All of this passed like lightning through poor Modin’s brain. He no longer believed actually that he knew more about the lady in white than did her husband.
Axelson was on the watch when his wife went in to arrange about dinner and pounced on his guest.
“Beware of white ladies, dear brother. So far it seems that she doesn’t recognize you. But at dinner I may perhaps make her memory clearer. It’s uncanny when the dead come to life, eh?”
And with that if the brutal dog didn’t go on to hum:
“Look out, my boy, look out, look out!
’Tis the White Lady beyond a doubt.”
He then hurried in for a moment after his wife, presumably to order the wine. But Modin used the moment. He had no wish whatever to be recognized by the bride of his dreams. On the contrary he seized his hat, bounded away over cucumber frames and strawberry patches, and swift as the timid doe threw himself among the sheltering trees of the wood.
LEONARD AND THE FISHERMAN
AFTER a dinner consisting of an anchovy and four cold potatoes Leonard, a needy artist in wood-cuts, wandered about aimlessly through the city. It was a May day of the grand and dangerous sort. Over the heavens voyaged festal white clouds of giant size, bulging with undefined expectations. And the cool, prickly wind whistled with seductive mockery of all that lay behind the horizon: explorations, adventures, visions of beauty. It was a day of lightness and oppression; of futile longing for action; of cold, far-reaching perfidy; and deep, exhausting unrest. How can the breast expand to bursting and at the same time feel so horribly empty? thought Leonard. Spring is the time when we not only make solemn confession but are merged into a new vital existence; whence, then, in the name of all the devils, is this emptiness, this lack in the midst of plenty, this criminal tendency to put all the glory behind one as quickly as possible?
Brooding painfully over these things, Leonard reeled about half blind and with aching eyes through Gustavus Adolphus Place. Finally he succeeded in making a resolution: to go down to the River Terrace and see whether the apple trees had begun to blossom yet.
It proved that they had not gone beyond the budding stage.