Martin Birck’s Youth

and growth; every day new truths arose before his mind and new beauty before his senses during his long lonely wanderings to the edge of the city or in the woods when spring had begun. And spring.⁠ ⁠… At that time spring was still a real spring⁠—not a disease, an intoxication, a fever in the blood, in which all old half-forgotten yearning and regret rises to the surface and says: “Look, here I am! Do you recognize me? I have slept long but I am not dead.” Nothing of that sort, but an awakening, a morning, a murmur in the air, and a resounding song. And at that time the thousand unsatisfied desires which he bore within him were like so many shimmering hopes and half-uttered promises, for no long years of emptiness and disappointment had yet managed to sharpen them into cutting knives which wounded and tore at the soul. And if he did not believe that all these obligations, or even most of them, would be redeemed by life, they were still like bribing possibilities, like a lever for dreams without goal or bounds; and even at the moment when the book he held in his hand or the experience he had had in the course of the day whispered warnings in his ear and advised him not to believe in happiness, these dreams were woven into a longing without bitterness and a melancholy as luminous as a spring twilight.

Nevertheless these warnings came ever more closely together, and ever more often it happened that in the midst of the dreams youthful blood conjured up he caught himself listening to the other voice, the voice that welled up from the depths of the oldest times and was echoed in the newest books of the day, the strange voice that none of the hundred new gospels which periodically as equinoctial storms had blown through the minds of men could silence for more than a brief moment, the voice which said: “All is vanity, and there is nothing new under the sun.” Why was he alive, and what was the meaning of it all? He did not cease to ask himself these questions, for he still continuously demanded of the life which he saw with his eyes that there should be something behind it, something which could be called life’s meaning. For most of the happiness which he saw men possess and that which he saw them strive for seemed to him like the fairy gold in the story, to be withered leaves, or it appeared to him like nice playthings, something not to be taken seriously. If he turned his gaze to his own life as he lived it from day to day, he could not escape the thought that in itself it was miserable and empty and that its only worth lay in the uncertain hope that it would not remain as it was. But what he hoped for was not something that one could approach step by step with work and patience and a hundred small sacrifices⁠—competence and respect and that sort of thing⁠—what he hoped for was something indefinite and indescribable: a sunrise, a breakup of the ice, an awakening from a painful and purposeless dream.

For it was like a painful and purposeless dream that his life appeared when he looked at it with waking eyes and found it filled with shabby joy, with vulgar sorrow and ignoble anxiety. Now and then he wrote some poems and stories to earn a little money and to prove how far his words could follow his thoughts, but with every new year all he had written in the old seemed to him childish and worthless, and he felt that nothing would amount to anything which could not fill him completely with the joy of creation. Beyond this he fulfilled almost automatically the sum of actions, or more properly gestures, which usually characterize a young man in a government office or to which other circumstances may lead. He went to his work as late in the day as possible and left as early as propriety allowed. He made acquaintance with his fellow employees and shared in their amusements. He drank punch, ate suppers, and visited cheap girls of the streets; he loved music and often sat at the opera among the blackamoors and musical enthusiasts of the upper gallery, and he sang quartettes and took his reward in double file when an old school superintendent hung the gilded tin funnel on a rose-colored ribbon around his neck with paternal hands.

And he said to himself: “No, I’m dreaming. This is not life.”

IX

Years passed.

… Martin was roaming about in the twilight. The streets and squares lay white, snow was falling softly and silently. A man went in front of him on a zigzag course lighting a lamp here and a lamp there.

Martin went along without a purpose; he hardly knew where he went.

Suddenly he noticed that he was crying as he walked. He did not clearly know why. He did not ordinarily find it easy to cry. Some snowflakes must have caught in his eyelashes, and his eyes had got wet.⁠ ⁠… He turned off into a side street and came to a bit of park, he brushed past a couple half snowed in on a bench, and proceeded on among the trees, where it was lonely and empty and the branches drooped heavily under the wet snow.

… Strange! A hovel in an alley, a smoking lamp. Two naked arms which bent and reached forward to the window, and the sound of curtains coming down. The girl, who was humming the latest popular tune while she slowly and unconcernedly hung up her red bodice⁠—he hummed too so as not to speak aloud⁠—was she pretty or ugly? He did not know, he had hardly set eyes on her. It was not she for whom he longed.

He had sat at home in the dusk, the icy blue dusk of a March afternoon, twisting