Chapter V (2)

“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.