Harriet Skottë. He repeated the name to himself and tried to analyze the impression it evoked. He dwelt in particular on the forename and murmured, “Harriet, Harriet.” But this gave him no impression of her nature; it roused only an indefinite conception of something English and pale and blonde, a sensation of tea fumes and benevolence and chilly bedrooms with varnished floors as at a hospital. The surname, again, only suggested family, an uncle who was on the Board of Trade, and a cousin who was a lieutenant in the Army Service Corps. But if he whispered to himself the whole name, “Harriet Skottë,” there came in a new element which quite excluded the others, then it became something quite different and new, then he felt as if she herself passed through the room with her brown hair glinting in a sunbeam.
He started at the ringing of the hall bell; he heard the maid open the front door and a familiar voice asking if he was at home. He stuffed the letter into his pocket. The next instant the door opened and Henrik Rissler stood in the doorway blinking at the sunlight, whose copper-red rays struck horizontally across the room.
XII
Henrik Rissler had come down from Uppsala. He had just taken his preliminary degree and in a couple of weeks was to make a tour down in Europe while he wrote his thesis, “On Romantic Irony.” He had no independent means, but his uncle—a bank lawyer, politician, and millionaire—had offered to pay for the trip. This Martin already knew from Henrik’s letters. But before he started he was to rest a few weeks. He was somewhat overworked, for he had studied hard so as to get away from Uppsala as soon as possible, and he had also taken extra time to write some critical studies for a magazine and so become a little better known among the score or so of men who interested themselves in such things.
Martin had been expecting him for a couple of days and had a bottle of wine and a pack of cigarettes ready.
Henrik shaded his eyes from the sun and said: “Here everything is the same. Here time has stood still.”
“Yes, in this immediate region,” answered Martin. “Only they have built a big factory chimney over opposite. It has been quite a diversion for me in solitude. For a while I worked in competition with the masons, but I was beaten. I began on a poem when they had just begun on the chimney; now the chimney is done, but not the poem. It’s beautiful, what’s more—the chimney, I mean. Especially in the evening as a silhouette. The smoke no longer belches out, one forgets its purpose; it is no longer a chimney, it is a pillar tower built by some Chaldaean prince and priest, who mounts it when night comes on and measures the course of the stars.”
“Yes,” said Henrik, “one forgets the purpose, then first it becomes beautiful.”
“No,” replied Martin, “it doesn’t become beautiful because one forgets its purpose, but because one invents for it another which has the prestige of old and venerable poetic tradition. But outside of that, in and for themselves, without any fancification, factory chimneys are among the most beautiful of modern structures. They promise less than they make good, and at least they are no masquerade figures either in Gothic or Renaissance.”
Henrik smiled. “You’re talking in the style of the ‘ ’Eighties,’ ” he said.
Henrik Rissler sat in his old place in the sofa corner, Martin sat in the rocking-chair at the writing table. They were drinking wine and talking about Uppsala, about books and women, and about a new philosopher by the name of Nietzsche. And as they talked, the sunbeam in which the motes danced like red sparks grew ever narrower and more oblique and more decidedly red.
Martin surveyed Henrik. He found him changed; his face was leaner, stronger, and more masculine in contour. Why had he said, “Here everything is the same, here time has stood still”? He had had an experience, but what? He was in love presumably; he would perhaps go so far as to get engaged—to whom? Was it his cousin Anna Rissler? She was fond of him and he knew it. No, that couldn’t be. Was it Maria Randel, or Sigrid Tesch?
“It’s curious,” observed Henrik. “Have you felt the same thing?—how painful it is to search for old associations and not to find them. To read over a book one has been fond of, or hear an opera into which one has formerly been able to put everything imaginable and a bit more—and sit empty-handed, wondering where it has all gone to!”
“Yes,” Martin agreed, “it’s a strange, oppressive feeling. One feels as if it was one’s duty to stick to the past, as if one were committing an infidelity. … And one can do nothing. Why is it really so painful? Is it perhaps because there is no plaintiff in the suit, no clearly formulated claim to meet? For the plaintiff is not the book or the music which one has lost touch with, not the mood which shrinks away; the plaintiff is one’s old self, and that is dead and buried, it is supplanted and refuted by the new, it has no plea to make and yet it does make a sort of plea. Therein lies the paradox, and there is nothing as vexatious
