The poet emitted a sigh. Martin studied him: the face of a child under the red-bearded mask of a pirate. It occurred to him that he had possibly hurt this man’s feelings just now, and he felt the need of saying something agreeable.
“Do you know,” he said, “if you shaved off your beard you would certainly look like the most profligate kind of monk?”
The poet brightened up.
“I dare say you’re right,” he said, trying to get a look at himself in a mirror. “What’s more, I’ve written poems with a leaning toward Catholicism. You ought to read my poems sometime, the real ones, the ones that can’t be printed.”
“Surely,” said Martin. “Where do you live?”
The poet declared that he didn’t live anywhere. He hadn’t had any dwelling-place for three weeks, and he didn’t need any. He wrote his poems on the table of the café and slept with girls. In the house of one of them he had his green-edged traveling bag with some extra collars and the poems of Verlaine, and there too were his own manuscripts.
Martin began to be really impressed, but he found no outlet for his thoughts, and silence once more spread itself between the two whom chance had driven together on a street corner.
The clock struck twelve, the gas was turned half down, and the poet, feeling the approach of inspiration with the darkness, began to write verses on the table.
Martin said good night.
Sture Square lay white and empty. The snow had ceased, the moon was up, and it was more bitterly cold than ever. To the east a new street without houses opened like a great hole in a wall. To the west a snow-covered jumble of old shanties and stone gables was spread out in the misty moonlight, and from one of the streets of sin which slunk between them echoed a woman’s laugh and the sound of a gate being opened and shut.
X
It was late when Martin came home, and he was dead tired but could not sleep. Black butterflies fluttered before his eyes, and thoughts and rhythms came to him as he lay and stared into the dark. He raised himself in bed and relighted the candle on his bedside table, where paper and pen were at hand as always. He felt no feverish overexcitement, only a deep weariness, which pained him but did not delude. He saw clearly where his thought wavered and needed the support of a rhythm, a bit of melody; he changed and erased, and finally a poem evolved.
You up yonder
Who are deaf and dumb!
You up yonder,
Who with your right hand squeeze
The fresh and sweetly-smelling fruit of Good
And with your left constrict
The poison-dripping maggot nest of Ill,
Looking upon them
With equal satisfaction!
You up yonder,
Whose glance is dim
With all the emptiness of space—
I have a prayer to you.One prayer, but one,
Which you can never hear
And cannot fulfill:
Teach me,
Teach me to forget
I ever met your glance.
For look!
In youthful days
I myself made a god
In mine own image,
A warm and living and aggressive god,
And on a spring day I went out
To seek for him through all the world and heavens.
Not him I found,
But you.
Not life’s divinity
But death’s I found under the mask of life.Take the memory of the sight of you
Away, O horrible One! That memory is
A hidden sickness, is a worm that gnaws
My life-tree’s root.
I know it well, with every barren year
And every day that runs in vain
It gnaws yet closer to my being’s nerve.
It gnaws and preys upon
All that in me which is of human worth,
All that which dares, all that which wills and works;
Nor does it spare
The wondrous, brittle time-piece of the soul
Which points out Good and Ill.Speak, you up yonder,
Is it your will
To re-create me after your own image?
Was that the meaning hidden in your word:
“He who hath seen God, he must die the death”?
O horrible One,
Have you the heart to infect
Me, a poor child of men,
With your immortal vices?
XI
The afternoon sun fell across the writing table and gilded everything: the inkstand, the books, and the words he wrote on the paper. The smoke from the chimneys rose straight and tranquilly toward heaven, and in a window just opposite a young Jewess was playing with her child.
Martin was writing to his sister:
Dear Maria:
Thanks for your letter. Mamma is poorly as usual, perhaps a little better these last weeks. Papa keeps the same, only he gets more silent every year. It’s very quiet here at home, for as you know I am not one either to love idle talk. Silence is golden. Uncle Janne, Aunt Louise, etc., are still, unfortunately, alive and in health, though it doesn’t make much difference anyhow, since we are not likely to be their heirs. But they are always annoying me by asking about the prospects of my work, whether papa isn’t in line for the Order of Vasa soon, whether it’s true that your husband takes morphine, and so on. Otherwise there is no harm in them.
You ask whether I’m writing much just now. No, very little, but on the other hand I have an appointment for a long job as amanuensis, and last night I dreamed very clearly and distinctly that papa and I got an Order of Vasa together, since the king couldn’t manage to give us each one.
Thanks for the invitation to come to you in the summer, but it’s not likely I can get off—my appointment will last over the summer. Too bad your husband is nervous. Nice your little boy is well. Remember me to all.
He put the letter in an envelope and laid it aside.
He sat and thought about his sister.
“Is she happy?” he asked himself. And he was forced to answer: “No, she is not happy. She does not perhaps know it herself. Six years ago she was very happy, when she was married and became a
