Short Fiction

young artist, and to my thinking it was very fine.

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

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

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

I was a little surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

The Wages of Sin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, I’m sorry to admit.”

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

---

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

I sat and looked at the young girl.

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

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

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

---

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

We had laid the rings and the sword in a heap on the ground and were now standing in groups, whispering and smiling, while the dusk came on. But the