Martin was delighted with all this, although he didn’t realize it.
Spring at last, real spring. … It came first when the Royal Family drove out to the big park with their plumed and golden equipage. How the whole day shone, how radiant it was with blue and sunshine and spring around the chimneys and roofs, around the weathercock on the church tower! In Martin’s street the lindens were already out, and over the leaning fences hovered clouds of white blossom, cherry blossom, and hawthorn. On the square and along the Avenue the people thronged, the whole city was out in bright and gay-colored costumes, and in front of the Life Guards’ barracks stood the light blue guardsmen, whom Martin loved and worshiped, on duty with sabers drawn. The Royal Family drove past in a cloud of plumes and gold, the crowd cheered and Martin cheered, and then everybody went out to the park to drink fruit juices and mineral water at Bellmansruh. All around whined violins and street-organs, and Martin felt completely happy. But on the way back they stopped a moment to look at the Punch and Judy theater. The landscape was already beginning to darken, but people still flocked around the puppet theater where Punch was just going to beat his wife to death. Martin pressed close to his mother. He saw mouths open in a broad laugh around him in the dusk; he understood nothing, but the sound of the cudgel on the doll’s head frightened him—were people laughing at that bad man there beating his wife? Then came the creditor, and him too Punch beat to death. The policeman and the devil he treated similarly, till finally Death lured him into his cauldron, and that was the end. Martin couldn’t laugh or weep either; he only stared abashed and terrified into this new world, which was so unlike his own. On the way home he was cold and tired. The sun was gone, it grew darker and darker; the king had long since driven home to his castle, and drunken men scuffled and bawled around him. The anemones which Martin had picked at the edge of the wood were withered, and he threw them away to be trampled into the mire.
But when he was home at last and it was night and Martin lay in his bed asleep, he dreamed that father hit mother on the head with a big cudgel.
IX
Summer skies and summer sun, a white house with green trees. …
Martin’s parents had rented several low-ceiled rooms with rickety white furniture and the bluest window-blinds in the world for the small square windows. Close to these windows passed the state highroad. Here wagoners and wayfarers from the islands of the Malar went by continually to and from the city, all stopping to pay the bridge toll, for the white house belonged to the bridge-tender and stood just at the abutment of Nockeby bridge. The bridge-tender sat every evening on his porch, which was twined about with hop vines, drinking toddy, holding out his money-box to the passersby, chatting and telling yarns, for he had been a sea captain and voyaged to many strange lands. But now he was a little old white-haired man, who had for many years had the tenancy of the bridge and had become a well-to-do citizen.
On the evening of the first day, when the packing boxes, trunks, and clothes-baskets were still standing higgledy-piggledy in the room—which still looked a little strange, though every wardrobe and chair, every flower in the wallpaper seemed to say, “We shall soon get acquainted,”—and while the evening meal with butter and cheese and some small broiled fish was spread by the window, Martin sat silent on the corner of a chest surveying the strange and new picture: the gray highroad with telegraph poles in which the wind sang, and the dark shadowy figures of the horses and peasants outlined against the greenish-blue western sky. Obliquely across the way a little to one side was a slope with a clump of oaks, whose verdure stood out strong and heavy in the summer twilight. Among these oaks was one that was naked and black and could not put out leaves like the others, and in its branches the crows had built a nest.
Martin could not take his eyes from this black tree with the crow’s nest between the branches. He thought he knew this tree, that he had seen it before, or heard a story about it.
And he dreamed of it that night.
Summer skies, summer days. Green fields, green trees. …
The fields were full of flowers, and Martin and Maria picked them and tied them up in bouquets for their mother. And Maria said to Martin: “Look out for snakes! If you step on a snake, he’ll think you did it on purpose, and then he’ll bite you.” So Martin trod as carefully as he could in the high grass. She taught him too that it was a great sin to pick the white strawberry blossoms, because it was from them the strawberries grew. They agreed that the first one who saw a strawberry blossom should say, “Free for that one!” And the one who had said it should then have the right to pick it when
