Per Hallström

“ THE DRIZZLE AUTUMN is here again with its dismal days, and the sun is hiding himself in the darkest corner of the heavens so that no one shall see how pale and aged and worn he has grown in this latter time. But while the wind whistles in the window-chinks and the rain purls in the rain-spouts and a wet dog howls in front of a closed gate down below on the street and before the fire has burned down in our tile stove, I will tell you a story about the drizzle. ”

“ But now he has loved and died with Tristan, so that now he hardly touches the ground, and everything is silent and all the world appears as a cool and lovely memory. Yes, what have I, Leonard the artist in wood-cuts, not experienced, seeing that I stand here with the fate of a mighty heart behind me! In this hour I feel love as a great enrapturing memory, something that lives in my soul but is not able to choke my freedom. I have come to drink the potion without its fatal poison. Verily art can give appeasement even to the most burning Now. In art is freedom! ”

“ When the falcon beheld the light and turned to look around, it gathered its strength for flight, expecting to be swung on the arm of the bearer, while its glances rapidly sought its prey in the air; these glances were sharp and fierce with hunger, flaming as with sparks, and they had no memory in their depths, they recognized no one. But Renaud’s eyes were fixed in anxious searching on those of the bird and were filled with tears of sorrow at not meeting them. ”

“ Then I knelt yet again in the straw and stammered: “Imperial Majesty—in my pettiness and weakness—beside you sits a—a pure and good woman.”
“Haha!” screamed the dwarfs and Boyars and tottered to their feet. “Haha! haha!”
The czar got up and carried Feodosova toward me.
“I understand. He who limps on a wooden leg may fall in love, too. Good. I present her to you as she goes and stands, and you shall have a good situation with me. I have promised every Swede who enters into my service and is baptized in our faith that he shall become one of our people.” ”

“ The heather droned and the lake splashed so that the island and the sedge and all the closed water-lilies swayed. As soon as mealtime had passed, Johannes lay down at full length nearest the hearth, but Lena, who did not yet feel that she possessed the right of ownership to Wander Isle, huddled together outside at the entrance with one hand as a pillow. She still heard the juniper sputter with heart’s delight, and as she fell asleep she counted the small sparks that sailed forth above the chink in the roof like stars through the night air. ”

“ It did not occur to Leonard to say good-bye. And yet as he went up the granite steps he felt that now he was passing out of the worthy Lundstrom’s perspective. Here ashore the fisherman’s power of giving certitude was no longer the same.
No, for up on the bridge went Woman. Nothing could save one from her. Ah, this delicate shiver in the air, this trembling in the nerves of the invisible which sent its waves through coat and Sunday paper straight into one’s heart! The restlessness of the day had deepened to a livelier and more dangerous poison. ”

“ Renaud almost blushed when he met their great eyes filled with languid repose, especially before Sir Enguerrand’s white Iceland{223} falcon, which had a crimson hood, a gold and crimson glove, a jess with silver bells on its foot, and a glance full of proud disdain and the yellow sunlight of heroic story.
The young birds, which still quivered with rage over their captivity and dreamed under the night of their hoods of hunting free and of lifting their necks to scream, birds that were being tamed by hunger and darkness,—them he might sometimes lift out of their cages. ”

“ No sense for the big masses. Only to make bridges and set up gabions, clap his hands at captured flags and a couple of kettle-drums. No sense for state and army, only for men.”
“That may be also a sense,” replied the ensign.
He walked vigorously back and forward, for his fingers were already so stiff with cold that he scarcely could hold his drawn blade.
The Holsteiner shifted the ragged coat-collar around his cheeks and went on with muffled voice and eager gestures: “King Carolus laughs with delight when the bridge breaks and men and beasts are miserably drownt. No heart in his breast. ”

“ At that the peasant shrunk together as at a frost-cold breeze and whipped the small, shaggy horses more and more wildly. He hallooed and beat and urged them into a thundering gallop. The lantern-light fell caressingly on the fir bushes and the burnt homesteads; the wagon banged and tottered among the stones, and creaked in its joints.
Lina Andersdotter lay on her back in the hay and looked at the stars. Whither was she carried? What fate awaited her? She wondered and wondered. On her wrist hung the bracelet as a talisman, a pledge for the accomplishing of Ogilvy’s wonderful prediction. ”

“ Although the czar himself went around and did the waiting and let himself be treated worse than a knave, I saw only him—and Feodosova. I read his thoughts in the smallest things. I recognized him in the forcibly curtailed caftans and shaven chins at the city gate.
There was a buzzing in my head, and I knelt humbly on the straw and stammered: “Imperial Majesty! To tell the truth is in the long run less dangerous than to lie, and the Lord said to Moses: ‘Thou shalt not hold with the great ones in that which is evil.’ Therefore I beseech that I may forego further eating. ”

“ No evil can befall the righteous, but the ungodly shall be filled with misfortunes.”
“Forgive me, pious sir,” whispered the Zaporogean. “The Swedish czar has left us poor Zaporogeans to our fate, and the Muscovite czar, whom we faithlessly deserted, is coming to maim and slay us. I only wanted to get me a Swedish coat so that in a moment of need I could give myself out as one of you. Do not be angry, godly sir!” ”

“ The electric footlights below threw splintered rays up through the grilled flooring of the galleries, until the gleams were lost in an incredible labyrinth of ropes, weights and pulleys. The whole was like a giant skeleton, a fantastic loom.
This is where they weave dusty lies, thought Leonard, who found the rear view of the drama grotesque and oppressive, so that he almost began to long for the streets again. People must love illusion astoundingly, if it can be made big business to such an extent. ”

“ Sir Enguerrand looked down at Renaud in silence and more and more clearly in his thoughts took form the memory of an old hunting law from the time when the nobleman’s foot pressed, steel shod, on the neck of the common people, and his enjoyments fluttered unassailable around his shoulders. And Sir Enguerrand’s eyebrows contracted about the certainty that the old law had never been repealed. The law commanded that he who stole a falcon with a knight’s crest on its jess should pay twelve sols of silver{232} or six ounces of flesh from his ribs under the beak of a hungry bird of prey. ”

“ There is a disease of hatred which is inborn in man. But still it is great to endure together. And an honest and deep despair is something quite different from a little cold and limp aversion without marrow in its bones. Everything that’s honest, everything that doesn’t falsify the fundamentals of life, has a worth, let it look as devilish bitter as it may.”
Modin looked away, troubled by the other’s confidence.
“My dear friend, I haven’t desired to hear all this. From your experience you will hardly succeed in making an apology for marriage.”
Axelson gave a jump. ”

“ The Holsteiner came down with a vehement stride to the ensign, and pointing at the king’s door, he cried out, “Forgif me, ensign. We Germans don’t mince words when a wound oozes after a rope, but I lay down my arms and give your lord the victory, because I also could shed my bloot for the man. Do I love him! No-one efer understands him that has not seen him.—But ensign, you cannot stay any longer out in the weather.” ”

“ What a treasure for an artist in wood-cuts! Lundstrom’s custom had grown as one with him. It was no wretched accident. Is there anything more agonizing than a tired, grumpy scarecrow that peers out of a brand new summer suit, glittering with naïve optimism? Or red-cheeked, pious rusticity sewed up in cautiously{109} gray, pessimistic duds from a distant, smoky, rain-dripping, overcrowded factory district? But out of Lundstrom’s worn collar grew a face covered with moss-gray stubble over a network of friendly wrinkles and furrows. ”

“ Only when twilight comes does she kiss him for the last time and steal out of the house. She stops a minute in the courtyard and looks up at the window of the room where he is lying with her almond blossoms and violets on the bed-cover. When she turns to the little room in the wing of the court, she stands face to face with Mrs. Wetzmann, and she utters a little scream.
There is no living human being in the courtyard, none but these two. Round about stand the walls, staring at them in the darkness with empty, black windows, and the old linden trembles in its corner. ”

“ We are overwhelmed by the deluge from the mountains, and from lack of shelter we embrace the cliffs. But we beg Thee not for mitigation Almighty God. We pray only: Lead us, be nigh unto us! Behold, Thou hast turned away Thy countenance from our people and stuck thorns in our shoes, that we may become Thy servants and Thy children. In the mould of the battle-field our brothers sleep, and a fairer song of victory than that of the conquerors by the sword Thou dost offer to Thy chosen ones. ”

“ And the memory of our communion remains always equally fresh and pure just because I did not wear it stale with further acquaintance. I don’t lie when I say that I have lived in a sort of spiritual wedlock with that unknown woman. Who can prove that the long years give more than one exquisite hour? Humanity is so brittle and changeful that a long life together must always be precarious. ”

“ Tristan lies in feverish dreams by the shore of the sea. He waits for his Isolde. But when she finally comes, he, in the wild joy of desperation, tears open his unhealed wound and bleeds to death before it is vouchsafed him to kiss her. So, too, it had to be. Passion has overleaped all human bounds. It is a cool, wondrous alleviation that finally his blood may pour forth with the poison of the potion, with all the endless, tempestuous, lamenting, jubilating desire. ”

“ King Carolus is more lonely than the meanest wagon-drifer. He has not once a comrade’s knee to weep on. Among nobles and fine ladies and perukes he comes like a spectre out of a thousand-year mausoleum—and spectres mostly go about without company. ”

“ He grew more fond of it than he had ever been of anything; it seemed to him that it was his own soul, his longing, with its broad wings and its glance confident of victory. But there was suffering in his love, the dismal premonition of a misfortune. Sometimes he was afraid that the bird would fly away from him in a{230} fit of indifference; would vanish in a mocking sound of bells, and that would be his death, such an empty existence. Or it seemed to him that the falcon was honor, gleaming with sunlight against the blue, which rested itself on his shoulder for new exploits ”

“ Round their camp they have outposts that sit with a stone in their one uplifted claw, so that it may tumble down and wake them if they fall asleep. But the most wonderful thing is that then if any human being sees the ashen-gray birds go up, he himself begins to flap with his arms and longs to be able to fly with them, so high that the lakes below on the earth are only like little shimmering water-drops.”
“I want to see the cranes,” answered Johannes.
“Perhaps you may get to see them in the autumn, but then you must first teach yourself a great deal. ”

“ You are a Zaporogean, a renegade, who have hidden yourself in Swedish clothes.—To the wheel with him, to the wheel!”
All, even the drunken men, began to tremble and feel toward the doors, and in his terror one of the Boyars whispered: “Bring forward the woman! Shove her forward! As soon as he gets to see pretty faces and woman’s limbs, he grows quiet.”
They seized her, her bodice was cut over the bosom, and, softly wailing, she was supported forward step by step to the czar. ”

“ And out of the stubble shot up a two-story nose with room for many a pinch of reflective snuff. Large noses may be either volcanic or placid. Lundstrom’s was placid. It separated genially but firmly two small gray, liquidly bright eyes, which never seemed to have fastened on anything that burned too hot, never to have stared at anything helplessly, never to have wavered anxiously about over empty, exhausting horizons.
Lucky man, sighed Leonard. He sits peacefully under the voyaging clouds, in the midst of the Northstream swollen with spring freshets he sits peacefully at his crank. ”

“ And the air will be cold and clear; it will all be as if it were at the bottom of the sea. Everything we pass falls to pieces behind us; there’s a sound of broken iron and a roaring and groaning of the earth, but we hasten forward, only forward; we do not turn our heads, we say nothing to each other, only scream with joy, as when it thunders. ”