The winter night slept around them. It snowed no longer, and they went home in a white moonlit mist through the snowdrifts, in through her door and up the stairs. It got brighter and brighter the higher they climbed. They stopped at a stairway window and looked out. The greater part of the mist was now below them, it lay wrapped around the yards and open spaces beneath, but in the upper regions of the air everything was almost clear; it was bluish and bright as a night in August. A wide ring of light was around the moon, and in the pale glow the world lay as if icebound and petrified. Out of the ocean of mist down there arose a lonely gable wall without a window, which absorbed the cold glance of the moon and stared blindly and emptily back. A long shiver went through them both, they pressed hard against each other, closing their eyes, and everything was lost to them in a kiss.
It became a long and wonderful kiss. He felt all her being dissolve, while he heard in his ears the sound of distant bells from a little country church far away between hedges and wheat fields. It seemed to be a Sunday morning: he saw a neat gravel plot, red peonies were glowing from the flower beds, white and yellow butterflies were fluttering about the bushes and the lawn, and he heard the rustling of mighty trees. He was walking with her among the trees, but through their murmur passed a breath of autumn, the yellow butterflies were yellow leaves, and some were already dark with frost. The wind carried with it broken accents and words, which were sometimes like the dry words of everyday speech, sometimes like furtive whispers about something that had to be kept secret, with all of which was blended as it were the echo of the actor’s strange intonation a little while before when he said, “I loved Ophelia.”
But he did not relinquish her mouth. They sank ever more deeply into one another. He seemed to be voyaging through space: in the white moon-mist burned a red star, first faint and expiring, then more powerful and ever nearer, growing and broadening into a flaming spring of fire, to which he fastened his lips tightly. He seemed to burn without suffering, the flames cooled his tongue like a slightly bitter wine, until he felt that he was drinking in everything: satiety and hunger, thirst and coolness, the sun’s health and the midnight’s anguish, the lucid thought of day and the morbid brooding of moonlit dusk, all the joy and all the misery of the earth—from this one spring.
Colophon
Martin Birck’s Youth
was published in by
Hjalmar Söderberg.
It was translated from Swedish in by
Charles Wharton Stork.
This ebook was produced for
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Robin Whittleton,
and is based on a transcription produced in by
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Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
The Kiss,
a painting completed in by
Edvard Munch.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
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