Or perhaps it was unnecessary that his life should end so tragically. When he thought it over more carefully, this seemed to him even a trifle banal. He might just as well move to a small town, to Strengness or Grenna. There he could live alone with a parrot and a black cat. He might also have an aquarium with goldfish. Behind closed shutters he would dream away the day, but when night came he would light candles in all the rooms and pace back and forth, back and forth, meditating on the vanity of life. And when the townfolk passed his house on the way home from their evening toddy at the rathskeller, they would stop to point at his window and say: “There lives Martin Birck. He has taught like a sage and lived like a fool, and he is very unhappy.”
All this and a lot more Martin Birck thought as he went out the Avenue across the park on the way to Hasselbacken.
IV
The orchestra struck up the opening bars of Mefistofele.
Martin was sitting out by the balcony railing with Henrik Rissler. They listened to the music, looked out across the terraces, and said little. Henrik Rissler had a smooth white forehead and calm limpid eyes. His glance was long and questing; it seemed to slip over the objects nearest it in order more quickly to reach those farther off. He was the only one of Martin’s comrades who had sought his company outside of school. They used to go to each other’s homes in the afternoon to talk and smoke cigarettes, and once in a while they had gone on long walks together, often in rain, snow, or wind, out to the park or through the suburbs, talking the while of everything that concerns young men, of girls and God and the immortality of the soul. Or they would go into the gas-lighted streets with the sensation of throwing themselves into the turmoil of the world, would stand in front of etchings in bookshop windows, where they admired beyond everything a lithograph entitled Don Juan in Hades with a motto from Baudelaire:
The hero all the while, half leaning on his sword,
Gazed at the vessel’s wake and deigned not to look up.
This picture excited their imagination, their hearts beat more quickly when in the current of humanity they brushed elbows with a pretty girl, and they believed they were living through an entire adventure every time an old painted professional threw them an ardent glance.
But the original cause of their friendship was that they had both read Jacobsen’s novel, Niels Lyhne, and loved it more than other books.
Inside the house the others were talking and laughing around the punch-bowls, forming themselves into groups and coteries. Most of them grouped themselves after their old custom according to social and intellectual similarities and differences, which even on the school benches had united some and separated them from others; Gabel and Billfelt, Jansson and Moberg, Planius and Tullman. Others went about somewhat morosely and talked about all keeping together.
Josef Marin rapped on a bowl and called for a toast “to the ontological proof.” It was drunk with rather halfhearted acclaim. Everyone was so tired of school matters that it didn’t seem worth the trouble even to make fun of them.
Josef Marin was to be a clergyman, but he was still not quite settled in his faith.
The music played student songs, “Stand Strong!” and “Here’s to Happy Student Days!” Dusk began to fall over the tops of the trees, over the roofs and chimneys of the city and the heights of the southern mountains, the pallid dusk of spring twilight, which rarefies and uplifts all things, making them hover with the unreality of a dream world. The crowd, who were clinking glasses and drinking down on the terrace and who a little while ago could still be clearly divided into their component parts as lieutenants and students, guardsmen and girls, and townsfolk with their wives and children, had now melted together in the dusk into an indefinite mass. As though by an inexplicable caprice the murmur suddenly became silent, so that for the moment one could hear the plash of the water in the fountain and the last sleepy bird-notes from the trees. And in the west already flamed a solitary and mighty star.
“Look at Venus,” said Henrik; “how she glitters!”
Martin sat contemplatively drawing on the table, and the strokes under his hand formed themselves into a woman’s arms and breast.
“Tell me,” he asked suddenly—he felt that he was blushing—“tell me, do you think it’s possible for a man to live chaste till real happiness in love comes to him? That’s surely what one would wish. To be with women whom one has no feeling for, who belong to another class, who have dirty linen and use ugly words and only think about being paid—that must be loathsome.”
Henrik Rissler too became a little red.
“It’s possible,” he said; “yes, for some it’s always possible. People are so different. But I know this much of myself, that it will hardly be possible for me. Then at least the great love mustn’t keep me waiting much longer.”
They sat silent and gazed at the star, which glittered ever more brightly in the darkening blue.
“Venus,” Martin murmured, “Venus. She’s a great and beautiful star. But I don’t see why she should have a name. Anyhow, she doesn’t come when she’s invoked.”
Martin suddenly heard a strange voice behind his chair.
“Very true,” said the voice, “very true. She doesn’t come when she’s invoked. An equally mournful and accurate observation!”
Martin turned in surprise. The stranger was a man carelessly dressed, with a student cap, a pale narrow face and
