“Mr. Potocki says ‘ugh’ with the malice of the bachelor who listens to the complaints of the married man,” remarked the bookseller.
“What did I say?” asks the astonished widower. “Ugh!” says the bookseller, mimicking him, and the conversation degenerates into a universal grinning and a cloud of tobacco smoke.
It is midnight. The piano upstairs, which has accompanied a mixed choir of male and female voices, is silent. The waiter has finished his countless journeys from the speaking tube to the verandah; the proprietor enters into his daybook the last few bottles of champagne which have been ordered upstairs. The three friends rise from their chairs and go home, two to their “virgin couches,” and the bookseller to his Stafva.
When schoolmaster Blom had reached his twentieth year, he was compelled to interrupt his studies at Upsala and accept a post as assistant teacher at Stockholm. As he, in addition, gave private lessons, he made quite a good income. He did not ask much of life. All he wanted was peace and cleanliness. An elderly lady let him a furnished room and there he found more than a bachelor finds as a rule. She looked after him and was kind to him; she gave him all the tenderness which nature had intended her to bestow on the new generation that was to spring from her. She mended his clothes and looked after him generally. He had lost his mother when he was a little boy and had never been accustomed to gratuitous kindness; therefore he was inclined to look upon her services as an interference with his liberty, but he accepted them nevertheless. But all the same the public house was his real home. There he paid for everything and ran up no bills.
He was born in a small town in the interior of Sweden; consequently he was a stranger in Stockholm. He knew nobody; was not on visiting terms with any of the families and met his acquaintances nowhere but at the public-house. He talked to them freely, but never gave them his confidence, in fact he had no confidence to give. At school he taught the third class and this gave him a feeling of having been stunted in his growth. A very long time ago he had been in the third class himself, had gradually crept up to the seventh, and had spent a few terms at the University; now he had returned to the third; he had been there for twelve years without being moved. He taught the second and third books of Euclid; this was the course of instruction for the whole year. He saw only a fragment of life; a fragment without beginning or end; the second and third books. In his spare time he read the newspapers and books on archaeology. Archaeology is a modern science, one might almost say a disease of the time. And there is danger in it, for it proves over and over again that human folly has pretty nearly always been the same.
Politics was to him nothing but an interesting game of chess—played
for the king, for he was brought up like everybody else; it was an
article of faith with him that nothing which happened in the world,
concerned him, personally; let those look to it whom God had placed in
a position of power. This way of looking at things filled his soul
with peace and tranquillity; he troubled nobody and nothing troubled
him. When he found, as he did occasionally, that an unusually foolish
event had occurred, he consoled himself with the conviction that it
could not have been helped. His education had made him selfish, and
the catechism had taught him that if everybody did his duty, all
things would be well, whatever happened. He did his duty towards his
pupils in an exemplary fashion; he was never late; never ill. In his
private life, too, he was above reproach; he paid his rent on the day
it fell due, never ran up bills at his restaurant, and spent only one
evening a week on pleasure. His life glided along like a railway train
to the second and, being a clever man, he managed to avoid collisions.
He gave no thought to the future; a truly selfish man never does, for
the simple reason that the future belongs to him for no longer than
twenty or thirty years at the most.
And thus his days passed.
Midsummer morning dawned—radiant and sunny as mid-summer morning should be. The schoolmaster was still in bed, reading a book on the Art of Warfare in ancient Egypt, when Miss Augusta came into his room with his breakfast. She had put on his tray some slices of saffron bread, in honour of the festival, and on his dinner-napkin lay a spray of elder blossoms. On the previous night she had decorated his room with branches of the birch-tree, put clean sand and some cowslips in the spittoon, and a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley on the dressing table.
“Aren’t you going to make an excursion to-day, sir?” she asked, glancing at the decorations, anxious for a word of thanks or approval.