Chapter V (5)

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.