FullReads

It is ten o’clock. He leaves his table and goes to the back room where his grog awaits him. This is the time when the bookseller arrives. They play a game of chess or talk about books. At half-past ten the second violin from the Dramatic Theatre drops in. He is an old Pole who, after 1864, escaped to Sweden, and now makes a living by his former hobby. Both the Pole and the bookseller are over fifty, but they get on with the schoolmaster as if he were a contemporary.

The proprietor has his place behind the counter. He is an old sea captain who fell in love with the proprietress and married her. She rules in the kitchen, but the sliding panel is always open, so that she can keep an eye on the old man, lest he should take a glass too much before closing time. Not until the gas has been turned out, and the old man is ready to go to bed, is he allowed a nightcap in the shape of a stiff glass of rum and water.

At eleven o’clock the young bloods begin to arrive; they approach the counter diffidently and ask the proprietor in a whisper whether any of the private rooms upstairs are disengaged, and then there is a rustling of skirts in the hall and cautious footsteps are creeping upstairs.

“Well,” says the bookseller, who has suddenly found a topic of conversation, “when are you going to be married, Blom, old man?”

“I haven’t the means to get married,” answered the school-master. “Why don’t you take a wife to your bosom yourself?”

“No woman would have me, now that my head looks like an old, leather-covered trunk,” says the bookseller. “And, moreover, there’s my old Stafva, you know.”

Stafva was a legendary person in whom nobody believed. She was the incarnation of the bookseller’s unrealised dreams.

“But you, Mr. Potocki?” suggested the schoolmaster.

“He’s been married once, that’s enough,” replies the bookseller.

The Pole nods his head like a metrometer.

“Yes, I was married very happily. Ugh!” he says and finishes his grog.

“Well,” continues the schoolmaster, “if women weren’t such fools, one might consider the matter; but they are infernal fools.”

The Pole nods again and smiles; being a Pole, he doesn’t understand what the word fool means.

“I have been married very happily, ugh!”

“And then there is the noise of the children, and children’s clothes always drying near the stove; and servants, and all day long the smells from the kitchen. No, thank you! And, perhaps, sleepless nights into the bargain.”

“Ugh!” added the Pole, completing the sentence.

“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.