One evening my glance fell on a woman’s portrait in the recess with the porcelain stove, a faded portrait behind a glass. I had presumably seen it many times before without its having tempted my curiosity or my even noticing it at all. This time it occurred to me to ask who it was.
Herbst looked up, a bit surprised.
“That is my wife,” he answered.
My astonishment made me embarrassed. There was a moment’s silence.
“I never knew you were married … Or that you …”
Herbst smiled meditatively in his sofa corner, while he gathered together the chessmen and laid them in a drawer, each in its place according to a regular scheme.
“Yes, I believe I was married.”
“You believe!”
“It’s so long ago. I’ve almost forgotten.”
His eyes stared into the dusk with a blind and empty look.
“If I didn’t know that I have a worn ring with her initials in a drawer somewhere, and a church certificate and some other trifles, I might sometimes believe the whole thing was a dream—a bright and happy dream, whose contours break up and fade in my memory inch by inch, a shade more with every passing year.”
“A good many have passed since then,” he continued. “I was twenty, and she was eighteen. After two years she died.”
And he added, while he slowly stirred the fire, “Her name was Margot.”
I could not take my eyes from the portrait, which surveyed me with a faded and stiffened smile. But behind the smile I caught a glimpse in the half light of a sad and winsome girl’s face, almost a child’s, framed in long curls after the style of the time, with a wonderfully blue and bright glance.
Some days later I was in company with Herbst on the way home from a party.
He lived on the outskirts of Östermalm, and we went out there along Strandvägen. That was in the days when new and old flourished together on the street, two or three modern houses in the midst of gray dilapidation, outhouses and old wharf sheds.
It was a cool night in the early part of October. The moon was up; a cold, moist wind was blowing. The big buildings on Blasieholm formed a dark mass, whose broken and irregular edge seemed to be catching at the wisps of cloud that drove forward against a deep blue background. The still, heavy water of Nybro Inlet mirrored a broad glittering moon-path in oily rings, and along the wharves the lumber sloops raised a thin and motionless forest of masts and tackle. In the upper air was haste and tumult; the clouds hunted each other from west to east, till over the woods of Djurgården they congested into a low black wall. It was as if heaven were breaking camp for a journey, for a flight.
It was late, and Herbst seemed weary.
“Let’s hurry up a bit,” he said. “Moonlight isn’t healthy. One doesn’t sleep well after it.”
“Perhaps … But it’s beautiful just the same.”
“I suppose so. Sunlight’s more beautiful.”
We went on a stretch in silence. The city slept around us. A policeman’s rapid step rang on the pavement, iron heels against the stone; a shrill laugh came from an alley, a heavy carriage rumbled past somewhere in the distance.
Herbst picked up his thread of thought anew:
“The sun, you see, is healthier and above all more up-to-date. It celebrates the new, the fresh, the present, what we must admire so as not to be out of things—even if it seems tiresome sometimes. Toward the old, the past, it is pitiless; it calls an old ruin straight out an old ruin.—The moon, on the other hand, the moon is a reactionary. It reveres the dynasties of banished beauty. It makes us think of the beauty that enchanted us in our first youth, which we laugh at now or have forgotten; of voices that are silenced; of caresses under which we trembled long ago.”
His voice shook a little.
“—And of the dead whom we loved.”
He was very pale, and his look had a sickly gleam. I had never seen him like that. I felt that I was walking beside a strange man whom I had never known and never seen by daylight. Was he drunk? His features had new lines, and his voice sounded with a new tone. I don’t know why, but at that moment it occurred to me that he was a passionate worshipper of music. I recalled that I had heard him play the violin one evening when I stood outside his closed door, and when I had rung, the violin ceased, but no one opened. Perhaps music was to him like a fair but depraved mistress, for whom he fevered in darkness and solitude, but for whom he blushed in daytime, in the sunlight.
We had come into the newly-planted avenues. All was silent and bare; not a human being was visible. The sparse, thin skeletons of the trees threw long shadows in the moonlight.
Neither of us spoke for a long while.
Finally Herbst took my arm: “Let us turn off! I have something to show you over there. It’s nothing remarkable, only an old house.”
We turned to the left into a dark side street. The houses stood sleeping in low irregular lines, and far away a lamp flared in the wind with a reddish light.
The street ascended sharply. Herbst stood still before a high-paled fence.
“Here is where we used to live,” he said.
It was an old dilapidated two-story house with a pointed gable and a high, steeply-inclined tile roof—probably an old citizen’s residence of the last century—shaded by five or six tall lindens and a gigantic chestnut. The moonlight burned white on the wavy glass of the gable windows. On the gray masonry the net of linden branches was outlined like the broken web of a monster spider, and from the round attic window with broken glass in its ragged frame stared the darkness.
The gate stood open,
