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.

It grew black around me, and I staggered backward out of the room. I
remained standing on the street under the stars and I heard the clamor
grow muffled and the dwarfs began to sing.

Then I clenched my hands and remembered a promise on the field of
battle to pray for a poor sinner’s soul. But the more fervently I spoke
with my God, the further went my thoughts, and my invocation became a
prayer for a yet greater sinner who with his last faithful followers
wandered about on the desolate steppes.

The surgeon ceased with an anxious glance toward the coffin, and the
lady-in-waiting followed him forward to the catafalque.

“Amen!” said she, and the two again spread the covering over the
wax-pale Queen Dowager, Charles’ mother.

STORIES BY
PER HALLSTRÖM

THE FALCON

Renaud’s eyes took the color of the day: dim, lustreless and dark at
twilight; gleaming molten gold when the sunshine flitted across his hair
and outstretched neck, so that they sparkled with widening and
contracting flames as they looked out over the fields toward the blue
haze against the slanting red of the dawn, or toward the rustling of
hares in the thicket, of frightened birds and swaying branches.

Indolent and proud was his glance, the reflection of gilded steel on a
sheathed dagger, of the luck-piece on the brown bosom of a gipsy girl;
indolent and proud, too, the rhythmic motion of his naked feet, and the
line of his arms as he laid himself down at full-length in the passion
of the moment with his hands under his head and heard the horns
jubilating in the distance and the earth quivering with the thud of the
huntsmen.

But when it grew quiet--a quiet wonderfully intense, as if spread out in
a domed vault of restless waiting, with two black huddled specks that
rose in circles at the top--then Renaud raised his glance, as he leaned
on his elbow, his eyes wide and lips half-parted. And when the specks
came together and fell,--one subsiding in broken curves, the other
dropping always above it in a line straight as a spear,--and the blue
welkin rang again with voices, and the riders galloped forward to see
the falcon and the heron finish their fight, the boy ran up close. He
screamed with delight when the falcon, still trembling with ardor, was
lifted on his master’s glove, its wings drooped and its eyes blinded
under the hood.

He often followed along to Sir Enguerrand’s stable yard and saw the
falconers bathe the yellow feet of the hunting birds in metal bowls,
drying them carefully as if they were princes’ children each with its
crested cloth, and caressing their necks till they shut their naked
eyelids and dreamed against the shoulders of the attendants.

Renaud would have given ten years of his life or one of his ten fingers
to be allowed to hold them like that, the proud, silent creatures; but
they might not be touched by everybody, they were noble. They had each
its glove ornamented according to its rank, each its hood with
embroidered pattern, each its special food, and people talked to them in
a strange, archaic speech with elaborate etiquette. Renaud almost
blushed when he met their great eyes filled with languid repose,
especially before Sir Enguerrand’s white Iceland 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. He might
show them the light and see them first totter with blinded eyes and
claws clasped about his wrist, then grow more calm, as their pupils
contracted, almost gentle indeed when he gave them a bit of warm, bloody
meat. But them he cared not for, them he soon wearied of, and he quickly
learned to perceive that none had the Iceland falcon’s breast-muscles of
steel, its long wide wings and quiescent strength. But it was the most
delightful thing possible to see how the young falcons were trained to
hunt according to the wise rules of King Modus, when they had reached
the time that their memory of freedom wore off and they sat, heavy and
blind, dozing on their perches.

The first thing was to accustom them again to fly, but with a cord on
the foot, till they had learned at the falconer’s cry to swoop down upon
the red cloth dummy fitted with a pair of large heron wings, which he
swung in the air on a string in oddly deliberate circles--that was fine
to see!--and to which he had tied the breast of a quail or a piece of
chicken. This the falcons afterwards devoured, the rage at their
confinement being dulled by thirst of blood. Soon they grew so
accustomed to this procedure that they never strained at their cord, no
gleam of wildness remained in their eyes; they at once looked about
calmly for the decoy and only rose according to rule, ascending in a
curve at the proper time to swoop down indolently and playfully in a
wide circle; and when the cord was taken off, they hardly seemed to
notice.

The time had now come to train them for hunting, each for its particular
quarry; the smaller for quail, partridge or sparrows, the larger for
hare or heron or kites, the ignoble kites which had the nature of crows
along with their powerful talons and beaks and which could never be
tamed to eat at a knightly board.

First they were given decoys like their quarry, with a piece of their
favorite food inside for them to search out; then disabled birds, which
they could strike their claws into at once and tear to pieces in
half-roused fury; and so on to prey that was harder to catch, until they
learned to enjoy the intoxication of the hunt. Their old wild instincts
awoke once more in full strength, but controlled and ennobled, so that
they calmly dropped their dying quarry after a short mad drink of blood
and ate only from their ornamented dishes, without greediness, as is
fitting for the birds of a knight.

Their eyes grew indolent and proud and took on the color of the day,
black when their hood was lifted off, brightening to molten gold when
they rose in the sunlight, burning with flakes of fire above the shriek
of their prey. They bent caressingly toward Renaud’s brown hand, but
none of them was like the Iceland falcon with the weary, kinglike
disdain in its glance, and he grew disgusted with them all, pressed
their beaks harshly shut when they tried to play, and threw them from
him carelessly, and mimicked the shriek of the kite so that they
trembled with disquietude and left the aviary with men’s curses behind
them and the wide brown plain before them.

Sir Enguerrand rode out hunting every day, nearly always wearing his
red, gold-embroidered glove, for only the bell-tinkling flight of the
Iceland falcon could awaken song within him and cause him to breathe the
sharp, volatile morning air with delight as if he drank living wine. One
day the falcon had struck a heron, bleeding, into a swamp behind a
thicket, where the huntsman found it and cracked its neck; but the
falcon itself was gone, either lured after a new quarry or recoiling
from the brown water or capriciously letting itself be lifted and
carried along by the wind. In vain they searched, in vain they called it
by the prettiest names, in vain they made the notes of the horn rebound
from every hill. Sir Enguerrand smote the mouth of the head falconer
bloody with his red glove and rode straight home across the tussocks of
the swamp with his lips shut more sharply and his eyelids sunk over the
listless pupils more gloomily than ever. The falcon they did not find.

But Renaud found it, its jess caught in a wild rose bush, awaiting death
by starvation with its grip fast on a branch, one wing drooping, the
other lifted defiantly, its narrow head stretched threateningly forward
with the eyes fixed and beak sharp--a splendid sight it was among the
blood-red berries. Renaud’s hand trembled with eagerness as he loosed
the jess from the thorns, as the bells tinkled around his fingers and
the ring with Sir Enguerrand’s crest, and he cried aloud with joy when
the sharp claws cut into his sinewy arm and he felt that it was his, the
falcon of broadest breast and longest wings and proudest eyes of burning
gold.

It was the more his in that he never would be able to show it to anyone,
for he knew that strict laws protected the sport of the nobles. In the
woods he would have to build a cage for it, early in the morning he
would steal thither before the bird had shaken off its chill, they
would go together across the open with searching looks directed at the
whitish heavens, they would grow fond of each other as they let the
sunlight rise and fall over their heads and the wind carry their silent
thoughts along, and the falcon would never miss its red glove or the
constraint of its pearl-sewn hood. He tied it again and ran down to the
pond, returning shortly with a duck which he had killed with a stone.
The falcon took it, and Renaud’s brain grew numb with intoxication, for
that was a sign that it did not despise him, that it was willing to be
his.

It became his; it bent its head forward, listening, with tranquil
wide-open eyes when the frosty branches cracked under his step in the
stillness of morning; it hopped lightly down from its cage and stretched
out toward his hand, beating its wings as for flight, but it did not
fly--that was only a reminder--and therewith they hurried out to the
softly glowing expanse of the moor.

Their eyes glanced searchingly toward the dark-red welkin. Black lay the
hills and thinning thickets, and the trees slept, their boughs heavy
with silent birds. But the heavens grew brighter, flaming with gold and
red and the lines of the plain turned to blue, and the owl sped close to
the ground, seeking its covert, and the day birds stretched their wings
and chirped softly because of the cold, and dark their flight cut
through the gleaming air. But Renaud and his falcon went quickly on, for
these were sparrows and thrushes, no prey fit for them. Down toward the
marshes sounded already the drawling cry of the herons and wide-circling
beat of their long wings, yonder was the quarry they sought. Then the
falcon was cast with breast already expanded and wings prepared to beat,
and Renaud saw it gilded by the sun as he stood with blinded eyes and
dizzy head while the bird crouched against the deep blue, and heard how
the clang of its bells mocked the shout of the herons.

They whirred like wheels in their terror; now they tended to shoot down
to the shore and hide their long necks and stupid frightened heads with
backward-pointing tufts under the dark wooded banks, now they tried in
wavering uncertainty to rise up in a spiral, thrusting in their broad
wings to attain higher than the enemy could follow, and they swerved
like reeds in the terror of their pale hearts.

But the falcon singled out at the start one of the strongest, one of
those that flew immediately aloft, because it loved to prove its
strength and to feel sharp, light air under its wings, and it rose as
fast and straight as if circling around a sunbeam. Soon it was
uppermost; smaller than a sparrow it looked, but something in the poise
of the wings, in the gathered strength of the body, made one divine the
sparkling savagery of its eye, its outspread talons. Of a sudden it
fell, heavy as steel, on the defenseless upturned neck of the quarry,
and they dropped like a single stone, hardly once eddying aside by a
wing’s breadth. Then Renaud ran and swam and waded so as to arrive
before the heron, which had been stunned by the stroke, could gather
itself together and in the wildness of its desperation make use of its
pointed bill. The falcon gave it the death blow sharply and swiftly,
turning its great eyes, already tranquil, on its master, for it did not
care to soil its feathers with blood, and waiting to have the warm heart
given to it.

Afterwards it did not fly any more that day; when Renaud cast it and ran
ahead with a shout, it only took a couple of wingstrokes and lighted
again on the lad’s shoulder close to his laughing face with proud
composure. It seemed to despise all play and Renaud soon made an end,
his expression taking on the far-gazing seriousness of the falcon. 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 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; and in the midst of his joy he was oppressed with his own
insignificance, so that he hardly dared to look at it. There was grief
at his heart that the bird would never share his delight, that its
glance would never melt warmly into his, and he fled to the realm of
dreams.

He laid himself down in the midst of the moor with the red heather under
his head, and the clouds glided past like human destiny, heavy and
light, gathered within a firm outline or scattered on high, with the
winds’ invisible hand ever at their shoulder, while the bushes bent
their rustling golden branches and Renaud told stories to the falcon.

King Arthur was come again, once more from out the British sea was
handed to him his sword Excalibur, blue as the chill nightly heavens;
his twelve knights lifted their heavy heads from the stone table and
shook off their sleep, the earth resounded with their tread. Gareth was
there, the prince’s son who put on the attire of a scullery boy and
turned Lynette’s ringing scorn into love. Renaud was there, too, was of
noble birth, his horse danced beneath him, and the falcon which now
slept with sunken head sat high on his hand and sought his glance with
eyes that gleamed with joy and the yellow sunlight of heroic story.

But the clouds glided past like human destiny, were driven dark, one
over another into a gigantic vault, from the apertures of which fell
sunbeams pale and sharp as spears, and the falcon dreamed dismal dreams
of impotent wrath and waked with a shriek.

Before long some roving lads chanced to see Sir Enguerrand’s falcon on
Renaud’s hand, and the knight’s men seized him and bore him to the
castle. His heart froze within him when they took away the falcon,
motionless and proud as ever, without a turn of its bended neck or a
look from its cold, calm eyes. They took it to its master, but he had
not a single caress for the missing favorite that had let itself be
touched by ignoble hands. 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 or six ounces of
flesh from his ribs under the beak of a hungry bird of prey.

Sir Enguerrand knew of Renaud’s poverty and, looking at his naked brown
breast, extended his hand and touched it with an experimental, unfeeling
gesture. He then sent a message to the neighboring castle which reared
its pointed roof above the woods, and invited the seneschal and his two
daughters to be his guests three days later and see some falcons fly,
after they by their presence had heightened the solemnity of punishing a
thief--and they were to come before daybreak.

Renaud’s eyes had widened from the darkness of the prison; they were
black and motionless, and the gleaming pupils contracted but slowly to
mirror the thin-worn clouds and rising sun of the east. Behind Sir
Enguerrand was borne the Iceland falcon, its talons fiercely clasped in
the glove, with the hood over its wakeful and famished glances that had
not seen food for three days.

But further behind curved a line of color that flamed and burned: six
bright horses, almost blue in the gloaming, were led by pages at a run,
with cloths of red velvet on their bending necks. Red was the wagon
which they drew, and within it gold shone heavy on the tender bosoms and
slender arms of the seneschal’s daughters. Six damsels rode after it
with hair blonde as grain, their pointed feet playing beneath the hem
of their kirtles; six huntsmen blew calls which seemed to dance and
swing like wheels from the mouths of the crooked horns. The contours of
the plain danced with them and shot past one another in wine-colored
mist, while the clouds above had glittering borders like the wings of
butterflies.

The party formed into a semi-circle, plume by plume, shoulder by
shoulder, around a bush where the captive was tied. The horsecloths
flapped in the wind; the red taking on depth in the shadow, heavy as
hopeless yearning; the red burning in the light, gay as the clamor of
victory. The maidens’ delicate necks leaned forward out of the wagon,
and their conical hoods flowed into one with the descending line of
their shoulders. They were like herons, thought Renaud, and he almost
expected to hear them add a shrill shriek, when the notes of the horns
fell far away like hurled stones, and all became silent. But when he saw
them more plainly with their thin, straight lips and strange, dreaming
eyes, which were always leveled in a chill ecstasy on something
infinitely distant, and their white, indolent hands in their laps, and
the long folds of their garments--they seemed to him wondrously
beautiful, like the most gorgeous saints’ pictures with a dimming glow
of wax tapers at their feet, and it pained him that they should see him
bound. He let his gaze leap further, past the damsels--shy, jaunty birds
that he wanted to frighten with a whistle--past the red faces and
inquisitively gaping mouths of the grooms, past the brown plain, where
he had run himself tired and dreamed himself tired.

He knew what doom awaited him, but when the Iceland falcon was borne
forward and he realized it was this which was to exact the penalty, he
laughed in his joy, and his heart throbbed with pride, as when he
possessed the bird and the long sunny days and the plain with the
listening winds and the swaying trees of autumn yellow.

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. They should have mirrored his
life’s bold longing, his contempt, and his dreams on the red heather,
but they only waited greedily for their prey, grimly and coldly as the
human spirit of curiosity or jesting on the thin lips of Sir Enguerrand.
He felt his sorrow smart more bitterly than before and turned aside his
head to recover himself, his eyelids closed and his thoughts fluttering.

He lay thus while the herald proclaimed the law--“twelve sols of
silver--six ounces of flesh over the heart--thus does Sir Enguerrand
safeguard the pastime of the nobles.” He did not look up when his skin
was cut so that the scent of blood should attract the falcon, and when
it sank its beak in his breast he gave no cry, merely trembled, so that
the bird’s eyes flamed up in rage and its wings were spread out as if to
beat.

The seneschal’s daughters leaned their heads forward with a gleam of
interest in their strange dreaming eyes, but they did not raise their
hands from their laps, and their garments lay as before in tranquil
folds. The horses snorted at the smell of blood and stamped on the
frosty ground so that the red horsecloths flapped against the pallor of
the deepening blue, but Renaud lay silent, and the huntsmen stood
needlessly with expanded cheeks and horns to their mouths ready to drown
his cries.

The first agony had clutched at his finest fibres, it seemed as if his
heart would come out with them; but afterwards he had grown numb almost
to the degree of pleasure, and while the blood flowed warmly from the
wound, and the pointed beak tore at his breast, Renaud dreamed himself
into the high blue heaven of his visions, until he understood
everything, death and honor, feeling how it burned and dazzled--the
yellow sunlight of heroic story.

When Sir Enguerrand thought that the legal six ounces had been paid, he
gave his men a sign to blow, and the falcon was lifted off, sated with
blood, its eyes filled once more with tranquil pride, and the troop set
itself in motion more gaily even than before toward the sedge that
gleamed yellow in the distance. But Renaud could not be wakened, he had
dreamed himself to death, and they merely loosed him and let him lie
with the red heather under his head.

The Iceland falcon, however, might never sit on its master’s hand, for
Sir Enguerrand did not care to drink of a cup where another’s lips had
pressed a kiss.

OUT OF THE DARK

We had sat in the studio since just after dinner--a couple of us had not
had any dinner either--and had talked, talked the whole time.

We liked to talk, we had each and every one of us convictions and
opinions so firm that they impressed all the others; yes, even
ourselves, as we thought them over. Some had also a share of scepticism,
which at suitable moments was still more impressive; and a couple simply
kept quiet, which was almost the most impressive of all. To be really
deeply silent under wide puffs of cigar smoke, with a broad back against
the wall, and a large indolent glance out of wide-open eyes, which
during the climax of a speaker are turned away in good-natured
boredom--there is surely nothing in this realm of insolvent currency
that is sounder and gives one longer credit.

But now we were nearly all talking about nearly everything except
politics and religion, for we had come past the years when one takes
such things earnestly and had not come to the years when one takes them
practically. Furthermore we had all read at least a couple of French
novels and so had got over all naïveté. But we touched on the subject of
hypnotism, very carefully with a general feeling that “there was
something in it.” Literature we gripped by the throat and said rough
things to her face, thrusting at her a word sharp as a needle, the word
“style.” That was what she lacked, style. It is a splendid word, this;
one can hide as much or as little as one will behind it, and as an
accusation it is almost instantly condemnatory. And so we talked about
pictures and busts and verse, of synthesis and analysis, of symbolism
and realism. We were all idealists and wrapped ourselves in the very
newest imperial robes with genuine spangles of brass.

I don’t know exactly what we were driving at, the utterances were so
varied, but it came out clearly from the total that we had the deuce
knows what resources within us and were some day going to shake new
artistic tendencies out of our sleeves as easily as the trick man does
rabbits. Among some of us there was a general flair for the joy of
living, which was taken up most seriously and discussed--a bit
tediously--as a settled duty; how one should attain to it was left to
one’s own free discretion and it was assumed that he who went to sleep
over “Hans Alienus” had a satisfactory private reason for his conduct
and might take up gymnastics instead.

But above everything we were zealous for “the new”; we held our fingers
on the pulse of the time with the solemnity of one who had universal
pills to sell, and were only afraid that others would get ahead of us in
guessing its complaints, or that these would change, since everything
progresses so fast now.

Leo had then walked about a while, taken an oblique stand where he cut
diagonals across the room, and snapped his fingers at every æsthetic
dogma that had ever been devised--lively, indefatigable Leo, with his
sharp, somewhat affected painter’s glance from behind his glasses, and
his handsome, exalted countenance as of a patentee of ideas; Leo, who
talked the most of all and made the greatest effect.

“Oh, the devil take it!” he had cried--his accent was half that of a
Parisian and half that of a mountaineer--“I’ve a pain in the head. I beg
leave to take the air a bit.”

A moment later the door had slammed, and one might as well have tried to
catch the shadow of a bird as get hold of him. Also, no one else cared
to go, since it was snowing outside, and furthermore the day was so
gray, so strikingly empty and melancholy; the sort of day that stares at
one searchingly, haunting one like a question to which one can find no
answer. But Leo went out in all weathers, distance had no meaning to
him; he walked so fast that the cold could not bite through his thin
overcoat, and besides he swore himself warm at it, fighting it as if it
was a personal enemy and keeping his brain ready to note every beautiful
composition of lines that he passed.

We knew that in a short while he might be back with us again after he
had hurried almost around the city, his headache gone and his buoyant
figure full of nervous energy, with fresh air in his clothes, his
glasses damp with cold, and a new theory of chiaroscuro in his head. We
therefore continued meanwhile to discuss along the same line as before.
The question rose of what the soul of a masterpiece consisted, to what
degree it should be manifest, and what share emotion should play. We
agreed that the artist’s feeling should be suppressed and only reveal
its immeasurable power in lines of form; otherwise it might destroy the
proper effect, and a tendency toward declamation could not be tolerated
under any condition. We said a number of very telling things, but
nevertheless felt a bit weary, either from the yellow lamplight or
because the air was a trifle close.

Thereupon we heard Leo talking outside the front door. He had someone
with him, then. But whom, since we were all here? We turned
inquisitively in the direction of the door. It opened and over the
threshold stepped a little, dark figure with an ugly black hat on her
head, a summer hat whose brim was bent with age and cast a grotesque
shadow on the wall. She was a little girl, but what sort of girl?

A strange girl, to be sure. Without hesitating a moment and before
anyone said anything, she came into the middle of the room, stood still
and looked about her with a reposeful movement of the head, her hands in
the pockets of her cape, her whole slender figure wonderfully composed
and firm, her motion somewhat like a figure in a dream, when one all the
while thinks: just so, that’s what she ought to do,--and yet feels with
mysterious uneasiness that every gesture has meaning, every step hides
the significance of coming events.

While she stood there close to the hanging lamp, which threw a sharp,
dark shadow across her face, Leo explained hurriedly: “I met her by the
street-car line. She was walking and staring up at the snow just as you
see her with her head thrown back, walking slowly in all the cold. I saw
she was pretty with a well-formed head and wanted to find out who she
was. She wasn’t at all afraid to come along.”

“Take off your hat,” he added eagerly; “I haven’t had a good look at you
yet.”

She took off her hat, went toward the door, and laid it with her cape
on a chair, always with the same remarkable composure of movement. Then
she came forward to the light again, and now we could see her face
clearly.

It was pale and narrow, but not small in proportion to her figure. The
chin was strong, projecting, especially as she held her head very high,
and her profile ran into it prettily from the rounded cranium. The nose
was straight, the lips straight and pale, the contour of the cheek
uncommonly severe and beautiful, the eyebrows a little sunk towards the
middle; and the eyes, partly shut against the light, looked steadily and
calmly out from under short, dark lashes. Her hair, too, was dark. It
was hard to tell the color of the eyes, which seemed to shift from the
suggestion of gray that violets have at twilight to the glimmer of the
darkest lake. Also their size must have been more variable than usual,
for according to the thought that burned in them they widened with
distended pupils, or closed around the steel blades of her glance;--the
muscles around them were indicated under the skin with uncommon
sharpness.

Her figure was slim and childish, that of a city girl of fifteen; the
neck slender and supple. Every expression of the face was childish, too,
but her general appearance bore the stamp of firmness, of set
character, which comes from living life all the way through.

She looked at us without letting her glance rest on anyone, looked
beyond us at the studies on the wall, pausing a little longer there,
till at last her gaze met the yellow dials of the clock in the church
tower as it stared in through the dark atmosphere framed by the window,
and her face caught at it in silent recognition. She sat down a little
to one side of us with her thin wrists crossed, her eyes still,
reposeful and dark.

We did not know what we should say to her, she was so strange, so
different from everything else, as she sat there in her black garments.
It was as if the darkness, the unknown darkness outside which hid the
future, had taken form and pressed in amongst us, grave and enigmatical.

“What’s your name?” someone asked.

“Cecilia.”

The name acted as a stimulus to our imagination. Cecilia, the organ song
that rises through the struggling light of the church vaulting, upward,
ever upward, strong as if it knew its goal, pure through the clarity of
space, freezing under the chill of the stars. But what a strange Cecilia
was this! What song did those eyes dream?

“And you go around alone on such an evening, Cecilia! Were you going
anywhere?”

“No, nowhere. I like to feel the snow falling on me.”

“Were you born here, Cecilia?”

“No, I was born out there--we lived there then.” She stared into the
distance, with raised eyebrows, and her tone gave us the impression that
“out there” was some great, dark teeming city on the other side of the
ocean, that it was deep with black memories, painfully intriguing to the
thought. “But I’ve been here a long while,” she concluded.

She was so pretty with her reticent, dark manner; and her brief answers
waked a trembling echo within one, like the commonplace but meaningful
words in a dream. One could have sat there a long while asking questions
at random and could have listened long.

But Leo grew impatient. He burned with zeal to get at his drawing, for
that was why he had taken up with the girl, and he was not to be put
off. He trusted in his art, did Leo; he was wont to talk of distilling
the quintessence out of a physiognomy--and now he wished to do it with
this subject. Just a few strokes and he would have it all in a
concentrated effect: the tranquillity of chin and eyebrows, the falling
line of the neck--the girl’s whole content should be noted there; but if
so there must be no distraction, no emotions and associated thoughts to
make one’s glance stray.

“Let her alone with your prattle,” he said; “she’s prettier when she is
quiet.” And his eyes glanced with restless penetration, as if he was
afraid of losing something, while he and the others chose their places.

She sat motionless; the whole proceeding appeared to be entirely
indifferent to her and she continued to hold her wrists crossed and to
gaze in front of her without seeing.

But we who did not draw felt that the silence was oppressive. Was not
this unfair to her, was it not wrong to keep her there as a mere thing
to be measured? Was not every glint of her eye, every ring in her voice
worth more than all these lines? Was it not presumptuous to attempt to
translate the changing deeps of life into the language of the deaf and
dumb? What did she hide in the vault of her brain?--what was this girl
that sat there?

The sketchers sweated and screwed up their eyes to make them sharp. They
held up their hands against the light--they seemed to have a harder task
than they had realized--and the girl slowly drooped her eyelashes.

With that we broke in, “You’re tired perhaps, Cecilia? It’s getting on
toward bedtime.”

“I never sleep at night,” she answered, “I haven’t done it as long as I
can remember.”

“But what do you do then? Are you up and about?”

“I think,” she said, and her eyes grew deep, as if night were there
before her--“I lie and think and gaze out into the dark. It’s so silent
then; sometimes I think that everybody is dead, and I, too. It _is_ so
calm, the dark is so weightless and soft and pure.”

Her face had grown rigidly earnest; now it suddenly glowed with nervous
life, as if a thought had burst into flames within it.

“But sometimes I can hear. There is someone walking in the street, far
away; the stones ring under his feet, and he is coming nearer. First I
think that there is only one, and I wonder who it can be. I dream that
it’s for me that he is coming, but I don’t get up; I want him to lift me
from just where I am, and take me to him without saying a word, and
carry me far away. Then my heart begins to throb, and there’s a ringing
in my ears, and I hear many steps, a whole flood of trampling and
dancing which fills the street so completely that I think the house will
fall over and be swept away, as when the river breaks up the dirty ice.

“And I’m so glad that I burst out laughing and stuff the blanket into my
mouth so as not to be heard. Sometimes I hear myself sing, hear it
actually, and lie and stretch out my arms; and the dark is no longer
still, or black, it is like red whirlpools only. And I lie and wait, and
know that it’s for me they are coming, and that they’ll lift me on high
and rush forward. And I know how the sky will look: black, with great
white lights. 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.”

Her voice had a shrill and brittle ring, jubilant, but nearer to weeping
than laughter. All at once she changed her tone.

“That’s the sort of thing I think at night,” she said wearily.

“But when do you sleep? You must surely sleep.”

She gave a clear, childish laugh.

“All day if I like. Mamma pulls up the curtains of course, but I can
keep on lying. Then I can sleep, especially if there’s sunshine. One can
dream so finely in the sunshine; one can laugh and run, and then it gets
so warm, and when one gets up one is so deliciously tired!”

“But after that? Don’t you go to school, don’t you have any work?”

“Papa wants”--she uttered the first word with a peculiar intonation.
“Papa (I don’t know whether he is my father,” she added indifferently)
“wants me to go away; no matter where, he says. I went to school, but
they didn’t suit me there. Now I’m left in peace. Mamma talks to them
when they come after me; she has such a proud way with her, mamma has.”

“And what do your parents do?”

She looked up with a scornful dismissal of the subject and made no
reply. Suddenly she laughed under her breath.

“Such a funny word!” she said. “It’s out of the catechism, isn’t it?”

“What word?”

“Parents. Oh, I know it means father and mother,” she drawled the words
out to a comic length. “Mother is slender,” she continued, “but she’s
beginning to get fat and lace herself. You ought to see her when she’s
drunk soda water, oh, you just ought to see her! Her teeth aren’t as
pretty any more either; she envies me mine.”

“And what does she want you to be?”

“It’s all the same”--her voice was cuttingly hard--“it’s all the same,
whatever she wants; it’s all the same, what she says. I shan’t do it
anyhow.”

It was easy to imagine her home after that; what was worse, it was easy,
too, to imagine her future.

She seemed to have tired of being examined now, and turned around to one
of the sketchers.

“Why do you paint girls?” she inquired of the corpulent Hans.

“Hm! Because they’re pretty.”

“Why don’t you paint war, or red clouds like those there?” She pointed
to a landscape opposite her.

“Because I’ve never seen a war.”

“But red clouds you’ve seen surely. I’ve seen much handsomer ones than
those; they don’t really burn.”

It was an impressionistic canvas; darkness creeping along the ground,
darkness leaping up to meet one from the fields, and in the midst of the
fading red off in the distance a lonely shivering poplar, the one thing
that rose above the plain, cutting like a sword against the sky proudly
and tragically. As the girl looked at it her pupils widened, contracted
and widened and trembled; she had understood it at once, and her face
became fixed by the sorrow of the picture.

“That’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it hard to learn to paint?”

“That depends. Can you draw?”

“I can’t do anything but play the piano. Mamma taught me that, but I
can play better than she does, though we have no piano now.”

“Do you sing, then?”

“No, I _can’t_ sing”--her voice sounded more mournful than at any time
before, almost despairing--“I can’t sing at all now.”

“Probably your voice is changing; you’ll have plenty of voice if you’ve
had it before.”

“Oh, yes,” she replied impatiently; “it isn’t the voice I’m thinking of,
but I can never sing any more.”

She raised her head slowly and regarded us all with a swift, deep,
strangely searching look.

“What do you do that for?” we asked. “What are you looking for?”

“I’m looking at your eyes.” Her voice was childish, naïvely frank and so
earnest!

“Do you often do so?”

“Yes, among strangers; then I don’t look at them any more.”

“And how have you found our eyes?”

“About like other peoples’. There is none of you who can _see_.”

“How do you mean?”

“I can’t say any more, but there is no one that sees, really sees
straight through you.”

“Hm! Maybe not. Have you met any such person?”

“No, never, but I keep on searching.”

“And if you should see such a person, what would you do?”

“Just wait, wait for the tide.”

“The tide you listen for at night?”

“Yes, for then it will come soon.”

“Finish me now,” she urged with a look at the sketchers. “Get done with
your drawings.” And she sat as before.

But no one could draw in his usual style, no one was satisfied with his
beginning. All were seeking for something, expressions changed, flaming
with eagerness or drooping with fatigue. It seemed as if their thoughts
tried to catch something fluttering, shifting, something that
continually fled them.

Under these looks that were concentrated on her, together with the sharp
yellow light, she grew dazzled, hypnotized, her mouth became tired, her
eyes closed experimentally a couple of times, and then the lashes
remained lowered and she went suddenly to sleep like a child, sinking
back on the arm of the chair.

All had ceased drawing and had leaned forward with the same thought.
What was she, this remarkable girl? Could all this be true?

Here she had come out of the dark, had come silently as the dark itself,
enigmatical, disturbing as a dream, impossible to comprehend, impossible
to lay hold of. Was she not just a vision,--not sprung from us, oh, no,
but a vision of the slumbering darkness, the uncertain possibility, the
great new chance that might come? But her breathing was audible, light
and easy; her lean hands had the marks of the sempstress, her clothes
were threadbare--an actual girl to be sure, with blood such as ours, a
developing soul! What would ever become of her, what would become of
her?

As if the question had been put in an audible voice, Jacques took it up,
the silent Jacques who was wont to make an epigram out of every
conviction and who filed every doubt to the point of a needle. But he
now got up to speak, advancing toward the girl with his angular motions
like those of a clasp-knife and his pointed head leaning forward.

“What will become of her? What will become of her?” he said; “that’s
easy to guess.”

He bent down toward her, but so as not to overshadow her; his hand
followed his words, but with light, caressing movements, as if he were
touching an invalid. But on the floor his long shadow stood bowed
against hers, and his gestures became pointed, sharp as thrusts,
merciless, threatening to the slumberer in black.

“What will become of her--you who can wish but not will, you who wear
away your time with comparing and feeling and looking, look here at what
will become of her! First her mouth will be transformed--her eyes, too,
of course, but there the change won’t be permanent all at once; her eyes
will go back and forward a long while and kindle and be quenched, but
the mouth will retain inflexibly all that is strong enough to force in a
wrinkle, to bend a line. The lips will come to shut harder when they are
not opened by laughter. Here everything will be constricted together:
the weariness of desire, the suffocation of kisses; hate which congeals
into loathing, shame that is stifled; and then certitude will encompass
them, the certitude that it must be so, that that is the whole.

“The cheek”--he almost touched it as it shone soft and pale in the
light--“the cheek gets more sharply modeled, more set in contour, sinks
in a little here, as when a flower petal withers. The forehead,--it will
stay the same, only a line straight across as if an invisible knife had
cut into the brain and divided the thoughts; barred in some to pine away
up here, and driven the others to wrestle in nakedness and confinement.
The hair,--it will grow darker with age and disfiguring attention, it
will droop here and lie like a weight. The eyebrows,--you see there is a
bend between them, they sink here, which gives a suggestion of nervous
sensibility, of vibrating thoughts; but this will become no longer
noticeable when she opens her eyes, nothing will be noticeable then but
their depth of weariness, their infinity of freezing chill.

“Imagine the color of the whole harder, more vivid; weigh down all that
is heavy, make sharp all that is light and delicate, harden all that is
strong, banish joy with a cuff and blushes with a sneer, and there you
have her, that is what will become of her. Pretty, eh! prettier than now
because she’ll be even more effective to draw, eh?”

He stood silent a while and looked at her, his shadow trembling. Then he
went on:

“That’s what she’ll come to be, and that, too, is all that such as we
have the right to think of. But what she _might_ be, ah! what she might
be. If someone could take her as she lies there and dreams, take her and
carry her far away and lift her on high in his arms. We keep on talking
about art here, about what we intend and what the time is dreaming of.
If there is anyone that has the same dreams that she has and the
strength to will them, if there is anyone who’s a man, she is his. And
what might not become of them both!”

He looked about him at us others who sat bending forward, gazing with
hypnotized looks at the white gleaming countenance of the girl. At his
last words we started half up; it was as if we waited that some one
should come, that some one should grip us by the hair and hurl us
forward, should lift us to where space was bright around us. Something
should come to birth in us, sharp as a steel blade, unbending,
unsullied, the blue sword of our will and life should be created among
us, true life with warm soil and the sun that impels to growth. In the
heat of the room we felt it already glowing in us by anticipation,
cheeks and foreheads were red, a warm current of blood set in, there
were white sparks in the eyes, and a shiver trembled along the spine.

Thereupon the girl awoke, as if roused by the clamor of all these
thoughts as they beat their wings and struck together. First her eyes
stared in fright, and then she laughed.

We all sunk back again.

“I didn’t know where I was,” she said.

“Oh, you weren’t afraid of us, were you?” inquired Jacques. “You saw
that there was no one dangerous here.”

“Oh, no, I surely wasn’t afraid.” She laughed more merrily still. “No,
there’s no one dangerous here. But I must have been asleep a long while.
I must go now.”

We all offered to go with her, but she looked straight at us.

“Why?” she asked, “is the outside door locked?”

“No, not yet. But the street, the dark, the snow!”

“Oh, only that! But I went out alone. No, no, nobody needs to go along
with me. I know my way.”

Nobody thought of opposing her, her voice was so remarkably firm; almost
scornful, we thought.

We lighted her to the door and saw her small feet step quickly on the
yellow lamplight, which grew paler along the tile floor and was broken
by the light on the stairway.

When she was half out of sight we called for the last time, “You’ll come
again, won’t you?”

She turned her head. From under the ugly old hat her eyes looked out at
us, deep and sombre.

“No,” she said, “I shan’t come again. Why should I?”

She was gone, and we all rushed forward to the window, opened it and
leaned out, stretching ourselves over the sill. She had not got down
yet. Before us lay the black bulks of the houses, defiantly heavy and
motionless to our gaze. Here and there was a faint yellow gleam from a
street lamp; one could see some large, loose flakes glide through it.
The air was gray, swarmingly alive with darkness and a little farther
out across the roofs the church tower stood with its shining dials
against the black horizon.

Then she came out of the house door; we could hear her steps resound up
to where we were through the chilly air. We followed the little black,
indistinct figure out to the corner, where the lamplight took hold of it
and threw it out into tawny, pale relief. With that she was gone,
vanished into the blackness, into the snow and night and threatening
uncertainty from which she had come.

We fastened the window and sat down. In order to do something we tried
to discuss, as we were used to, about art and its future. We talked
about symbolism and syntheticism, but it all seemed less worth while now
than before, and from time to time a speaker would stop in the midst of
his period in order to examine a line in the half-finished portrait of
Cecilia, and then give it up in despair.

And there was no warmth in the discussion, only dry and ill-tempered
sallies that cut now at one man’s, now at another’s hobby and caused
them to bolt off into the inane, where comprehension ceases. Soon we
were all silent.