Henrik took up the thread.
“Yes, you are right; it is between the old and the new self that the battle is, and as long as there is a new which is the stronger, one can always master the phantoms. There is a continuous growth. The old goes, the new comes—or the old goes, that’s really the one certain thing, for how long can one be sure whether the new will come in its place? Suppose the supply should stop some day, suppose nothing under the sun should be new any more, and one only became poorer with every year and every day that passed!”
“Yes,” said Martin, “that sort of thing happens sometimes. And there are cases then in which a man digs up the oldest, the deadest, and most withered thing in his past and begins to worship it anew without seeing the caricature. That’s nearly the worst of all. Better the old saying: poor but proud.”
They sat silent a few minutes. The sun had gone, and still it was not twilight yet. It was almost brighter in the room than just before; everything in it had merely become suddenly pale.
Henrik broke the silence.
“Yes,” he said, “it’s a melancholy feeling to grow out of oneself and one’s old associations—but what’s it matter so long as one grows? And what is melancholy, anyhow, if it isn’t what the rowdy said of the toothbrush, a new kind of amusement invented by the upper classes? But the melancholy is only there when it’s a matter of associations and music and ideas. It was really something else I’ve been thinking of all the time. I’ve been thinking of love and women. If one comes into that province, it isn’t only just melancholy any longer; no, one can’t get off so cheaply. A man is fond of a woman. He wants the whole of eternity to be in that feeling. And yet he can’t escape reflecting that this emotion must be subordinate to the same law of growth as everything else in the world, that some day he will weary of what he loves just as one wearies of the moonlight music in Faust. I have not had many love affairs, but, believe me, I have never even in my imagination begun the game otherwise than with the thought: may she be the first to tire, and not I!”
“I’m afraid that prayer will not be often uttered,” said Martin. “To be sure both a lover and a married man may be betrayed, but it rarely happens that they wish to be.”
“Still I’m ashamed of the prayer, for I know it comes straight from my heart’s great cowardice. How far must we not have come from the primitive simple and straightforward conception of these things to think it is happier to be betrayed than to betray! And yet that’s how I feel. What does love signify to me; what does it ever mean to a man? Why should there be anything tragic in the fact that a man is betrayed in love? If he takes it tragically he merely becomes comic. And if on the discovery that he is a cuckold he breaks off reading a good book, he deserves to be one. But women—it’s a different thing with them.”
Henrik’s glance was fixed on vacancy.
“Deserted women,” he said—“there’s something special about them. One can’t escape lightly from the thought of them. No, if they scold and fuss and make a row, it’s easier at once; then the whole thing becomes burlesque, one shakes it off, and is free. Then one asks oneself, ‘How did I ever come to love such a creature?’ One easily persuades oneself that one has never loved her, and so she’s out of the story. But the others—it seems the most painful thing of all to me to imagine her whom I love withered and pale, discarded, put in the shadow side of life, while I myself live on. … It is a paradox, I realize—it can never happen; one cannot at the same time act so and feel it so. And yet … I met an old woman just now, here on the street, right outside your door. She was old and very pale and a little comic. She was quite shabbily dressed, too—one of the poor who are too proud to beg. One often sees such old women; there was nothing remarkable about her, nothing that distinguished her from any others of her kind, except that all at once, when I came close to her, she struck me as so like—No, I can’t tell you straight out. There’s a young girl I’m very fond of. I’m so fond of her that we’re going to be married, perhaps very soon. It was she that the old woman was like, despite the difference in age and all the rest—it was one of those indefinite resemblances that one thinks one sees the first moment, and the next it’s gone without one’s knowing in what it consists. But that moment was enough for me; a chill went through me, a shudder as if I had seen something terrible, and it seemed to me only all the worse that everything else was as usual: the sun was shining and people were on the street. … The girl I care for stood before me, she passed me, withered, discarded, a little comic. It came over me that not even the thought that I myself was dead and lying under the earth could be any consolation to me in such a case; the only conception that could bring any relief was that I was living as wretched and exhausted as she.”
They sat quiet a long while.
“Tell me,” Martin finally asked, “who is she, the girl you are fond of? That is, if it’s no secret. Do I know her?”
“Yes,” said Henrik, in a subdued voice, “you know her, and I can tell you. It is Sigrid Tesch.”
Sigrid Tesch. Martin saw before him
