But the years passed, and the bridal might have to wait. The young girl got to be twenty-five, she was nearly thirty, and still she danced at balls with half-closed eyes, but her mouth was no longer open; she now knew that this looked unseemly, so she held it convulsively shut, a bloodred streak. Would it never come, the great, the wonderful experience? Her glance was that of a drowning woman. “Save me, I’m sinking, I’m going under! Youth is so short. Look! my color is already fading, my bosom is sinking in, and my young flower is withering!” She tried being provocative and bold, she was afraid she had been too timid before, perhaps that was not the right way. … But the gentlemen were already laughing at her covertly when they drank healths over their punch, and some of them mocked her in public. Others understood her better and thought within themselves that she might make a good wife and an ardent mistress. But they had no desire to marry, and to seduce a girl of family would be a risky business. When they left the ball they could easily and without any ado find the way to their old place, to the room with the smoking lamp, or with a red night-lamp hanging from the ceiling.
“What are we doing with our lives, we men, and what are we doing with theirs?”
Martin turned back into the city.
On a street corner he met a poet, who was freezing in a thin yellow-green ulster. He was a few years older than Martin and already a bit famous, for he wrote with fabulous ease the loveliest verses on any theme, mostly about girls and flowers and June nights on the lowlands of Scania, whence he had come. He had a pale face and a thin red beard; and when he met a fellow-artist, his great childlike eyes took on a wild and staring expression, as if he were considering within himself: “Shall I murder him, or shall we go in somewhere and consume alcohol?”
They went up to the “Anglais” and drank green chartreuse.
The poet talked about himself. He confided to Martin that he was a decadent. He worshiped everything that was disintegrating, rotten at the core, and doomed to destruction. He hated the sun and light—here he shook a clenched fist at the gas candelabra on the ceiling—he loved the night and sin and all alcoholic drinks of a green shade. He had most of the well-known venereal diseases and an insane fear of crowded squares. Nothing in the world could make him go diagonally across Gustavus Adolphus Place. This disease gave him a very special pleasure, for he took it as the forerunner of general paralysis. And general paralysis was the great sleep; it was nirvana.
Martin listened absently. “Light is good,” he said to himself, “and darkness is good too. But sometimes darkness is bad, and light too.”
“But how is it,” he asked, “that your poems are really not in any essential way different from those which generally get the prize in the Academy?”
At these words the poet’s glance darkened, his lips suddenly became thin and narrow. He took a dirty sheath-knife from his pocket, pulled it halfway out, and laid his index finger on the bare blade.
“How deep can you stand cold steel?” he asked.
“You misunderstand me entirely,” said Martin, laying his hand calmingly on the other’s arm. “I love your poems. Only I don’t see rightly the connection between them and your inner life as you have just pictured it.”
The poet laughed.
“It’s amusing to hear that you love my poems,” he said. “The things I’ve allowed to be published up to now, you see, are mere skits. Good enough for the mob. Look here!” …
He took a newspaper clipping from his pocket, a review of his last volume signed by a well-known critic. This authority mildly deplored that some of the poems could not be acquitted of a certain tinge of sensualism which gave an unpleasing effect. In others again the poet struck purer tones, such as were fitted to give rich promise for the future.
“Well, that was quite friendly,” observed Martin, when he had read it.
“Friendly!” The poet again made a convulsive grab in his pocket where the knife lay. “Friendly, you say? Shouldn’t such an insect creep in the dust before the wretchedest of my poems?”
“Oh, yes,” said Martin, “yes, naturally; but since it isn’t the custom for older folks with younger—”
The poet was silent, took a drink, then was silent a long while.
Martin drank too. The strong green liquor burned in his palate and his brain. Thereupon the woman of the morning was there, the one who walked in the sunlight and smiled. Was she asleep now, did she dream, did she smile in her dreams? Or did she twist about sleepless on her bed in longing for a man?
Should he write to her? He could easily find out her name. No. She would only show the letter to her friends, and they would titter and laugh. …
The café was nearly empty. In the farthest corner a regular customer sat alone behind a newspaper. In a mirror on the opposite wall was the vision of an old gentleman with white whiskers and a red silk handkerchief sticking out of his breast-pocket. He was fat and red and white, red by nature and white with powder, and as
