Martin Birck's Youth by Hjalmar Soderberg

The orchestra struck up the opening bars of Mefistofele.

Martin was sitting out by the balcony railing with Henrik Rissler. They listened to the music, looked out across the terraces, and said little. Henrik Rissler had a smooth white forehead and calm limpid eyes. His glance was long and questing; it seemed to slip over the objects nearest it in order more quickly to reach those farther off. He was the only one of Martin's comrades who had sought his company outside of school. They used to go to each other's homes in the afternoon to talk and smoke cigarettes, and once in a while they had gone on long walks together, often in rain, snow, or wind, out to the park or through the suburbs, talking the while of everything that concerns young men, of girls and God and the immortality of the soul. Or they would go into the gas-lighted streets with the sensation of throwing themselves into the turmoil of the world, would stand in front of etchings in bookshop windows, where they admired beyond everything a lithograph entitled Don Juan in Hades with a motto from Baudelaire: