Martin Birck’s Youth

mood for best enjoying Martin Birck. To call further attention to details would only tend to spoil the pleasure of those attempered to appreciate it. I must return to the original statement that the reader’s reaction to it will be peculiarly personal. For myself, I differ almost completely from the author in his conclusions about life, I object strongly to his rather supine attitude, yet I admire and love him. I find him as brilliant as the modern French masters, and much more kindly. He has given me more than have nine-tenths of the worthy authors with whom I agree. There is in him a strict sense of truth, a tenderness, a humor which put him definitely on the side of the angels. He will annoy, will scandalize, many excellent people, but I am afraid I am not sorry that he should. He has been called the enfant terrible of Swedish literature. Perhaps we have been taking him too seriously; no doubt he himself will think so. After all, there is something perennially fascinating about a naughty child.

C. W. S.

Martin Birck’s Youth

The Old Street

I

Martin Birck was a little child, who lay in his bed and dreamed.

It was twilight of a summer evening, a green and tranquil twilight, and Martin went holding his mother’s hand through a big and marvelous garden where the shadows lay dark in the recesses of the walks. On both sides grew strange blue and red flowers, swaying back and forth in the wind on their slender stalks. He went along holding his mother’s hand, looking at the flowers in wonder and thinking of nothing. “You must pick only the blue ones; the red ones are poisonous,” said his mother. Then he let go her hand and stopped to pick a flower for her; it was a big blue flower he wanted to pick, as it nodded heavily, poised on its stem. Such a marvelous flower! He looked at it and smelled it. And again he looked at it with big astonished eyes; it wasn’t blue, after all, but red. It was quite red! And such an ugly, poisonous red! He threw the naughty flower on the ground and trampled on it as on a dangerous animal. But then, when he turned around, his mother was gone. “Mamma,” he cried, “where are you? Where are you? Why are you hiding from me?” Martin ran a little way down the walk, but he saw no one and he was near to weeping. The walk was silent and empty, and it was getting darker and darker. At last he heard a voice quite near: “Here I am, Martin. Don’t you see me?” But Martin saw nothing. “Here I am all the time. Why don’t you come?” Now Martin understood: behind the lilac bush, that was where the voice came from. Why hadn’t he realized that at once? He ran there and peeped; he was sure his mother had hidden there. But behind the bush stood Franz from the Long Row, making an ugly face with his thick, raw-looking lips, till he finished by sticking out his tongue as far as he could. And such a tongue as he had; it got longer and longer; there was no end to it; and it was covered with little yellowish-green blisters.

Franz was a little rowdy who lived in the “Long Row” slantwise across the street. The Sunday before he had spat on Martin’s new brown jacket and called him “stuck-up.”

Martin wanted to run away, but stood as if rooted to the earth. He felt his legs grow numb beneath him. Then the garden and the flowers and the trees had vanished and he was standing alone with Franz in a dark corner of the yard at home by the ash barrel. He tried to scream, but his throat was constricted.⁠ ⁠…

II

But when he woke, his mother was standing by the bed with a clean white shirt in her hand and saying, “Up with you, little sleepyhead; Maria is off to school already. Don’t you remember that the pear tree in the yard is to be stripped today? You must hurry if you want to be there.”

Martin’s mother had blue eyes and brown hair, and at that time the glance of her eyes was still bright and smiling. She laid the shirt on the bed, nodded to him, and went out.

Maria was Martin’s big sister. She was nine. She went to school and already knew what many things were in French.

But Martin still had slumber in his eyes and the medley of the dream in his head, so that he couldn’t bring himself to get up.

The curtain was drawn back, and the sun shone straight into the room. The door to the kitchen stood ajar. Lotta was laughing at the kitchen window while she chatted with someone; it was sure to be Heggbom, the porter. Finally Heggbom began to sing down in the yard with his rummy voice.

“If I had King Solomon’s treasure chest
With money in heaps and masses,
I’d off to Turkey and never I’d rest
Till I’d bought me a hundred lasses.”

“What would you do with them all,” inquired Lotta; “you that can’t manage even your own wife?”

Martin couldn’t hear what Heggbom answered, but Lotta began to laugh with all her lungs. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” she said.

Now the porter’s wife had come into the yard, it sounded as if she was throwing out a tub of dishwater. With that she began to scold Heggbom, and Lotta as well. But Lotta only laughed and slammed the window.

Martin lay half awake, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. There was a crack that was just like Mrs. Heggbom if one looked at it right.

The clock struck nine in the neighboring church, and when it had stopped striking, the clock in the hall began. Martin jumped out of bed and ran to