths.

The Cossacks swung their sabres and pikes, but the sentry stood at his
post.

Then the king sprang carelessly into the saddle and set his horse to a
gallop. His forehead was clear and his cheeks rosy, and his broadsword
glimmered like a sunbeam.

The Holsteiner looked after him. His bitter expression relaxed, and he
murmured between his teeth, while he too mounted to the saddle and with
his hand lifted to his hat raced by the sentry: “It is only joy for a
hero to see a hero’s noble death.--Thanks, comrade!”




THE QUEEN OF THE MARAUDERS


The tocsin in the church tower at Narva had ceased. In a breach of the
battered rampart lay the fallen Swedish heroes, over whose despoiled and
naked bodies the Russians stormed into the city with wild cries. Some
Cossacks, who had sewed a live cat into the belly of an inn-keeper, were
still laughing in a circle around their victim, but the gigantic Peter
Alexievitch, the czar, soon burst his way through the midst of the
throng on street and courtyard and cut down his own men to check their
misdeeds. His right arm up to the shoulder was drenched with the blood
of his own subjects. Weary of murder, troop after troop finally
assembled in the square and the churchyard. Under the pretext that the
churches had been desecrated by the misbelievers who lay buried there,
bands of soldiers began to violate and plunder the graves. Stones were
pried up from the floor of the church with crowbars, and outside, the
graves were opened with shovels. Pillagers broke the copper and tin
caskets into pieces and threw dice for the silver handles and plates.
The streets, where at the first mêlée the inhabitants had thrown down
fire-brands and tiles, and where the blood of the slain was still
swimming in the gutters, were for many days piled up with rusty or
half-blackened coffins. The hair on some of the bodies had grown so that
it hung out between the boards. Some of the dead lay embalmed and well
preserved, though brown and withered, but from most of the coffins
yellow skeletons grinned forth from collapsed and mouldered shrouds.
People who stole anxiously among them read the coffin-plates in the
twilight and now and then recognized the name of a near relative, a
mother or a sister. Sometimes they saw the ravagers pull out the decayed
remains and throw them into the river. Sometimes, again, protected by
night, they themselves succeeded in carrying them off and burying them
outside the city. So in the dusk one might encounter an old man or woman
who came stealing along toilsomely with children or serving-maids,
carrying a coffin.

One night a swarm of pillagers bivouacked in a corner of the churchyard.
Hi! what fun it was to pile up a bonfire of bed-slats and bolsters and
chairs and coffin-ends and what the devil else could be dragged forth.
Flames and sparks blazed up as high as the attic window of the
parsonage. Round about stood coffins propped one against another. The
bottom of one of the uppermost had been broken, so that the treasurer,
of blessed memory, who was inside it, stood there upright with his
spliced wig on his head and looked as if he thought: “I pray you, into
what company have I been conducted?”

“Haha! little father,” the robbers called to him, as they roasted August
apples and onions at the flames; “you always wanted something to wet
your whistle, you there!”

The glow of the fire lighted up the living-room of the parsonage and the
sparks flew in through the broken panes. In the rooms stood only a
broken table and a chair, upon which sat the parson with his head
propped on his hands.

“Who knows? Perhaps it might succeed,” he mumbled and raised himself as
if he had found the key to a long-considered problem.

His silver-white beard spread itself over all his breast, and his hair
hung down to his shoulders. In his youth as chaplain he had gone in for
a little of everything and he had never pushed back a cup that was
offered him. Afterwards as a widower in the parsonage he had worshipped
God with joy and mirth and a brimming bowl, and it was bruited about
that he did not reach first for his Bible if a well-formed wench
happened to be in his company. He therefore even now took misfortune
more bravely and resignedly than others, and his heart was as undaunted
as his soldierly body was unbowed by years.

He went out into the entry and cautiously pulled out the five or six
rusty nails that held down a couple of boards above a little narrow
recess under the stairs. Then he lifted the boards aside.

“Come out, my child!” he said.

When no one obeyed him, his voice grew somewhat more severe and he
repeated his words: “Come out, Lina! Both the other maids have been
bound and carried away. It was verily at the last minute that I got you
in here. But it is almost a day since then, and you cannot live without
meat and drink. Eh?”

When he was not obeyed, he threw back his head in annoyance, and he now
spoke in accents of harsh command: “Why don’t you obey? Do you think
there is food here? There’s not so much as a pinch of salt left in the
house. You must be got away, you understand. If it goes ill with you, if
a plunderer gets you on the way, I can only say this: clasp your arms
about his neck and follow with him on his horse’s back wherever it
carries you. Many a time in the rough-and-tumble of war have I seen such
a love, and then I have slung the soldier’s cloak over my priest’s frock
and waved my hat for a lucky end to the song. Don’t you hear, lass? When
your late father, who was a drinker--if I must tell the truth--was my
stableboy and pulled me out of a hole in the ice once, I promised for
the future to provide for him and his child. Besides, he was Swedish
born as I was. Well, haven’t I always been a fatherly master to you, or
what has Her Grace to object? Have her wits deserted her, eh?”

Something now began to move in the pitch-black recess. An elbow struck
against the wall, there was a rustling and scraping, and with that Lina
Andersdotter stepped out in nothing but her chemise, bare legs, and a
torn red jacket without sleeves but with a whole back to it, over which
hung the braid of her brown hair.

The light of the fire fell in through the window. Squatted together she
held her chemise between her knees, but her fresh, downward-bent face
with broad, open features was as merry as if she had just stepped out of
her settle-bed on a bright winter morning in the light of the dawn.

The blood ran impetuously enough through the veins of the white-haired
chaplain, but in that moment he was but master and father.

“I did not know that in my simple house folk had learned such a
ceremonious feeling of delicacy,” said he, and gave her a friendly pat
on the bare shoulders.

She looked up.

“No,” she said, “it’s only because I’m so wretchedly cold.”

“Ah, well, that’s natural. That’s the way I like people to talk in my
house. But I have no garments to give you. My own hang on me in tatters.
The house may burn at any time. I myself can maybe sneak out on my way
unaccosted, and I have a Riga riksdollar in my pocket. Who asks about a
ragged old man? It’s another affair with you, Lina. I know these wild
fellows. I know but one way to get you off, but I myself shrink from
telling it. Naturally, you are afraid.”

“Afraid I’m not. It will go with me as it may. To be sure, I am no
better than the others. Only I’m perishing of cold.”

“Come here to the door then, but don’t be frightened. Do you see out
there in the doorway the rascals have set a little wooden casket. It
cannot be very heavy, but perhaps you will have room in it. If you dare
lay yourself in the casket, perhaps I can smuggle you out of the town.”

“That I surely dare.”

Her teeth chattered and she trembled, but she straightened herself up a
little, let the chemise hang free, and went out on the stones in the
doorway.

The pastor lifted off the moist lid, which was loose, and found nothing
else in the plundered casket than shavings and a brown blanket.

“That was just what I needed,” she shivered. She pulled up the blanket,
wrapped it over her, stepped up, and laid herself on her back in the
shavings.

The pastor bent over her, laid both his hands on her shoulder, and
looked into her fearless eyes. She might be eighteen or nineteen years
old. Her hair was stroked smoothly back to the braid.

As he stood so, it came over him that he had not always looked on her in
the past with as pure and fatherly feelings as he himself had wished and
as he had pretended to do. But now he did so. His long white hair fell
down as far as her cheeks.

“May it go well with you, child! I am old. It matters little whether my
life goes on for a while still or is destroyed in the day that now is. I
have been in many a piece of mischief and many an ill deed in my time,
and for the forgiveness of my sins I will also for once have part in
something good.”

He nodded and nodded toward her and raised himself.

There outside the clamor sounded louder than ever. He laid on the lid
and fastened in the long, crookedly set screws as well as he was able.
Then he knelt, knotted a rope crosswise around the casket, and with
strong arms lifted the heavy burden on his back. Bending forward and
staggering, he strode out into the open air.

“Look there!” shouted one of the pillagers at the fire, but his nearest
comrade silenced him with the word: “Let the poor old man alone! That’s
only a miserable beggar’s casket.”

Sweat trickled out over the old man’s face, and his back and arms ached
and smarted under the severe weight. Step by step he moved forward
through the dark streets. Every now and then he had to set down the
casket on the ground to take breath, but then he stood with his hands on
the lid in constant fear of being challenged and hustled away or of
being stabbed by some roving band of soldier revelers. Several times he
had to step to one side because of the heavy wagons, loaded with men and
women, who were to be taken hundreds of miles into Russia to people the
waste regions. The great conquering czar was a sower who did not count
the seeds he strewed.

When finally the old war-pastor reached the town gate and the watch came
to meet him, he roused his strength to the utmost with all the collected
will-power of his anxiety. With a single arm he held the casket in place
on his back, while with his free hand he drew the Riga riksdollar from
his pocket and handed it to the sentry as a bribe.

The soldier motioned to him to go on.

He wanted again to move his foot forward, but now he was unable. Through
the town gate he saw the river glimmer on the open plain, but then it
grew dark before his eyes. Still afraid for his burden in his
helplessness, he softly and cautiously lowered the casket beside him on
the stone flagging. Thereupon he fell forward and died.

The other men of the watch sprang forward and began to curse and
complain. No casket could remain standing there in the door of the
gateway.

The officers, who were sitting and gambling in a room of the casemate,
now came likewise to the spot. One of them, a little dry, weather-beaten
figure with rectangular spectacles, who was more like a clerk than a
soldier, took a lantern, came forward and held the lid slightly ajar
with his scabbard.

First he drew back his head precipitately, nearly dropping the lantern.
The next time he bent down and looked in, he dwelt on the action longer
and more searchingly, and afterwards passed his hands over his whole
face to hide his thoughts. Then he unhooked his spectacles and stood
pondering. When he bent the third time, he sent the light back and
forward through the crevice,--and there inside lay Lina Andersdotter
quite calmly, screwing up her eyes at him in the lantern’s light without
herself knowing what was going on.

“I’m hungry,” she said.

He laid aside the lantern and went a couple of paces up and down through
the door with hands crossed behind his back. There came then into his
frigid expression a sly and merrily vibrating life, and unnoticed he
took some August apples and thrust them into the casket. Thereupon he
began to give commands.

“Come here, boys! Let eight men take the casket to General Ogilvy,
salute him and say that this is a small gift from his humble servant,
Ivan Alexievitch. Eight of you others who have just come from working on
the walls go after it and roll up your leather aprons like trumpets, in
which you are to blow the regimental march. But in front of all two men
are to go with rushlights. Forward, march!”

The savage soldiers looked open-mouth at one another and obeyed.
Laughing, they lifted the casket on their muskets. Two long stalks,
tarred and twisted about with straw, were brought forward from a corner
of the gateway and lighted at the lantern; and as the procession set
itself in motion into the field toward the camp, the musicians tooted
the march in their aprons:

    O you, who have chosen a gun to bear,
    You care not for lodging or bed, lad,
    You feed like a prince on the finest fare,
    Of girls and of lice you’ve enough and to spare,
    But when will you ever be paid, lad?

When they came to the camp, the soldiers rushed together around them in
the torch-light. General Ogilvy, who was sitting at table, came out of
his tent.

“Beloved little father,” said one of the bearers, “Lieutenant Ivan
Alexievitch humbly sends you this gift.”

Ogilvy grew pale and bit his lips under his bushy gray mustaches. His
face, wrinkled and strained to harshness, was at bottom good-natured and
friendly.

“Is he out of his right mind?” he thundered with pretended wrath, though
in reality he was as frightened as a boy. “Put down the casket and break
off the lid!”

The soldiers pried it open with their blades, and the dark lid rattled
to one side.

Ogilvy stared. With that he burst out laughing. He guffawed so that he
had to sit down on an earthen bench. And the soldiers laughed too. They
laughed down through the whole lane of tents, so that they reeled and
tottered and had to support themselves one against another like
drunkards. Lina Andersdotter lay there in the casket with a half-eaten
apple in her hand and made great eyes. She had now become warm again and
was as blooming of cheek as a doll.

“By all the saints,” Ogilvy burst out. “Not ever in the catacombs of St.
Anthony has man seen such a miracle. This is a corpse that ought to be
sent to the Czar himself.”

“By no means,” answered one of his officers. “I sent him two little
fair-haired baggages day before yesterday, but he only cares for thin
brunettes.”

“So it is,” answered Ogilvy, and turned himself bending toward Narva.
“Salute Ivan Alexievitch and say that, when the casket is returned,
there shall lie in the bottom of it a captain’s commission.--Hey,
sweetheart!”

He went forward and stroked Lina Andersdotter under the chin.

But at that she sat up, took hold of his hair, and gave him a resounding
box on the ear, and after that another.

He did not let it affect him in the least, but continued to laugh.

“That’s the way I like them,” he said, “that’s the way I like them. I
will make you queen of the marauders, my chick, and as token thereof I
give you here a bracelet with a turquoise in the clasp. A band of our
worst rabble stole it just now from the casket of Countess Horn in
Narva.”

He shook the chain from his wrist and she caught it eagerly to her.

When later in the evening the cloth was laid in the tent, Lina
Andersdotter sat at the table beside Ogilvy. She had now got French
clothes of flowered brocade and wore a head-dress with blonde-lace. But
what hands! She managed to eat with gloves, but under them swelled the
big, broad fingers and the red shone between the buttons.

“Hoho! hoho!” shouted the generals. “Those hands make a man merrier than
he would get with a whole flask of Hungary. Help! Loosen our belts! Hold
us under the arms! It will be the death of us.”

Meanwhile she helped herself, munched sweetmeats, and sat with her spoon
in the air. If anything tasted bad, she made a face. Eat she could.
Drink, on the contrary, she would not but only took a swallow in her
mouth and then spurted the wine over the generals. But all their curses
and worst expressions she picked up while she sat ever alike blooming
and gay.

“Help, help!” shrieked the generals, choked with laughter. “Blow out the
light so they can slip her away! Hold our foreheads! Help! Will you have
a little pull of a tobacco pipe, mademoiselle?”

“Go to the deuce! Can’t I sit in peace!” answered Lina Andersdotter.

There was one thing, though, that Ogilvy skillfully concealed so that
the laughers should not turn to him and nudge him in the ribs and pull
his coat-tails and say: “Oho, little father, you’ve got into water too
deep for your bald head. Bless you, little father, bless you and your
little mishap!”

He pretended always to treat her with slightly indifferent familiarity,
but he never sat so near her that his dog could not jump up between
them. He never took hold of her so that anyone saw it, and never either
when no one saw it, for then he knew that her hand would catch him on
the face so that the glove would split and the red shine out in all its
strength. It was enough that, notwithstanding, she now and then gave him
a slap in the middle of the face, and no one did she snub worse than
him. But at all that he only laughed with the others, so that never
before had there been in the camp such a clamor and bedlam.

Sometimes he thought of knouting her, but he was ashamed before the
others, because everything could be heard through the tent, and he
feared that they then would the more easily guess how things stood and
how little he got along with the girl. Wait, he thought, we shall be
sitting alone sometime under lock and key. Just wait! Till then things
may go on as they do.

“Help, help!” shouted the generals. “That’s how she carries her train.
We must take hold of it. Lord, lord, no; but just look!”

“Take it up, you,” said she. “Take it up, you. That’s what you are
for.”

And so the generals were cuffed and bore her train, both when she came
to the table and when she went.

Then it happened one evening when she sat among the drinking old men
that an adjutant stepped in, hesitating and embarrassed. He turned to
Ogilvy.

“Dare I be frank?”

“Naturally, my lad.”

“And whatever I say will be forgiven?”

“By my honor. Only speak out!”

“The czar is on his way out to the camp.”

“Very good, he is my gracious lord.”

The adjutant pointed at Lina Andersdotter.

“The czar has a fancy for tall brunettes,” said Ogilvy.

“Your Excellency, in these last days he has changed his taste.”

“God! Call the troops to arms--and forward with the three-horse wagon!”

Now the alarm was struck. Drums rolled, trumpets shattered, weapons
clattered, and shouts and trampling filled the night. The drinking party
was broken up, and Lina Andersdotter was set in a baggage-wagon.

Beside the peasant who was driving, a soldier sprang up with a lighted
lantern, and she heard the peasant softly inquire of him the purpose of
the flight.

“The czar,” answered the soldier in a monotone and pointed with his
thumb over his shoulder at the girl.

At that the peasant shrunk together as at a frost-cold breeze and
whipped the small, shaggy horses more and more wildly. He hallooed and
beat and urged them into a thundering gallop. The lantern-light fell
caressingly on the fir bushes and the burnt homesteads; the wagon banged
and tottered among the stones, and creaked in its joints.

Lina Andersdotter lay on her back in the hay and looked at the stars.
Whither was she carried? What fate awaited her? She wondered and
wondered. On her wrist hung the bracelet as a talisman, a pledge for the
accomplishing of Ogilvy’s wonderful prediction. Queen of the Marauders!
It sounded so grand, though at first she had so gradually discovered
what the word really betokened. She stroked and plucked at the small
silver rings. Then she sat up and scanned the stony road in the
lantern’s light. Cautiously she moved further and further out.
Unnoticed, she climbed slowly over the wagon-sill and lowered her feet
to the ground. Would she be crushed and left lying? For a few steps she
dragged along. Then she lost her hold, stumbled, and fell lacerated
among the bushes.

On thundered the baggage-wagon with its three galloping horses, and the
lantern-light vanished. Then she got up and wiped off the blood from her
cheeks while she wandered forth into the trackless woods.

When she met barbarous-looking fugitives and they saw her pretty face,
they at once picked berries and mushrooms for her and followed along.
She got a whole court of ragamuffins and she treated them so ill that
they scarcely dared to touch her dress, but sometimes they stabbed each
other. Finally she took service with a skipper’s wife, who was to sail
with her husband to Danzig. Scarcely had it begun to grow dark when the
ragamuffins came out one after another and took service for nothing. The
skipper sat on his cabin in the moonlight, blew his shepherd’s pipe, and
congratulated himself on having got such a willing crew. And never had
an old woman seen a stronger serving-maid. But hardly had they put to
sea when Lina Andersdotter sat herself beside the skipper with her arms
crossed, and all the ragamuffins lay on their backs and sang in tune
with the pipe.

“Do you think I’ll scour your bunks?” said she.

“Beat her, beat her,” cried the old woman, but the skipper only moved
nearer and blew and blew on his pipe. Night and day the vessel rocked on
the bright waves with slack sail, and the skipper played for Lina
Andersdotter, who danced with her ragamuffins, but down in the cabin
sat the old woman crying and lamenting.

When they came to Danzig the skipper stuck the pipe under his arm and
slunk off the vessel at night with Lina Andersdotter and her
ragamuffins. They guessed now that she thought of going to the Swedish
troops in Poland and compelling the king himself to give her his hand.

When she with her followers stepped humming in among the Swedish women
of the camp, there was uproar and alarm, because for two days they had
sat by their wagons without food. The last provisions had been delivered
to the sutlers and divided among the soldiers. Then she stepped forward
to the first corporal she happened on and set her hands on her hips.

“Aren’t you ashamed,” said she, “to let my women starve, when in spite
of all you can’t get along without them?”

“_Your_ women? Who are you?”

She pointed to her bracelet. “I am Lina Andersdotter, the Queen of the
Marauders, and now take five men and follow us!”

He looked toward his captain, the reckless Jacob Elfsberg, he looked at
her pretty face and at his men. How the line surrounded her with their
muskets, and the women armed themselves with whip-handles and pokers! At
night when the light of the camp-fire tinged the heavens, the king,
inquisitive, got into his saddle. As the wild throng came back with
well-laden wagons and oxen and sheep, the troops cheered louder than
ever: “Hurrah for King Charles! Hurrah for Queen Caroline!”

The women thronged about the king’s horse so that the lackeys had to
hold them back, and Lina Andersdotter went to him to shake hands with
him. But he thereupon rose in his stirrups and shouted over the women’s
heads to the corporal and the five soldiers: “That’s well maraudered,
boys!”

From that moment she would never hear the king named, and whenever she
met a man, she flung her sharpest abuse right in his face, whether he
was plain private or general. When Malcomb Bjorkman, the young
guardsman--who, however, was already famous for his exploits and
wounds--held out his hand to her, she scornfully laid in it her ragged,
empty purse; and she was never angrier than when she heard General
Meyerfelt whistling as he rode before his dragoons, or recognized
Colonel Grothusen’s yellow-brown cheeks and raven-black wig. But if a
wounded wretch lay beside the road, she offered him the last drops from
her tin flask and lifted him into her wagon. Frost and scratches soon
calloused her cheeks. High on the baggage-wagon she sat with the butt of
a whip and commanded all the wild camp-followers, loose women, lawful
wives, and thievish fellows that streamed to them from east and West.
When at night the flare of a fire arose toward heaven, the soldiers knew
that Queen Caroline was out on a plundering raid.

Days and years went by. Then, after the jolly winter-quarters in Saxony,
when the troops were marching toward the Ukraine, the king commanded
that all women should leave the army.

“Teach him to mind his own affairs!” muttered Lina Andersdotter, and she
very tranquilly drove on.

But when the army came to the Beresina, there was murmuring and
lamenting among the women. They gathered around Lina Andersdotter’s cart
and wrung their hands and lifted their babies on high.

“See what you have to answer for! The troops have already crossed the
river and broken all the bridges behind them. They have left us as prey
to the Cossacks.”

She sat with her whip on her knee with her high boots, but on her wrist
gleamed the silver chain with its turquoise. All the more violently did
the terrified women sob and moan around her, and from the closed
baggage-wagons, which were like boxes, crept out painted and powdered
Saxon hussies. Some of them, none the less, had satin gowns and gold
necklaces. From all sides came women she had never seen before.

“Dirty wenches!” muttered she. “Now at last I have a chance to see the
smuggled goods that the captains and lieutenants brought along in their
wagons. What have you to do among my poor baggage-crones? But now we all
come to know what a man amounts to when his haversack is getting light.”

Then they caught hold of her clothes and called upon her as if she alone
could seal their fate.

“Is there no one,” she asked, “who knows the psalm: ‘When I am borne
through the Vale of Death’? Sing it, sing it!”

Some of the women struck up the psalm with choked and nearly whispering
voices, but the others rushed down to the river, hunted out boats and
wreckage from the bridges, and rowed themselves across. Each and every
one who had a husband or a beloved in the army had hoped even at the
last she would be taken along and hidden; but all the worst women of the
rabble, who belonged neither to this man nor to that, stood with their
rags or their tasteless, ridiculous gowns in a ring around Lina
Andersdotter. Meanwhile swarms of Cossacks, who had crossed the river to
snap up any straggling marauders, were sneaking up through the bushes on
their hands and knees.

Then her heart failed her and she stepped down from the wagon.

“Poor children!” she said, and patted the hussies on the cheek. “Poor
children, I will not desert you. But now,--devil take me!--do you pray
to God that he will make your blood-red sins white, for I have nothing
else to offer you than to shame the men and die a hero’s death.”

She opened the wagon-chest and hunted out from among her plunder some
pikes and Polish sabres, which she put into the hands of the
softly-singing women. Thereupon she herself grasped a musket without
powder or shot and set herself among the others around the cart to wait.
So they stood in the sunset light on the highest part of the shore.

Then the women on the river saw the Cossacks rush forward to the cart
and cut down one after another of them with the idea that they were men
in disguise. They wanted to turn their boats, and soldiers sprang down
from their ranks to the water and opened fire.

“Hurrah for King Charles,” they cried with a thousand intermingled
voices; “and hurrah--No, it’s too late. Look, look! There is Queen
Caroline who in the midst of the harlots is dying a virgin with a musket
in her hand!”




CAPTURED


Far out in the wastes of Småland and Finnved wondrous prodigies appeared
in the air and after that work lost all worth and the morrow all hope.
People either went hungry or ate and drank with riot and revel amid
half-stifled curses. At every farm sat a mother or a widow in mourning.
During the day’s occupation she talked of the fallen or the captives,
and at night she started from her sleep and thought she was still
hearing the thunder of the hideous wagons on which teamsters in black
oil-cloth cloaks carried away those who had died of the plague.

In the church of Riddarsholm the body of the Princess Hedwig Sofia had
lain unburied for seven years from lack of money, and now a new coffin
had been laid out for the old Queen Dowager Hedwig Eleonora, Charles’s
mother. Several sleepy ladies-in-waiting were keeping the death-watch,
and wax-lights burned mistily around the dead, who lay wrapped in a
simple covering of linen.

The youngest lady-in-waiting arose yawning, went to the window, and drew
back the black broad-cloth to see if dawn had not appeared.

Limping steps were heard from the ante-room, and a little man of a
gnarled and rugged figure, who in every way tried to subdue the thump of
his wooden leg, advanced to the coffin and with signs of deep reverence
lifted aside the drapery. His fair, almost white hair lay close along
his head and extended down his neck as far as his collar. From a flask
he poured embalming liquid into a funnel, which was set in the royal
corpse between the kirtle and the bodice. But the liquid was absorbed
very slowly, and, waiting, he set down the flask on the funeral carpet
and went to the lady at the window.

“Is it not seven o’clock yet, Blomberg?” she whispered.

“It has just struck six. It’s an awful weather outside, and I feel in
the stump of my leg that we’re going to have a snow-storm. But then it’s
a long while since one could foretell anything good in Sweden. Trust me,
not this time either will there be enough money for a decent funeral. It
was only the beginning when the sainted Ekerot prophesied misery and
conflagration. And perhaps the fire didn’t go on over the island in
front of the castle! Over the plain of Upsala it threw its light from
cathedral and citadel. In Vasterås and Linköping the tempest sweeps the
ashes around the blackened wastes--and now there’s burning in all
quarters of the kingdom. Forgive my freedom, gracious mistress, but to
tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie. That’s my
old maxim that saved my life once down there by the Dnieper River.”

“Saved your life? You were then a surgeon in your regiment. You must sit
down by me here and tell the story. The time is so long.”

Blomberg spoke resignedly and a trifle like a priest, from time to time
lifting his dexter and middle fingers with the other fingers closed.

Both cast a glance at the corpse, which slept in its coffin with
gracefully disposed locks, and wax and rouge in the deepest of the
wrinkles. Thereupon they sat themselves on a bench in the window nook
outside the hanging broad-cloth, and Blomberg began whispering his
narrative.

       *       *       *       *       *

I was lying unconscious in the marshy wilderness at Poltava. I had
stumped along on my wooden leg and got a blow from a horse’s hoof, and
when I came to, it was night. I felt a cold, strange hand fumble under
my coat and pull at the buttons. An abomination before the Lord are the
devices of the wicked, I thought; but gentle words are pure. Without
becoming frightened, I seized the corpse-plunderer very silently by the
breast, and by his stammered words of terror I perceived that he was one
of the Zaporogeans who had made an alliance with the Swedes and
followed the army. As surgeon I had tended many of these men, as well as
captured Poles and Muscovites, and could make myself tolerably
understood in their various languages.

“Many devices are in the heart of man,” said I meekly; “but the counsel
of the Lord, that shall abide. No evil can befall the righteous, but the
ungodly shall be filled with misfortunes.”

“Forgive me, pious sir,” whispered the Zaporogean. “The Swedish czar has
left us poor Zaporogeans to our fate, and the Muscovite czar, whom we
faithlessly deserted, is coming to maim and slay us. I only wanted to
get me a Swedish coat so that in a moment of need I could give myself
out as one of you. Do not be angry, godly sir!”

To see if he had any knife, I searched out flint and steel while he was
speaking and made a fire with dry thistles and twigs which lay at my
feet. I noted then that I had before me a little frightened old man with
a sly face and two empty hands. He raised himself as vehemently as a
hungry animal that has found its prey and bent in the light over a
Swedish ensign who lay dead in the grass. Thinking that a dead man might
willingly grant a helpless ally his coat, I did nothing to hinder the
Zaporogean; but as he drew the coat from the fallen one, a letter
slipped from the pocket. I saw by the address that Falkenburg was the
name of the boy who had bled to death. He lay now as fairly and
peacefully stretched out as if he had slept in the meadow by the house
where he was born. The letter was from his sister, and I had only time
to spell out the words which from that hour became my favorite maxim: To
tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie. At that
moment the Zaporogean put out my light.

“With your wise consent, sir,” he whispered, “do not draw the
corpse-plunderers hither.”

I paid little attention to his talk, but repeated time after time: “To
tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie. That is a
big saying my old fellow, and you shall see that I get along further
with it than you do with your disguise.”

“We may try it,” answered the Zaporogean, “but we must promise this,
that the one of us who survives the other shall offer a prayer for the
other’s soul.”

“That is agreed,” I said, and gave him my hand, for it seemed as if
through misfortune I had found in this shaggy-bearded barbarian a friend
and a brother.

He helped me up and at daybreak we fell into the long line of stragglers
and wounded that silently tottered into Poltava to give themselves up
as prisoners. They willingly tried to conceal the Zaporogean among the
rest. His big boots with their flaps reached up to his hips and his
coat-tails hung down to his spurs. As soon as a Cossack looked at him,
he turned to one of us and cried with raised voice the only Swedish
words he had come to learn in the campaign: “I Shwede, Devil-damn!”

My Zaporogean and I with eight of my comrades were assigned quarters in
the upper story of a big stone house. As we two had come up there first,
we picked out for ourselves a little separate cubby-hole with a window
on an alley. There was nothing else there than a little straw to lie on,
but I had in my coat a tin flute, which I had from a fallen Kalmuck at
Starodub, and on which I had taught myself to play a few pretty psalms.
With that I shortened the time, and soon we noticed that, as often as I
played, a young woman came to the window on the other side of the alley.
Possibly for that reason I played more than I should have otherwise
cared to and I know not rightly whether she was fairer and more seemly
than all other women, or whether long sojourn among men had made my eye
less accustomed, but I had great joy in beholding her. However, I never
looked at her when she turned her face toward our window, because I have
always been bashful before women-folk and have never rightly understood
how to conduct myself in that which pertains to them. Never, too, have I
sought fellowship with men who go with their heads full of wenches and
do nothing but hanker after gallant intrigues. “Let everyone keep his
vessel in holiness,” Paul saith, “and not in the lust of desire as do
the heathen, which know not God; also let no one in this matter dishonor
and wrong his brother, because the Lord is a powerful avenger in all
such things.”

I recognized, however, that a man should at all times bear himself
courteously and fittingly, and as one arm of my coat was in tatters, I
always turned that side inward when I played.

She usually sat with arms crossed above the window-sill, and her hands
were round and white, though large. She had a scarlet-colored bodice
with silver buttons and many chains. An old witch who often stood
beneath her window with a wheel-barrow and sold bread covered with jam
called her Feodosova.

When it grew dusk, she lighted a lamp, and since neither she nor we had
any shutters, we could follow her with our glance when she blew on the
fire, but I found it more proper that we should turn away and I
therefore set myself with my Zaporogean on the straw in the corner.

Besides the prayer-book, I had a few torn-out leaves of Müller’s
“Sermons,” and I read and translated many passages for my Zaporogean.
But when I noticed that he did not listen, I gave it over for more
worldly objects and asked him of our neighbor on the other side of the
alley. He said that she was not unmarried, because maidens in that
country always wore a long plait tied with ribbons and a little red tuft
of silk. More likely she was a widow because her hair hung loose as a
token of sorrow.

When it became wholly dark and we lay down on the straw, I discovered
that the Zaporogean had stolen my silver snuff-spoon, but after I had
taken it back and reproached him for his fault, we slept beside each
other as friends.

I was almost bashful, when it was morning again, at feeling myself
happier than for a long time, but as soon as I had held prayers with the
Zaporogean and had washed and arranged myself sufficiently, I went to
the window and played one of my most beautiful psalms.

Feodosova was already sitting in the sunlight. To show her how different
the Swedes were from her fellow-countrymen I instructed my Zaporogean to
clean our room, and after a couple of hours the white-washed walls were
shining white and free from cobwebs. All this helped me to drive away my
thoughts, but as soon as I set myself again at rest, my torments of
conscience awakened, that I could be happy in such misery. In the hall
outside, my comrades sat on floor and benches, sighing heavily and
whispering about their dear ones at home. In due turn two of us every
day were allowed to go out into the open air to the ramparts, but when I
laid myself on my straw in the evening, I was ashamed to pray God that
the lot next morning should fall upon me. I knew very well within myself
that, if I longed for an hour’s freedom, it was only to invent an errand
to the house opposite. And yet I felt that, if the lot really fell upon
me without my prayer, I should still never venture to go up there.

When I came to the window in the morning, Feodosova lay sleeping in her
clothes on the floor with a cushion under her neck. It was still early
and cool, and I did not have the heart to set the tin flute to my mouth.
But as I stood there and waited, she may have apprehended in her sleep
that I was gazing at her, for she looked up and laughed and stretched
her arms out, and all that so suddenly that I did not manage to draw
back unnoticed. My brow became hot, I laid aside my flute, and behaved
myself in every way so clumsily and unskilfully that I never was so
displeased with myself. I pulled and straightened my belt, took my flute
again from the window, inspected it, and pretended I was blowing dust
out of it. When finally the Russian subaltern who had charge over us
unfortunates informed my Zaporogean that he was one of the two who were
to go out into the city that day, I drew the Zaporogean aside into a
corner and enjoined him with many words to pick a bunch of yellow
stellaria such as I had seen around the burned houses by the ramparts.
At a suitable opportunity we should then give them to Feodosova I said.
She appeared to be a good and worthy woman, who perchance in return
might give us poor fellows some fruit or nuts, I said. The miserable
bite of bread that the czar allowed us daily did not even quiet our
worst hunger, I said.

He was afraid to show himself out in the sunlight, but neither did he
dare to arouse mistrust by staying in, and therefore he obeyed and went.

Scarcely was he out of the door, though, when I began to regret that I
had not held him back, because now in solitude my embarrassment grew
much greater. I sat down on the bed in the corner, where I was
invisible, and stayed there obstinately.

Still the time was long, for thoughts were many. After a while I heard
the Zaporogean’s voice. Without reflecting, I went to the window and saw
him standing by Feodosova with a great, splendid bouquet of stellaria,
which reminded one of irises. First she didn’t want to take them but
answered that they were impure, since they had been given by a heathen.
He pretended that he understood nothing and that he only knew a few
words of her speech but with winkings and gestures and nods he made it
intelligible that I had sent the flowers, and then at last she took
them.

Beside myself with bashfulness, I went back into the corner, and when
the Zaporogean returned, I seized him behind the shoulders, shook him,
and stood him against the wall.

But scarcely had I let go my grasp when he with his thoughtless vivacity
stood at the window again, made signs with his hands and threw kisses on
all five of his fingers. Then I came forward, pushed him aside, and
bowed. Feodosova sat picking the flowers apart, pulling off the leaves
and letting them fall one by one to the ground. Vehemence helped me so
that I took courage and began to speak, while I was still considering
how it would be most polite to begin a conversation.

“The lady will not take amiss my comrade’s pranks and unseemly
gestures,” I stammered.

She plucked still more eagerly at the flowers and answered after a time,
“My husband, when he was alive, often used to say that from heel to head
such well-made soldiers as the Swedes were not to be found. He had seen
Swedish prisoners undressed and whipped by women and had seen that the
women at the last were so moved because of their beauty, that they stuck
the rods under their arms and sobbed themselves, instead of those they
tormented. Therefore have I become very curious these days.... And the
love songs which you play sound so wonderful!”

Her speech pleased me not altogether, and I found it little seemly to
answer in the same spirit by praising her figure and white arms. Instead
I took my flute and played my favorite psalm: “E’en from the bottom of
my heart I call Thee in my need.”

After that we conversed of many things, and though my store of words was
small, we soon understood each other so well that never did any day seem
to me shorter.

At mid-day, after she had clattered about with jugs and plates and swung
a palm-leaf fan over the embers in the fire-place, she lifted down from
the ceiling a landing-net with which formerly her husband had caught
small fish in the river. Into the net she put a pan with steaming
cabbage and a wooden flask with kvass, and the net was so long that she
could hand us the meal across the street. When I drank to her, she
nodded and smiled and said that she did not regard it as wrong to feel
pity for captured heathens. Toward evening she moved her spinning-wheel
to the window, and we kept on conversing when it was dusk. I no longer
felt it as a sin to be happy in the midst of the sorrow that surrounded
us, because my intent was innocent and pure. Just as I had seen the
stellaria shining over heaps of ashes among the burned and desolate
houses by the ramparts as a song of praise to God’s goodness, so seemed
to me now the joy of my heart.

When it became night and I had held prayer with my Zaporogean and yet
once more reproached him that he had stolen my snuff-spoon, the
garrulous man began to talk to me in an undertone and say: “I see
clearly, little father, that you are in love with Feodosova, and in
truth she is a good and pure woman whom you may take to wife. That you
never would enter upon any love-dealing of another sort I have
understood from the first.”

“Such stuff!” answered I, “such stuff!”

“Truth is in the long run less dangerous than lying, you used to say.”

When he struck me with my own maxim-staff, I became confounded, and he
proceeded.

“The czar has promised good employment and wages to everyone of you
Swedes who will become his subject and be converted to the true faith.”

“You are out of your wits. But if I could get off and take her home with
me on horseback, I would do it.”

Next morning, when I had played my psalm, I learned that today it was my
turn to go out under the open heavens.

I became warm and restless. I combed and fixed myself up even more
carefully than at other times, and changed to the Zaporogean’s ensign
coat so as not to wear my torn one. Meanwhile I deliberated with myself.
Should I go up to her? What should I say then? Perhaps, though, that
would be the only time in my life when I could get to speak with her,
and how should I not repent thereafter even to my gray old age, if out
of awkwardness I had missed that one chance! My heart beat more
violently than at any affair with the enemy, when I stood with my
bandages among the bullets and the fallen. I stuck the flute into my
pocket and went out.

When I came down on the street she sat at the window without seeing me.
I would not go to her without first asking leave, and I did not know
rightly how I should conduct myself. Pondering, I took a couple of steps
forward.

Then she heard me and looked out.

I lifted my hand to my hat, but with a long ringing burst of laughter
she sprang up and cried, “Haha! Look, look, he has a wooden leg!”

I stood with my hand raised, and stared and stared, and I had neither
thought nor feeling. It was as if my heart had swelled out and filled
all my breast, so that it was near to bursting. I believe I stammered
something. I only remember that I did not know whither I should turn,
that I heard her still laughing, that everything in the world was
indifferent to me, that freedom would have frightened me as much as my
captivity and my wretchedness, that of a sudden I had become a broken
man.

I remember vaguely a long and steep lane without stone pavement, where I
was accosted by other Swedish prisoners. Perhaps, even, I answered them,
asked after their health, and took some puffs out of the tobacco pipes
they lent me.

I believe I disturbed myself over the fact that it was so long till
night, so that I had to return the same way and pass her window in
brightest daylight. By every means I prolonged the time, speaking now to
one man, now to another, but shortly the Russian dragoons came and
ordered me to turn about to my place.

As I went up the lane, I persuaded myself that I should not betray
myself, but should salute in a quite friendly manner before the window.
Was it her fault that so many of the Swedish soldiers of whom she had
had such fine dreams were now pitiful cripples on wooden legs?

“Hurry up there!” thundered the dragoons, and I hastened my steps so
that the thumping of my wooden leg echoed between the walls of the
houses.

“Dear Heavenly Father,” I muttered, “faithfully have I served my earthly
master. Is this the reward Thou givest me, that Thou makest of me in my
youth a defenseless captive, at whom women laugh? Yes, this is Thy
recompense, and Thou wilt abase me into yet deeper humiliation, that
thereby I may at length become worthy of the crown of blessedness.”

When I came under the window and carried my hand to my hat, I saw that
Feodosova was away. That gave me no longer any relief. I stumbled up to
my prison and at every step heard the thumping of my wooden leg.

“I have talked with Feodosova,” whispered the Zaporogean.

I gave him no reply. My happiness, my flower, that had grown up over the
heaps of ashes, lay consumed; and if it had again shone out, I myself,
in alarm, would have trampled it to death with my wooden leg. What
signified to me the Zaporogean’s whisperings?

“Ah!” he went on, “when you were gone, I reproached Feodosova and said
to her that you were fonder of her than she realized, and that, if you
were not a stranger and a heathen, you would ask her to be your wife.”

In silence I clenched my hands and bit my lips together to lock up my
vexation and embarrassment, and I thanked God that he abased me every
moment more deeply in shame and ridicule before men.

I opened the door to the outer hall and began to talk to the other
prisoners:

“As wild asses in the desert we go painfully to seek our food. On a
field that we do not own we must go as husbandmen, and harvest in the
vineyard of the ungodly. We lie naked the whole night from lack of
garments, and are without covering against the cold. We are overwhelmed
by the deluge from the mountains, and from lack of shelter we embrace
the cliffs. But we beg Thee not for mitigation Almighty God. We pray
only: Lead us, be nigh unto us! Behold, Thou hast turned away Thy
countenance from our people and stuck thorns in our shoes, that we may
become Thy servants and Thy children. In the mould of the battle-field
our brothers sleep, and a fairer song of victory than that of the
conquerors by the sword Thou dost offer to Thy chosen ones.”

“Yea, Lord lead us, be nigh unto us!” echoed all the prisoners
murmuringly.

Then out of the darkest corner rose a lonely, trembling voice, which
cried: “Oh, that I were as in former months, as in the days when God
protected me, when His lamp shone upon my head, when with His light I
went into the darkness! As I was in my autumn days, when God’s
friendship was over my tent, while yet the Almighty was with me, and my
children were about me! Thus my heart cries out with Job, but I hear it
no longer and I stammer forth no longer: Take away my trials! With the
ear I have heard tell of Thee, O God, but now hath mine eye beheld
Thee.”

“Quiet, quiet!” whispered the Zaporogean, taking hold of me, and his
hands were cold and trembling. “It can be no one else than the czar who
is coming below in the lane.”

The lane had become filled with people, with beggars and boys and old
women and soldiers. In the middle of the throng the czar, tall and lean,
walked very calmly, without a guard. A swarm of hopping and shrieking
dwarfs were his only retinue. Now and then, turning, he embraced and
kissed the smallest dwarf on the forehead in a fatherly way. Here and
there he stood still before a house and was offered a glass of brandy,
which he jestingly emptied at a single gulp. It could be nobody but the
czar, because one saw directly that he alone ruled over both people and
city. He came so close under my window that I could have touched his
green cloth cap and the half-torn brass buttons on his brown coat. On
the skirt he had a great silver button with an artificial stone and on
his legs rough woolen stockings. His brown eyes gleamed and flashed, and
the small black mustaches stood straight up from his shining lips.

When he caught sight of Feodosova, he became as if smitten with
madness. When she came down on the street and knelt with a cup, he
pinched her ear, then took her under the chin and lifted up her head so
that he could look her in the eyes.

“Tell me, child,” he inquired, “where is there a comfortable room where
I can eat? May there be one at your house?”

The czar had seldom with him on his excursions any master of ceremonies
or other courtier. He took along neither bed nor bed-clothes nor cooking
utensils; no, not even a cooking or eating vessel; but everything had to
be provided in a turn of the hand wherever it occurred to him to take
lodging. It was for this reason that there was now running and clatter
at all the gates and stairs. From this direction came a man with a pan,
from that another with an earthen platter, from yonder a third with a
ladle and drinking utensils. Up in Feodosova’s room the floor was strewn
deeply with straw. The czar helped with the work like a common servant,
and the chief direction was carried on by a hunchbacked dwarf, who was
called the Patriarch. The dwarf every once in a while put his thumb to
his nose and blew it in the air straight in front of the czar’s face, or
invented rascal tricks of which I cannot relate before a lady of
quality.

Once when the czar turned with crossed arms to the window, he noticed me
and the Zaporogean, and nodded like a comrade. The Zaporogean threw
himself prostrate on the floor and stammered his “I Schwede.
Devil-damn!” But I pushed him aside with my foot and told him once for
all to be silent and get up, because no Swede conducted himself in that
fashion. To cover him as much as possible, I stepped in front of him and
took my position there.

“Dat is nit übel,” said the czar, but at once fell back into his mother
speech and asked who I was.

“Blomberg, surgeon with the Uppland regiment,” I answered.

The czar scanned me with a narrowing gaze that was so penetrating I have
never seen a more all-discerning look.

“Your regiment exists no longer,” he said, “and here you see
Rehnskiöld’s sword.” He lifted the sword with its scabbard from his belt
and threw it on the table so that the plates hopped. “But for certain
you are a rogue, for you wear a captain’s or ensign’s uniform.”

I answered, “‘That is a hard saying,’ saith John the Evangelist. The
coat I borrowed, after my own fell in rags, and if that be ill done, I
will yet hope for grace, because this is my maxim: To tell the truth is
in the long run less dangerous than to lie.”

“Good. If that is your motto, you shall take your servant with you and
come over here so that we may prove it.”

The Zaporogean trembled and tottered as he followed behind me, but as
soon as we entered, the czar pointed me to a chair among the others at
the table as if I had been his equal and said: “Sit, Wooden-Leg!”

He had Feodosova on his knee, without the least consideration of what
could be said about it, and round them stamped and whistled the dwarfs
and a crowd of Boyars who now began to collect. A dwarf who was called
Judas, because he carried a likeness of that arch-villain on the chain
around his neck seized a handful of shrimps from the nearest plate and
threw them to the ceiling, so that they fell in a rain over dishes and
people. When in that way he had made the others turn toward him, he
pointed at the czar with many grimaces and called cold-bloodedly to him:
“You amuse yourself, you Peter Alexievitch. Even outside of the city I
have heard tell of the pretty Feodosova of Poltava, I have; but you
always scrape together the best things for yourself, you little father.”

“That you do,” chimed in the other dwarfs in a ring around the czar.
“You are an arch-thief, you Peter Alexievitch.”

Sometimes the czar laughed or answered, sometimes he did not hear them,
but sat serious and meditative, and his eyes moved meanwhile like two
green-glinting insects in the sunlight.

I called to mind how I had once seen the most blessed Charles the
Eleventh converse with Rudbeck, and how it then came over me that
Rudbeck, for all his bowings, amounted to far more than the king. Here
it was the other way about. Although the czar himself went around and
did the waiting and let himself be treated worse than a knave, I saw
only him--and Feodosova. I read his thoughts in the smallest things. I
recognized him in the forcibly curtailed caftans and shaven chins at the
city gate.

There was a buzzing in my head, and I knelt humbly on the straw and
stammered: “Imperial Majesty! To tell the truth is in the long run less
dangerous than to lie, and the Lord said to Moses: ‘Thou shalt not hold
with the great ones in that which is evil.’ Therefore I beseech that I
may forego further eating. For behold I am soon done with the game, and
my gracious lord--who is both like and unlike Your Imperial Majesty--has
in the last year turned me to drinking filtered marsh water.”

A twitching and trembling began in the czar’s right cheek near the eye.
“Yes, by Saint Andreas!” said he. “I am unlike my brother Charles, for
he hates women like a woman, and wine like a woman, and offers up his
people’s riches as a woman her husband’s, and abuses me like a woman;
but I respect him like a man. His health, Wooden Leg! Drink, drink!”

The czar sprang forward, seized me by the hair, and held the goblet to
my mouth, so that the Astrakan ale foamed over my chin and collar. As we
drank the prescribed health, two soldiers entered in brownish-yellow
uniforms with blue collars and discharged their pistols, so that the hot
room, which was already filled with tobacco clouds and onion smell, was
now also enveloped in powder smoke.

The czar sat down again at the table. Even in all that noise he wanted
to sit and think, but he never allowed anyone else to shirk the duty of
drinking and become serious like himself. He drew Feodosova afresh to
his knee. Poor, poor Feodosova! She sat there, a bit sunk together, with
arms hanging and mouth impotently half-open, as if she awaited cuff and
blow amid the caresses. Why had she not courage to pull the sword to her
from the table, press her wrist against the edge and save her honor,
before it was too late? Over and over she might have laughed at my
wooden leg and my disgrace, if with my life I could have preserved her
honor. Nor had I ever before been so near her and seen so clearly to
what a wondrous work she had been formed in the Heavenly Creator’s
hands. Poor, poor Feodosova, if you had but felt in your heart with
what a pure intent a friend regarded you in your humiliation and how he
prayed for your well-being!

Hour after hour the banquet continued. Those of the Boyars and dwarfs
who were most completely overcome already lay relaxed in the straw and
vomited or made water, but the czar himself always rose up and leaned
out through the window. “Drink, Wooden Leg, drink!” he commanded, and
hunted me around the room with the glass, making the Boyars hold me till
I had emptied every drop. The twitching in his face became ever more
uncanny, and when we were finally together at the table again, he moved
three brimful earthen bowls in front of me and said: “Now, Wooden Leg,
you shall propose a health to be drunk all round and teach us to
understand its meaning with your maxim.”

I raised myself again as well as I could.

“Your health, czar!” I shouted, “for you are assuredly born to command.”

“Why,” he asked, “should the soldiers present arms and salute me if any
other was worthier to command? Where is there anything more pitiful than
an incompetent ruler? The day I find my own son unworthy to inherit my
great, beloved realm, that day shall he die. Your first truth, Wooden
Leg, requires no bowl.”

The pistols cracked, and all drank but the czar.

Then I gathered the fragments of my understanding as a miser his coins,
for I believed that, if I could catch the czar in a gracious and mild
humour, I might perhaps save my Feodosova.

“Well, then, Imperial Majesty,” I continued, therefore, lifting one of
the bowls on high “this is Astrakan ale, brewed of mead and brandy with
pepper and tobacco. It burns much before it delights, and when it
delights it puts one to sleep.”

With that I threw the bowl to the ground so that it broke in a thousand
pieces. Then I lifted the next bowl.

“This is Hungarian wine. ‘Drink no more only water,’ writes the Apostle
Paul to Timothy, ‘but use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and
because thou art so often sick.’ So speaks a holy one to weakly men and
stay-at-homes. But go out on the battle-field amid frost and wailing and
tell me: To how many of the groaning would this bowl of sweetish wine
give relief from pain and a softer death?”

Therewith I threw that bowl also to the ground so that it broke. Then I
lifted the third bowl.

“This is brandy. It is despised by the fortunate and the rich, because
they thirst not after refreshment as the desert for coolness, but would
only gibe at the pleasure it gives. But brandy assumes power in the very
moment it swims over the tongue, like a despot in the moment he steps
across a threshold, and the bleeding and dying draw comfort from a few
drops.”

“Right, right!” acclaimed the czar, and took the bowl and drank it, at
the same time that he handed me two gold-pieces, while the pistols
cracked. “You shall have a pass and a horse to go your way, and wherever
you come, you shall tell about Poltava.”

Then I knelt yet again in the straw and stammered: “Imperial Majesty--in
my pettiness and weakness--beside you sits a--a pure and good woman.”

“Haha!” screamed the dwarfs and Boyars and tottered to their feet.
“Haha! haha!”

The czar got up and carried Feodosova toward me.

“I understand. He who limps on a wooden leg may fall in love, too. Good.
I present her to you as she goes and stands, and you shall have a good
situation with me. I have promised every Swede who enters into my
service and is baptized in our faith that he shall become one of our
people.”

Feodosova stood like a sleep-walker and stretched her hands toward me.
What did it matter that she had laughed at me. I should soon have
forgotten that and she would soon not have seen my wooden leg, for I
should have cared for her and worked for her and prayed with her and
made her home bright and tranquil. I should have lifted her up to my
bosom as a child and asked her if an honest and faithful heart could not
make another heart throb. Mayhap she already bore the answer on her
tongue, for slowly she beamed up and became flushed, and her whole face
became transfigured. Far away in a corner house on Priest Street in
Stockholm a lonely old woman sat with her sermon-book and listened and
wondered whether a letter would not be left for her through the door,
whether no disabled man would step in with a greeting from the remote
wilderness, whether I never should come or whether I lay already dead
and buried. I had prayed for her every night. I had thought of her in
the tumult in the midst of stretchers and wailing wounded. But at that
moment I thought of her no longer; I saw and heard nothing else but
Feodosova. And yet I was angry and strove against something heavy which
weighed upon my heart and which I did not understand, but was only
slowly and gradually able to make out.

I bent to Feodosova to kiss her hand, but she whispered, “The czar’s
hand, the czar’s hand.”

Then I stretched myself toward the czar and kissed his hand.

“My faith,” I whispered equally softly, “and my royal lord I may not
desert.”

The czar’s cheek still twitched, and the dwarfs in their terror pulled
forth the Zaporogean from his nook to make the czar laugh at his
ridiculous figure. But then the czar’s arms began to move convulsively.
His face grew gray and he trembled in one of his dreaded fits. He went
toward the Zaporogean and struck him in the face with clenched fist so
that the blood streamed from his nose and mouth, and with such a hoarse
and altered voice that it could no longer be recognized he hissed: “I
have seen through you, liar, from the moment you came into the room. You
are a Zaporogean, a renegade, who have hidden yourself in Swedish
clothes.--To the wheel with him, to the wheel!”

All, even the drunken men, began to tremble and feel toward the doors,
and in his terror one of the Boyars whispered: “Bring forward the woman!
Shove her forward! As soon as he gets to see pretty faces and woman’s
limbs, he grows quiet.”

They seized her, her bodice was cut over the bosom, and, softly wailing,
she was supported forward step by step to the czar.

It grew black around me, and I staggered backward out of the room. I
remained standing on the street under the stars and I heard the clamor
grow muffled and the dwarfs began to sing.

Then I clenched my hands and remembered a promise on the field of
battle to pray for a poor sinner’s soul. But the more fervently I spoke
with my God, the further went my thoughts, and my invocation became a
prayer for a yet greater sinner who with his last faithful followers
wandered about on the desolate steppes.

       *       *       *       *       *

The surgeon ceased with an anxious glance toward the coffin, and the
lady-in-waiting followed him forward to the catafalque.

“Amen!” said she, and the two again spread the covering over the
wax-pale Queen Dowager, Charles’ mother.




STORIES BY
PER HALLSTRÖM




THE FALCON


Renaud’s eyes took the color of the day: dim, lustreless and dark at
twilight; gleaming molten gold when the sunshine flitted across his hair
and outstretched neck, so that they sparkled with widening and
contracting flames as they looked out over the fields toward the blue
haze against the slanting red of the dawn, or toward the rustling of
hares in the thicket, of frightened birds and swaying branches.

Indolent and proud was his glance, the reflection of gilded steel on a
sheathed dagger, of the luck-piece on the brown bosom of a gipsy girl;
indolent and proud, too, the rhythmic motion of his naked feet, and the
line of his arms as he laid himself down at full-length in the passion
of the moment with his hands under his head and heard the horns
jubilating in the distance and the earth quivering with the thud of the
huntsmen.

But when it grew quiet--a quiet wonderfully intense, as if spread out in
a domed vault of restless waiting, with two black huddled specks that
rose in circles at the top--then Renaud raised his glance, as he leaned
on his elbow, his eyes wide and lips half-parted. And when the specks
came together and fell,--one subsiding in broken curves, the other
dropping always above it in a line straight as a spear,--and the blue
welkin rang again with voices, and the riders galloped forward to see
the falcon and the heron finish their fight, the boy ran up close. He
screamed with delight when the falcon, still trembling with ardor, was
lifted on his master’s glove, its wings drooped and its eyes blinded
under the hood.

He often followed along to Sir Enguerrand’s stable yard and saw the
falconers bathe the yellow feet of the hunting birds in metal bowls,
drying them carefully as if they were princes’ children each with its
crested cloth, and caressing their necks till they shut their naked
eyelids and dreamed against the shoulders of the attendants.

Renaud would have given ten years of his life or one of his ten fingers
to be allowed to hold them like that, the proud, silent creatures; but
they might not be touched by everybody, they were noble. They had each
its glove ornamented according to its rank, each its hood with
embroidered pattern, each its special food, and people talked to them in
a strange, archaic speech with elaborate etiquette. Renaud almost
blushed when he met their great eyes filled with languid repose,
especially before Sir Enguerrand’s white Iceland falcon, which had a
crimson hood, a gold and crimson glove, a jess with silver bells on its
foot, and a glance full of proud disdain and the yellow sunlight of
heroic story.

The young birds, which still quivered with rage over their captivity and
dreamed under the night of their hoods of hunting free and of lifting
their necks to scream, birds that were being tamed by hunger and
darkness,--them he might sometimes lift out of their cages. He might
show them the light and see them first totter with blinded eyes and
claws clasped about his wrist, then grow more calm, as their pupils
contracted, almost gentle indeed when he gave them a bit of warm, bloody
meat. But them he cared not for, them he soon wearied of, and he quickly
learned to perceive that none had the Iceland falcon’s breast-muscles of
steel, its long wide wings and quiescent strength. But it was the most
delightful thing possible to see how the young falcons were trained to
hunt according to the wise rules of King Modus, when they had reached
the time that their memory of freedom wore off and they sat, heavy and
blind, dozing on their perches.

The first thing was to accustom them again to fly, but with a cord on
the foot, till they had learned at the falconer’s cry to swoop down upon
the red cloth dummy fitted with a pair of large heron wings, which he
swung in the air on a string in oddly deliberate circles--that was fine
to see!--and to which he had tied the breast of a quail or a piece of
chicken. This the falcons afterwards devoured, the rage at their
confinement being dulled by thirst of blood. Soon they grew so
accustomed to this procedure that they never strained at their cord, no
gleam of wildness remained in their eyes; they at once looked about
calmly for the decoy and only rose according to rule, ascending in a
curve at the proper time to swoop down indolently and playfully in a
wide circle; and when the cord was taken off, they hardly seemed to
notice.

The time had now come to train them for hunting, each for its particular
quarry; the smaller for quail, partridge or sparrows, the larger for
hare or heron or kites, the ignoble kites which had the nature of crows
along with their powerful talons and beaks and which could never be
tamed to eat at a knightly board.

First they were given decoys like their quarry, with a piece of their
favorite food inside for them to search out; then disabled birds, which
they could strike their claws into at once and tear to pieces in
half-roused fury; and so on to prey that was harder to catch, until they
learned to enjoy the intoxication of the hunt. Their old wild instincts
awoke once more in full strength, but controlled and ennobled, so that
they calmly dropped their dying quarry after a short mad drink of blood
and ate only from their ornamented dishes, without greediness, as is
fitting for the birds of a knight.

Their eyes grew indolent and proud and took on the color of the day,
black when their hood was lifted off, brightening to molten gold when
they rose in the sunlight, burning with flakes of fire above the shriek
of their prey. They bent caressingly toward Renaud’s brown hand, but
none of them was like the Iceland falcon with the weary, kinglike
disdain in its glance, and he grew disgusted with them all, pressed
their beaks harshly shut when they tried to play, and threw them from
him carelessly, and mimicked the shriek of the kite so that they
trembled with disquietude and left the aviary with men’s curses behind
them and the wide brown plain before them.

Sir Enguerrand rode out hunting every day, nearly always wearing his
red, gold-embroidered glove, for only the bell-tinkling flight of the
Iceland falcon could awaken song within him and cause him to breathe the
sharp, volatile morning air with delight as if he drank living wine. One
day the falcon had struck a heron, bleeding, into a swamp behind a
thicket, where the huntsman found it and cracked its neck; but the
falcon itself was gone, either lured after a new quarry or recoiling
from the brown water or capriciously letting itself be lifted and
carried along by the wind. In vain they searched, in vain they called it
by the prettiest names, in vain they made the notes of the horn rebound
from every hill. Sir Enguerrand smote the mouth of the head falconer
bloody with his red glove and rode straight home across the tussocks of
the swamp with his lips shut more sharply and his eyelids sunk over the
listless pupils more gloomily than ever. The falcon they did not find.

But Renaud found it, its jess caught in a wild rose bush, awaiting death
by starvation with its grip fast on a branch, one wing drooping, the
other lifted defiantly, its narrow head stretched threateningly forward
with the eyes fixed and beak sharp--a splendid sight it was among the
blood-red berries. Renaud’s hand trembled with eagerness as he loosed
the jess from the thorns, as the bells tinkled around his fingers and
the ring with Sir Enguerrand’s crest, and he cried aloud with joy when
the sharp claws cut into his sinewy arm and he felt that it was his, the
falcon of broadest breast and longest wings and proudest eyes of burning
gold.

It was the more his in that he never would be able to show it to anyone,
for he knew that strict laws protected the sport of the nobles. In the
woods he would have to build a cage for it, early in the morning he
would steal thither before the bird had shaken off its chill, they
would go together across the open with searching looks directed at the
whitish heavens, they would grow fond of each other as they let the
sunlight rise and fall over their heads and the wind carry their silent
thoughts along, and the falcon would never miss its red glove or the
constraint of its pearl-sewn hood. He tied it again and ran down to the
pond, returning shortly with a duck which he had killed with a stone.
The falcon took it, and Renaud’s brain grew numb with intoxication, for
that was a sign that it did not despise him, that it was willing to be
his.

It became his; it bent its head forward, listening, with tranquil
wide-open eyes when the frosty branches cracked under his step in the
stillness of morning; it hopped lightly down from its cage and stretched
out toward his hand, beating its wings as for flight, but it did not
fly--that was only a reminder--and therewith they hurried out to the
softly glowing expanse of the moor.

Their eyes glanced searchingly toward the dark-red welkin. Black lay the
hills and thinning thickets, and the trees slept, their boughs heavy
with silent birds. But the heavens grew brighter, flaming with gold and
red and the lines of the plain turned to blue, and the owl sped close to
the ground, seeking its covert, and the day birds stretched their wings
and chirped softly because of the cold, and dark their flight cut
through the gleaming air. But Renaud and his falcon went quickly on, for
these were sparrows and thrushes, no prey fit for them. Down toward the
marshes sounded already the drawling cry of the herons and wide-circling
beat of their long wings, yonder was the quarry they sought. Then the
falcon was cast with breast already expanded and wings prepared to beat,
and Renaud saw it gilded by the sun as he stood with blinded eyes and
dizzy head while the bird crouched against the deep blue, and heard how
the clang of its bells mocked the shout of the herons.

They whirred like wheels in their terror; now they tended to shoot down
to the shore and hide their long necks and stupid frightened heads with
backward-pointing tufts under the dark wooded banks, now they tried in
wavering uncertainty to rise up in a spiral, thrusting in their broad
wings to attain higher than the enemy could follow, and they swerved
like reeds in the terror of their pale hearts.

But the falcon singled out at the start one of the strongest, one of
those that flew immediately aloft, because it loved to prove its
strength and to feel sharp, light air under its wings, and it rose as
fast and straight as if circling around a sunbeam. Soon it was
uppermost; smaller than a sparrow it looked, but something in the poise
of the wings, in the gathered strength of the body, made one divine the
sparkling savagery of its eye, its outspread talons. Of a sudden it
fell, heavy as steel, on the defenseless upturned neck of the quarry,
and they dropped like a single stone, hardly once eddying aside by a
wing’s breadth. Then Renaud ran and swam and waded so as to arrive
before the heron, which had been stunned by the stroke, could gather
itself together and in the wildness of its desperation make use of its
pointed bill. The falcon gave it the death blow sharply and swiftly,
turning its great eyes, already tranquil, on its master, for it did not
care to soil its feathers with blood, and waiting to have the warm heart
given to it.

Afterwards it did not fly any more that day; when Renaud cast it and ran
ahead with a shout, it only took a couple of wingstrokes and lighted
again on the lad’s shoulder close to his laughing face with proud
composure. It seemed to despise all play and Renaud soon made an end,
his expression taking on the far-gazing seriousness of the falcon. He
grew more fond of it than he had ever been of anything; it seemed to him
that it was his own soul, his longing, with its broad wings and its
glance confident of victory. But there was suffering in his love, the
dismal premonition of a misfortune. Sometimes he was afraid that the
bird would fly away from him in a fit of indifference; would vanish in
a mocking sound of bells, and that would be his death, such an empty
existence. Or it seemed to him that the falcon was honor, gleaming with
sunlight against the blue, which rested itself on his shoulder for new
exploits; and in the midst of his joy he was oppressed with his own
insignificance, so that he hardly dared to look at it. There was grief
at his heart that the bird would never share his delight, that its
glance would never melt warmly into his, and he fled to the realm of
dreams.

He laid himself down in the midst of the moor with the red heather under
his head, and the clouds glided past like human destiny, heavy and
light, gathered within a firm outline or scattered on high, with the
winds’ invisible hand ever at their shoulder, while the bushes bent
their rustling golden branches and Renaud told stories to the falcon.

King Arthur was come again, once more from out the British sea was
handed to him his sword Excalibur, blue as the chill nightly heavens;
his twelve knights lifted their heavy heads from the stone table and
shook off their sleep, the earth resounded with their tread. Gareth was
there, the prince’s son who put on the attire of a scullery boy and
turned Lynette’s ringing scorn into love. Renaud was there, too, was of
noble birth, his horse danced beneath him, and the falcon which now
slept with sunken head sat high on his hand and sought his glance with
eyes that gleamed with joy and the yellow sunlight of heroic story.

But the clouds glided past like human destiny, were driven dark, one
over another into a gigantic vault, from the apertures of which fell
sunbeams pale and sharp as spears, and the falcon dreamed dismal dreams
of impotent wrath and waked with a shriek.

Before long some roving lads chanced to see Sir Enguerrand’s falcon on
Renaud’s hand, and the knight’s men seized him and bore him to the
castle. His heart froze within him when they took away the falcon,
motionless and proud as ever, without a turn of its bended neck or a
look from its cold, calm eyes. They took it to its master, but he had
not a single caress for the missing favorite that had let itself be
touched by ignoble hands. Sir Enguerrand looked down at Renaud in
silence and more and more clearly in his thoughts took form the memory
of an old hunting law from the time when the nobleman’s foot pressed,
steel shod, on the neck of the common people, and his enjoyments
fluttered unassailable around his shoulders. And Sir Enguerrand’s
eyebrows contracted about the certainty that the old law had never been
repealed. The law commanded that he who stole a falcon with a knight’s
crest on its jess should pay twelve sols of silver or six ounces of
flesh from his ribs under the beak of a hungry bird of prey.

Sir Enguerrand knew of Renaud’s poverty and, looking at his naked brown
breast, extended his hand and touched it with an experimental, unfeeling
gesture. He then sent a message to the neighboring castle which reared
its pointed roof above the woods, and invited the seneschal and his two
daughters to be his guests three days later and see some falcons fly,
after they by their presence had heightened the solemnity of punishing a
thief--and they were to come before daybreak.

Renaud’s eyes had widened from the darkness of the prison; they were
black and motionless, and the gleaming pupils contracted but slowly to
mirror the thin-worn clouds and rising sun of the east. Behind Sir
Enguerrand was borne the Iceland falcon, its talons fiercely clasped in
the glove, with the hood over its wakeful and famished glances that had
not seen food for three days.

But further behind curved a line of color that flamed and burned: six
bright horses, almost blue in the gloaming, were led by pages at a run,
with cloths of red velvet on their bending necks. Red was the wagon
which they drew, and within it gold shone heavy on the tender bosoms and
slender arms of the seneschal’s daughters. Six damsels rode after it
with hair blonde as grain, their pointed feet playing beneath the hem
of their kirtles; six huntsmen blew calls which seemed to dance and
swing like wheels from the mouths of the crooked horns. The contours of
the plain danced with them and shot past one another in wine-colored
mist, while the clouds above had glittering borders like the wings of
butterflies.

The party formed into a semi-circle, plume by plume, shoulder by
shoulder, around a bush where the captive was tied. The horsecloths
flapped in the wind; the red taking on depth in the shadow, heavy as
hopeless yearning; the red burning in the light, gay as the clamor of
victory. The maidens’ delicate necks leaned forward out of the wagon,
and their conical hoods flowed into one with the descending line of
their shoulders. They were like herons, thought Renaud, and he almost
expected to hear them add a shrill shriek, when the notes of the horns
fell far away like hurled stones, and all became silent. But when he saw
them more plainly with their thin, straight lips and strange, dreaming
eyes, which were always leveled in a chill ecstasy on something
infinitely distant, and their white, indolent hands in their laps, and
the long folds of their garments--they seemed to him wondrously
beautiful, like the most gorgeous saints’ pictures with a dimming glow
of wax tapers at their feet, and it pained him that they should see him
bound. He let his gaze leap further, past the damsels--shy, jaunty birds
that he wanted to frighten with a whistle--past the red faces and
inquisitively gaping mouths of the grooms, past the brown plain, where
he had run himself tired and dreamed himself tired.

He knew what doom awaited him, but when the Iceland falcon was borne
forward and he realized it was this which was to exact the penalty, he
laughed in his joy, and his heart throbbed with pride, as when he
possessed the bird and the long sunny days and the plain with the
listening winds and the swaying trees of autumn yellow.

When the falcon beheld the light and turned to look around, it gathered
its strength for flight, expecting to be swung on the arm of the bearer,
while its glances rapidly sought its prey in the air; these glances were
sharp and fierce with hunger, flaming as with sparks, and they had no
memory in their depths, they recognized no one. But Renaud’s eyes were
fixed in anxious searching on those of the bird and were filled with
tears of sorrow at not meeting them. They should have mirrored his
life’s bold longing, his contempt, and his dreams on the red heather,
but they only waited greedily for their prey, grimly and coldly as the
human spirit of curiosity or jesting on the thin lips of Sir Enguerrand.
He felt his sorrow smart more bitterly than before and turned aside his
head to recover himself, his eyelids closed and his thoughts fluttering.

He lay thus while the herald proclaimed the law--“twelve sols of
silver--six ounces of flesh over the heart--thus does Sir Enguerrand
safeguard the pastime of the nobles.” He did not look up when his skin
was cut so that the scent of blood should attract the falcon, and when
it sank its beak in his breast he gave no cry, merely trembled, so that
the bird’s eyes flamed up in rage and its wings were spread out as if to
beat.

The seneschal’s daughters leaned their heads forward with a gleam of
interest in their strange dreaming eyes, but they did not raise their
hands from their laps, and their garments lay as before in tranquil
folds. The horses snorted at the smell of blood and stamped on the
frosty ground so that the red horsecloths flapped against the pallor of
the deepening blue, but Renaud lay silent, and the huntsmen stood
needlessly with expanded cheeks and horns to their mouths ready to drown
his cries.

The first agony had clutched at his finest fibres, it seemed as if his
heart would come out with them; but afterwards he had grown numb almost
to the degree of pleasure, and while the blood flowed warmly from the
wound, and the pointed beak tore at his breast, Renaud dreamed himself
into the high blue heaven of his visions, until he understood
everything, death and honor, feeling how it burned and dazzled--the
yellow sunlight of heroic story.

When Sir Enguerrand thought that the legal six ounces had been paid, he
gave his men a sign to blow, and the falcon was lifted off, sated with
blood, its eyes filled once more with tranquil pride, and the troop set
itself in motion more gaily even than before toward the sedge that
gleamed yellow in the distance. But Renaud could not be wakened, he had
dreamed himself to death, and they merely loosed him and let him lie
with the red heather under his head.

The Iceland falcon, however, might never sit on its master’s hand, for
Sir Enguerrand did not care to drink of a cup where another’s lips had
pressed a kiss.




OUT OF THE DARK


We had sat in the studio since just after dinner--a couple of us had not
had any dinner either--and had talked, talked the whole time.

We liked to talk, we had each and every one of us convictions and
opinions so firm that they impressed all the others; yes, even
ourselves, as we thought them over. Some had also a share of scepticism,
which at suitable moments was still more impressive; and a couple simply
kept quiet, which was almost the most impressive of all. To be really
deeply silent under wide puffs of cigar smoke, with a broad back against
the wall, and a large indolent glance out of wide-open eyes, which
during the climax of a speaker are turned away in good-natured
boredom--there is surely nothing in this realm of insolvent currency
that is sounder and gives one longer credit.

But now we were nearly all talking about nearly everything except
politics and religion, for we had come past the years when one takes
such things earnestly and had not come to the years when one takes them
practically. Furthermore we had all read at least a couple of French
novels and so had got over all naïveté. But we touched on the subject of
hypnotism, very carefully with a general feeling that “there was
something in it.” Literature we gripped by the throat and said rough
things to her face, thrusting at her a word sharp as a needle, the word
“style.” That was what she lacked, style. It is a splendid word, this;
one can hide as much or as little as one will behind it, and as an
accusation it is almost instantly condemnatory. And so we talked about
pictures and busts and verse, of synthesis and analysis, of symbolism
and realism. We were all idealists and wrapped ourselves in the very
newest imperial robes with genuine spangles of brass.

I don’t know exactly what we were driving at, the utterances were so
varied, but it came out clearly from the total that we had the deuce
knows what resources within us and were some day going to shake new
artistic tendencies out of our sleeves as easily as the trick man does
rabbits. Among some of us there was a general flair for the joy of
living, which was taken up most seriously and discussed--a bit
tediously--as a settled duty; how one should attain to it was left to
one’s own free discretion and it was assumed that he who went to sleep
over “Hans Alienus” had a satisfactory private reason for his conduct
and might take up gymnastics instead.

But above everything we were zealous for “the new”; we held our fingers
on the pulse of the time with the solemnity of one who had universal
pills to sell, and were only afraid that others would get ahead of us in
guessing its complaints, or that these would change, since everything
progresses so fast now.

Leo had then walked about a while, taken an oblique stand where he cut
diagonals across the room, and snapped his fingers at every æsthetic
dogma that had ever been devised--lively, indefatigable Leo, with his
sharp, somewhat affected painter’s glance from behind his glasses, and
his handsome, exalted countenance as of a patentee of ideas; Leo, who
talked the most of all and made the greatest effect.

“Oh, the devil take it!” he had cried--his accent was half that of a
Parisian and half that of a mountaineer--“I’ve a pain in the head. I beg
leave to take the air a bit.”

A moment later the door had slammed, and one might as well have tried to
catch the shadow of a bird as get hold of him. Also, no one else cared
to go, since it was snowing outside, and furthermore the day was so
gray, so strikingly empty and melancholy; the sort of day that stares at
one searchingly, haunting one like a question to which one can find no
answer. But Leo went out in all weathers, distance had no meaning to
him; he walked so fast that the cold could not bite through his thin
overcoat, and besides he swore himself warm at it, fighting it as if it
was a personal enemy and keeping his brain ready to note every beautiful
composition of lines that he passed.

We knew that in a short while he might be back with us again after he
had hurried almost around the city, his headache gone and his buoyant
figure full of nervous energy, with fresh air in his clothes, his
glasses damp with cold, and a new theory of chiaroscuro in his head. We
therefore continued meanwhile to discuss along the same line as before.
The question rose of what the soul of a masterpiece consisted, to what
degree it should be manifest, and what share emotion should play. We
agreed that the artist’s feeling should be suppressed and only reveal
its immeasurable power in lines of form; otherwise it might destroy the
proper effect, and a tendency toward declamation could not be tolerated
under any condition. We said a number of very telling things, but
nevertheless felt a bit weary, either from the yellow lamplight or
because the air was a trifle close.

Thereupon we heard Leo talking outside the front door. He had someone
with him, then. But whom, since we were all here? We turned
inquisitively in the direction of the door. It opened and over the
threshold stepped a little, dark figure with an ugly black hat on her
head, a summer hat whose brim was bent with age and cast a grotesque
shadow on the wall. She was a little girl, but what sort of girl?

A strange girl, to be sure. Without hesitating a moment and before
anyone said anything, she came into the middle of the room, stood still
and looked about her with a reposeful movement of the head, her hands in
the pockets of her cape, her whole slender figure wonderfully composed
and firm, her motion somewhat like a figure in a dream, when one all the
while thinks: just so, that’s what she ought to do,--and yet feels with
mysterious uneasiness that every gesture has meaning, every step hides
the significance of coming events.

While she stood there close to the hanging lamp, which threw a sharp,
dark shadow across her face, Leo explained hurriedly: “I met her by the
street-car line. She was walking and staring up at the snow just as you
see her with her head thrown back, walking slowly in all the cold. I saw
she was pretty with a well-formed head and wanted to find out who she
was. She wasn’t at all afraid to come along.”

“Take off your hat,” he added eagerly; “I haven’t had a good look at you
yet.”

She took off her hat, went toward the door, and laid it with her cape
on a chair, always with the same remarkable composure of movement. Then
she came forward to the light again, and now we could see her face
clearly.

It was pale and narrow, but not small in proportion to her figure. The
chin was strong, projecting, especially as she held her head very high,
and her profile ran into it prettily from the rounded cranium. The nose
was straight, the lips straight and pale, the contour of the cheek
uncommonly severe and beautiful, the eyebrows a little sunk towards the
middle; and the eyes, partly shut against the light, looked steadily and
calmly out from under short, dark lashes. Her hair, too, was dark. It
was hard to tell the color of the eyes, which seemed to shift from the
suggestion of gray that violets have at twilight to the glimmer of the
darkest lake. Also their size must have been more variable than usual,
for according to the thought that burned in them they widened with
distended pupils, or closed around the steel blades of her glance;--the
muscles around them were indicated under the skin with uncommon
sharpness.

Her figure was slim and childish, that of a city girl of fifteen; the
neck slender and supple. Every expression of the face was childish, too,
but her general appearance bore the stamp of firmness, of set
character, which comes from living life all the way through.

She looked at us without letting her glance rest on anyone, looked
beyond us at the studies on the wall, pausing a little longer there,
till at last her gaze met the yellow dials of the clock in the church
tower as it stared in through the dark atmosphere framed by the window,
and her face caught at it in silent recognition. She sat down a little
to one side of us with her thin wrists crossed, her eyes still,
reposeful and dark.

We did not know what we should say to her, she was so strange, so
different from everything else, as she sat there in her black garments.
It was as if the darkness, the unknown darkness outside which hid the
future, had taken form and pressed in amongst us, grave and enigmatical.

“What’s your name?” someone asked.

“Cecilia.”

The name acted as a stimulus to our imagination. Cecilia, the organ song
that rises through the struggling light of the church vaulting, upward,
ever upward, strong as if it knew its goal, pure through the clarity of
space, freezing under the chill of the stars. But what a strange Cecilia
was this! What song did those eyes dream?

“And you go around alone on such an evening, Cecilia! Were you going
anywhere?”

“No, nowhere. I like to feel the snow falling on me.”

“Were you born here, Cecilia?”

“No, I was born out there--we lived there then.” She stared into the
distance, with raised eyebrows, and her tone gave us the impression that
“out there” was some great, dark teeming city on the other side of the
ocean, that it was deep with black memories, painfully intriguing to the
thought. “But I’ve been here a long while,” she concluded.

She was so pretty with her reticent, dark manner; and her brief answers
waked a trembling echo within one, like the commonplace but meaningful
words in a dream. One could have sat there a long while asking questions
at random and could have listened long.

But Leo grew impatient. He burned with zeal to get at his drawing, for
that was why he had taken up with the girl, and he was not to be put
off. He trusted in his art, did Leo; he was wont to talk of distilling
the quintessence out of a physiognomy--and now he wished to do it with
this subject. Just a few strokes and he would have it all in a
concentrated effect: the tranquillity of chin and eyebrows, the falling
line of the neck--the girl’s whole content should be noted there; but if
so there must be no distraction, no emotions and associated thoughts to
make one’s glance stray.

“Let her alone with your prattle,” he said; “she’s prettier when she is
quiet.” And his eyes glanced with restless penetration, as if he was
afraid of losing something, while he and the others chose their places.

She sat motionless; the whole proceeding appeared to be entirely
indifferent to her and she continued to hold her wrists crossed and to
gaze in front of her without seeing.

But we who did not draw felt that the silence was oppressive. Was not
this unfair to her, was it not wrong to keep her there as a mere thing
to be measured? Was not every glint of her eye, every ring in her voice
worth more than all these lines? Was it not presumptuous to attempt to
translate the changing deeps of life into the language of the deaf and
dumb? What did she hide in the vault of her brain?--what was this girl
that sat there?

The sketchers sweated and screwed up their eyes to make them sharp. They
held up their hands against the light--they seemed to have a harder task
than they had realized--and the girl slowly drooped her eyelashes.

With that we broke in, “You’re tired perhaps, Cecilia? It’s getting on
toward bedtime.”

“I never sleep at night,” she answered, “I haven’t done it as long as I
can remember.”

“But what do you do then? Are you up and about?”

“I think,” she said, and her eyes grew deep, as if night were there
before her--“I lie and think and gaze out into the dark. It’s so silent
then; sometimes I think that everybody is dead, and I, too. It _is_ so
calm, the dark is so weightless and soft and pure.”

Her face had grown rigidly earnest; now it suddenly glowed with nervous
life, as if a thought had burst into flames within it.

“But sometimes I can hear. There is someone walking in the street, far
away; the stones ring under his feet, and he is coming nearer. First I
think that there is only one, and I wonder who it can be. I dream that
it’s for me that he is coming, but I don’t get up; I want him to lift me
from just where I am, and take me to him without saying a word, and
carry me far away. Then my heart begins to throb, and there’s a ringing
in my ears, and I hear many steps, a whole flood of trampling and
dancing which fills the street so completely that I think the house will
fall over and be swept away, as when the river breaks up the dirty ice.

“And I’m so glad that I burst out laughing and stuff the blanket into my
mouth so as not to be heard. Sometimes I hear myself sing, hear it
actually, and lie and stretch out my arms; and the dark is no longer
still, or black, it is like red whirlpools only. And I lie and wait, and
know that it’s for me they are coming, and that they’ll lift me on high
and rush forward. And I know how the sky will look: black, with great
white lights. And the air will be cold and clear; it will all be as if
it were at the bottom of the sea. Everything we pass falls to pieces
behind us; there’s a sound of broken iron and a roaring and groaning of
the earth, but we hasten forward, only forward; we do not turn our
heads, we say nothing to each other, only scream with joy, as when it
thunders.”

Her voice had a shrill and brittle ring, jubilant, but nearer to weeping
than laughter. All at once she changed her tone.

“That’s the sort of thing I think at night,” she said wearily.

“But when do you sleep? You must surely sleep.”

She gave a clear, childish laugh.

“All day if I like. Mamma pulls up the curtains of course, but I can
keep on lying. Then I can sleep, especially if there’s sunshine. One can
dream so finely in the sunshine; one can laugh and run, and then it gets
so warm, and when one gets up one is so deliciously tired!”

“But after that? Don’t you go to school, don’t you have any work?”

“Papa wants”--she uttered the first word with a peculiar intonation.
“Papa (I don’t know whether he is my father,” she added indifferently)
“wants me to go away; no matter where, he says. I went to school, but
they didn’t suit me there. Now I’m left in peace. Mamma talks to them
when they come after me; she has such a proud way with her, mamma has.”

“And what do your parents do?”

She looked up with a scornful dismissal of the subject and made no
reply. Suddenly she laughed under her breath.

“Such a funny word!” she said. “It’s out of the catechism, isn’t it?”

“What word?”

“Parents. Oh, I know it means father and mother,” she drawled the words
out to a comic length. “Mother is slender,” she continued, “but she’s
beginning to get fat and lace herself. You ought to see her when she’s
drunk soda water, oh, you just ought to see her! Her teeth aren’t as
pretty any more either; she envies me mine.”

“And what does she want you to be?”

“It’s all the same”--her voice was cuttingly hard--“it’s all the same,
whatever she wants; it’s all the same, what she says. I shan’t do it
anyhow.”

It was easy to imagine her home after that; what was worse, it was easy,
too, to imagine her future.

She seemed to have tired of being examined now, and turned around to one
of the sketchers.

“Why do you paint girls?” she inquired of the corpulent Hans.

“Hm! Because they’re pretty.”

“Why don’t you paint war, or red clouds like those there?” She pointed
to a landscape opposite her.

“Because I’ve never seen a war.”

“But red clouds you’ve seen surely. I’ve seen much handsomer ones than
those; they don’t really burn.”

It was an impressionistic canvas; darkness creeping along the ground,
darkness leaping up to meet one from the fields, and in the midst of the
fading red off in the distance a lonely shivering poplar, the one thing
that rose above the plain, cutting like a sword against the sky proudly
and tragically. As the girl looked at it her pupils widened, contracted
and widened and trembled; she had understood it at once, and her face
became fixed by the sorrow of the picture.

“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it hard to learn to paint?”

“That depends. Can you draw?”

“I can’t do anything but play the piano. Mamma taught me that, but I
can play better than she does, though we have no piano now.”

“Do you sing, then?”

“No, I _can’t_ sing”--her voice sounded more mournful than at any time
before, almost despairing--“I can’t sing at all now.”

“Probably your voice is changing; you’ll have plenty of voice if you’ve
had it before.”

“Oh, yes,” she replied impatiently; “it isn’t the voice I’m thinking of,
but I can never sing any more.”

She raised her head slowly and regarded us all with a swift, deep,
strangely searching look.

“What do you do that for?” we asked. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m looking at your eyes.” Her voice was childish, naïvely frank and so
earnest!

“Do you often do so?”

“Yes, among strangers; then I don’t look at them any more.”

“And how have you found our eyes?”

“About like other peoples’. There is none of you who can _see_.”

“How do you mean?”

“I can’t say any more, but there is no one that sees, really sees
straight through you.”

“Hm! Maybe not. Have you met any such person?”

“No, never, but I keep on searching.”

“And if you should see such a person, what would you do?”

“Just wait, wait for the tide.”

“The tide you listen for at night?”

“Yes, for then it will come soon.”

“Finish me now,” she urged with a look at the sketchers. “Get done with
your drawings.” And she sat as before.

But no one could draw in his usual style, no one was satisfied with his
beginning. All were seeking for something, expressions changed, flaming
with eagerness or drooping with fatigue. It seemed as if their thoughts
tried to catch something fluttering, shifting, something that
continually fled them.

Under these looks that were concentrated on her, together with the sharp
yellow light, she grew dazzled, hypnotized, her mouth became tired, her
eyes closed experimentally a couple of times, and then the lashes
remained lowered and she went suddenly to sleep like a child, sinking
back on the arm of the chair.

All had ceased drawing and had leaned forward with the same thought.
What was she, this remarkable girl? Could all this be true?

Here she had come out of the dark, had come silently as the dark itself,
enigmatical, disturbing as a dream, impossible to comprehend, impossible
to lay hold of. Was she not just a vision,--not sprung from us, oh, no,
but a vision of the slumbering darkness, the uncertain possibility, the
great new chance that might come? But her breathing was audible, light
and easy; her lean hands had the marks of the sempstress, her clothes
were threadbare--an actual girl to be sure, with blood such as ours, a
developing soul! What would ever become of her, what would become of
her?

As if the question had been put in an audible voice, Jacques took it up,
the silent Jacques who was wont to make an epigram out of every
conviction and who filed every doubt to the point of a needle. But he
now got up to speak, advancing toward the girl with his angular motions
like those of a clasp-knife and his pointed head leaning forward.

“What will become of her? What will become of her?” he said; “that’s
easy to guess.”

He bent down toward her, but so as not to overshadow her; his hand
followed his words, but with light, caressing movements, as if he were
touching an invalid. But on the floor his long shadow stood bowed
against hers, and his gestures became pointed, sharp as thrusts,
merciless, threatening to the slumberer in black.

“What will become of her--you who can wish but not will, you who wear
away your time with comparing and feeling and looking, look here at what
will become of her! First her mouth will be transformed--her eyes, too,
of course, but there the change won’t be permanent all at once; her eyes
will go back and forward a long while and kindle and be quenched, but
the mouth will retain inflexibly all that is strong enough to force in a
wrinkle, to bend a line. The lips will come to shut harder when they are
not opened by laughter. Here everything will be constricted together:
the weariness of desire, the suffocation of kisses; hate which congeals
into loathing, shame that is stifled; and then certitude will encompass
them, the certitude that it must be so, that that is the whole.

“The cheek”--he almost touched it as it shone soft and pale in the
light--“the cheek gets more sharply modeled, more set in contour, sinks
in a little here, as when a flower petal withers. The forehead,--it will
stay the same, only a line straight across as if an invisible knife had
cut into the brain and divided the thoughts; barred in some to pine away
up here, and driven the others to wrestle in nakedness and confinement.
The hair,--it will grow darker with age and disfiguring attention, it
will droop here and lie like a weight. The eyebrows,--you see there is a
bend between them, they sink here, which gives a suggestion of nervous
sensibility, of vibrating thoughts; but this will become no longer
noticeable when she opens her eyes, nothing will be noticeable then but
their depth of weariness, their infinity of freezing chill.

“Imagine the color of the whole harder, more vivid; weigh down all that
is heavy, make sharp all that is light and delicate, harden all that is
strong, banish joy with a cuff and blushes with a sneer, and there you
have her, that is what will become of her. Pretty, eh! prettier than now
because she’ll be even more effective to draw, eh?”

He stood silent a while and looked at her, his shadow trembling. Then he
went on:

“That’s what she’ll come to be, and that, too, is all that such as we
have the right to think of. But what she _might_ be, ah! what she might
be. If someone could take her as she lies there and dreams, take her and
carry her far away and lift her on high in his arms. We keep on talking
about art here, about what we intend and what the time is dreaming of.
If there is anyone that has the same dreams that she has and the
strength to will them, if there is anyone who’s a man, she is his. And
what might not become of them both!”

He looked about him at us others who sat bending forward, gazing with
hypnotized looks at the white gleaming countenance of the girl. At his
last words we started half up; it was as if we waited that some one
should come, that some one should grip us by the hair and hurl us
forward, should lift us to where space was bright around us. Something
should come to birth in us, sharp as a steel blade, unbending,
unsullied, the blue sword of our will and life should be created among
us, true life with warm soil and the sun that impels to growth. In the
heat of the room we felt it already glowing in us by anticipation,
cheeks and foreheads were red, a warm current of blood set in, there
were white sparks in the eyes, and a shiver trembled along the spine.

Thereupon the girl awoke, as if roused by the clamor of all these
thoughts as they beat their wings and struck together. First her eyes
stared in fright, and then she laughed.

We all sunk back again.

“I didn’t know where I was,” she said.

“Oh, you weren’t afraid of us, were you?” inquired Jacques. “You saw
that there was no one dangerous here.”

“Oh, no, I surely wasn’t afraid.” She laughed more merrily still. “No,
there’s no one dangerous here. But I must have been asleep a long while.
I must go now.”

We all offered to go with her, but she looked straight at us.

“Why?” she asked, “is the outside door locked?”

“No, not yet. But the street, the dark, the snow!”

“Oh, only that! But I went out alone. No, no, nobody needs to go along
with me. I know my way.”

Nobody thought of opposing her, her voice was so remarkably firm; almost
scornful, we thought.

We lighted her to the door and saw her small feet step quickly on the
yellow lamplight, which grew paler along the tile floor and was broken
by the light on the stairway.

When she was half out of sight we called for the last time, “You’ll come
again, won’t you?”

She turned her head. From under the ugly old hat her eyes looked out at
us, deep and sombre.

“No,” she said, “I shan’t come again. Why should I?”

She was gone, and we all rushed forward to the window, opened it and
leaned out, stretching ourselves over the sill. She had not got down
yet. Before us lay the black bulks of the houses, defiantly heavy and
motionless to our gaze. Here and there was a faint yellow gleam from a
street lamp; one could see some large, loose flakes glide through it.
The air was gray, swarmingly alive with darkness and a little farther
out across the roofs the church tower stood with its shining dials
against the black horizon.

Then she came out of the house door; we could hear her steps resound up
to where we were through the chilly air. We followed the little black,
indistinct figure out to the corner, where the lamplight took hold of it
and threw it out into tawny, pale relief. With that she was gone,
vanished into the blackness, into the snow and night and threatening
uncertainty from which she had come.

We fastened the window and sat down. In order to do something we tried
to discuss, as we were used to, about art and its future. We talked
about symbolism and syntheticism, but it all seemed less worth while now
than before, and from time to time a speaker would stop in the midst of
his period in order to examine a line in the half-finished portrait of
Cecilia, and then give it up in despair.

And there was no warmth in the discussion, only dry and ill-tempered
sallies that cut now at one man’s, now at another’s hobby and caused
them to bolt off into the inane, where comprehension ceases. Soon we
were all silent.



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