Outside, the spring night was cool. Leonard grew pale and his eyes shone.
“In old times people opened their veins,” he muttered, “but this is a much finer way.”
He edged hurriedly across Gustavus Adolphus Place and took his stand at the barrier by the river. The moon hung thin as a flower petal up in the greenish-blue heavens, whose color seemed to consist only of coolness and depth. The river rolled along pale mother-of-pearl dust.
Here assuredly some one passed one day in May and was empty and sad and full of fiery moods, thought Leonard. 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!
Leonard had almost wholly forgotten his fisherman. But now he noted that the old man stood steadily beside him at the rampart. His face appeared smaller than before in the moonlight. Despite the two-story nose and the gray stubble it was almost like a child’s. But it had always the same stamp of repose. It peered out into the spring night, as if all this illimitable canopy was a friendly home for brisk old folks. Naturally, thought Leonard, the whole world is for him just a beautiful dream of once on a time. The moon, the trees, and the rushing water here, all are his memory, all have flowed into a great certitude, all are his innermost self, as memories are.
Leonard gave the old man his hand:
“Thanks for your help!” he said.
“Aye, thanks and good-bye, then. Now I must down there again a bit, I suppose. Fishing is best at night.”
Thereupon Lundstrom went to his net. But Leonard strolled without uncertainty or restlessness up to his den on the crest of South Stockholm. His thoughts played meanwhile with the same daring little speech:
Why should infinity make us homeless? he said to himself. Infinity has its middle point somewhere. Well, and I, woodcut artist Leonard, am sitting in the centre. Should I not then with a good heart cut at my boxwood blocks?