His home was Hedeby; it lay on the other side of the lake, almost opposite Björne. She knew him well; they were of the same age and playmates.
“You might marry me, Marianne. I lead such a wretched life. I have to ride on borrowed horses and cannot pay my tailor’s bills. It can’t go on. I shall have to resign, and then I shall shoot myself.”
“But, Adrian, what kind of a marriage would it be? We are not in the least in love with one another.”
“Oh, as for love, I care nothing for all that nonsense,” he had then explained. “I like to ride a good horse and to hunt, but I am no pensioner, I am a worker. If I only could get some money, so that I could take charge of the estate at home and give my mother some peace in her old age, I should be happy. I should both plough and sow, for I like work.”
Then he had looked at her with his honest eyes, and she knew that he spoke the truth and that he was a man to depend upon. She engaged herself to him, chiefly to get away from her home, but also because she had always liked him.
But never would she forget that month which followed the August evening when her engagement was announced,—all that time of madness.
Baron Adrian became each day sadder and more silent. He came very often to Björne, sometimes several times a day, but she could not help noticing how depressed he was. With others he could still jest, but with her he was impossible, silent and bored. She understood what was the matter: it was not so easy as he had believed to marry an ugly woman. No one knew better than she how ugly she was. She had shown him that she did not want any caresses or love-making, but he was nevertheless tortured by the thought of her as his wife, and it seemed worse to him day by day. Why did he care? Why did he not break it off? She had given hints which were plain enough. She could do nothing. Her father had told her that her reputation would not bear any more ventures in being engaged. Then she had despised them both, and any way seemed good enough to get away from them. But only a couple of days after the great engagement feast a sudden and wonderful change had come.
In the path in front of the steps at Björne lay a big stone, which caused much trouble and vexation. Carriages rolled over it, horses and people tripped on it, the maids who came with heavy milk cans ran against it and spilled the milk; but the stone remained, because it had already lain there so many years. It had been there in the time of Sinclair’s parents, long before any one had thought of building at Björne. He did not see why he should take it up.
But one day at the end of August, two maids, who were carrying a heavy tub, tripped over the stone; they fell, hurt themselves badly, and the feeling against the stone grew strong.
It was early in the morning. Melchior was out on his morning walk, but as the workmen were about the house between eight and nine, Madame Gustava had several of them come and dig up the big stone.
They came with iron levers and spades, dug and strained, and at last got the old disturber of the peace up out of his hole. Then they carried him away to the back yard. It was work for six men.
The stone was hardly taken up before Melchior came home. You can believe that he was angry. It was no longer the same place, he thought. Who had dared to move the stone? Madame Gustava had given the order. Those women had no heart in their bodies. Did not his wife know that he loved that stone?
And then he went direct to the stone, lifted it, and carried it across the yard to the place where it had lain, and there he flung it down. And it was a stone which six men could scarcely lift. That deed was mightily admired through the whole of Värmland.
While he carried the stone across the yard, Marianne had stood at the dining-room window and looked at him. He was her master, that terrible man with his boundless strength,—an unreasonable, capricious master, who thought of nothing but his own pleasure.
They were in the midst of breakfast, and she had a carving-knife in her hand. Involuntarily she lifted the knife.
Madame Gustava seized her by the wrist.
“Marianne!”
“What is the matter, mother?”
“Oh, Marianne, you looked so strange! I was frightened.”
Marianne looked at her. She was a little, dry woman, gray and wrinkled already at fifty. She loved like a dog, without remembering knocks and blows. She was generally good-humored, and yet she made a melancholy impression. She was like a storm-whipped tree by the sea; she had never had quiet to grow. She had learned to use mean shifts, to lie when needed, and often made herself out more stupid than she was to escape taunts. In everything she was the tool of her husband.
“Would you grieve much if father died?” asked Marianne.
“Marianne, you are angry with your father. You are always angry with him. Why cannot everything be forgotten, since you have got a new fiancé?”
“Oh, mother, it is not my fault. Can I help shuddering at him? Do you not see what he is? Why should I care for him? He is violent, he is uncouth, he has tortured you till you are prematurely old. Why is he our master? He behaves like a madman. Why shall I honor and respect him? He is not good, he is not charitable. I know that he is strong. He is capable of beating us to death at any moment. He can turn us out of the house when he will. Is that why I should love him?”
But then Madame Gustava had been as never before. She had found strength and courage and had spoken weighty words.
“You must take care, Marianne. It almost seems to me as if your father was right when he shut you out last winter. You shall see that you will be punished for this. You must teach yourself to bear without hating, Marianne, to suffer without revenge.”
“Oh, mother, I am so unhappy.”
Immediately after, they heard in the hall the sound of a heavy fall.
They never knew if Melchior Sinclair had stood on the steps and through the open dining-room door had heard Marianne’s words, or if it was only over-exertion which had been the cause of the stroke. When they came out he lay unconscious. They never dared to ask him the cause. He himself never made any sign that he had heard anything. Marianne never dared to think the thought out that she had involuntarily revenged herself. But the sight of her father lying on the very steps where she had learnt to hate him took all bitterness from her heart.
He soon returned to consciousness, and when he had kept quiet a few days, he was like himself—and yet not at all like.
Marianne saw her parents walking together in the garden. It was always so now. He never went out alone, grumbled at guests and at everything which separated him from his wife. Old age had come upon him. He could not bring himself to write a letter; his wife had to do it. He never decided anything by himself, but asked her about everything and let it be as she decided. And he was always gentle and kind. He noticed the change which had come over him, and how happy his wife was. “She is well off now,” he said one day to Marianne, and pointed to Madame Gustava.
“Oh, dear Melchior,” she cried, “you know very well that I would rather have you strong again.”
And she really meant it. It was her joy to speak of him as he was in the days of his strength. She told how he held his own in riot and revel as well as any of the Ekeby pensioners, how he had done good business and earned much money, just when she thought that he in his madness would lose house and lands. But Marianne knew that she was happy in spite of all her complaints. To be everything to her husband was enough for her. They both looked old, prematurely broken. Marianne thought that she could see their future life. He would get gradually weaker and weaker; other strokes would make him more helpless, and she would watch over him until death parted them. But the end might be far distant. Madame Gustava could enjoy her happiness in peace still for a time. It must be so, Marianne thought. Life owed her some compensation.
For her too it was better. No fretting despair forced her to marry to get another master. Her wounded heart had found peace. She had to acknowledge that she was a truer, richer, nobler person than before; what could she wish undone of what had happened? Was it true that all suffering was good? Could everything be turned to happiness? She had begun to consider everything good which could help to develop her to a higher degree of humanity. The old songs were not right. Sorrow was not the only lasting thing. She would now go out into the world and look about for some place where she was needed. If her father had been in his old mood, he would never have allowed her to break her engagement. Now Madame Gustava had arranged the matter. Marianne had even been allowed to give Baron Adrian the money he needed.
She could think of him too with pleasure, she would be free from him. With his bravery and love of life he had always reminded her of Gösta; now she should see him glad again. He would again be that sunny knight who had come in his glory to her father’s house. She would get him lands where he could plough and dig as much as his heart desired, and she would see him lead a beautiful bride to the altar.
With such thoughts she sits down and writes to give him back his freedom. She writes gentle, persuasive words, sense wrapped up in jests, and yet so that he must understand how seriously she means it.
While she writes she hears hoof-beats on the road.
“My dear Sir Sunshine,” she thinks, “it is the last time.”
Baron Adrian immediately after comes into her room.
“What, Adrian, are you coming in here?” and she looks dismayed at all her packing.
He is shy and embarrassed and stammers out an excuse.
“I was just writing to you,” she says. “Look, you might as well read it now.”
He takes the letter and she sits and watches him while he reads. She longs to see his face light up with joy.
But he has not read far before he grows fiery red, throws the letter on the floor, stamps on it, and swears terrible oaths.
Marianne trembles slightly. She is no novice in the study of love; still she has not before understood this inexperienced boy, this great child.
“Adrian, dear Adrian,” she says, “what kind of a comedy have you played with me? Come and tell me the truth.”
He came and almost suffocated her with caresses. Poor boy, so he had cared and longed.
After a while she looked out. There walked Madame Gustava and talked with her husband of flowers and birds, and here she sat and chatted of love. “Life has let us both feel its serious side,” she thought, and smiled sadly. “It wants to comfort us; we have each got her big child to play with.”
However, it was good to be loved. It was sweet to hear him whisper of the magical power which she possessed, of how he had been ashamed of what he had said at their first conversation. He had not then known what charm she had. Oh, no man could be near her without loving her, but she had frightened him; he had felt so strangely subdued.
It was not happiness, nor unhappiness, but she would try to live with this man.
She began to understand herself, and thought of the words of the old songs about the turtle-dove. It never drinks clear water, but first muddies it with its foot so that it may better suit its sorrowful spirit. So too should she never go to the spring of life and drink pure, unmixed happiness. Troubled with sorrow, life pleased her best.
My pale friend, Death the deliverer, came in August, when the nights were white with moonlight, to the house of Captain Uggla. But he did not dare to go direct into that hospitable home, for they are few who love him, and he does not wish to be greeted with weeping, rather with quiet joy,—he who comes to set free the soul from the fetters of pain, he who delivers the soul from the burden of the body and lets it enjoy the beautiful life of the spheres.
Into the old grove behind the house, crept Death. In the grove, which then was young and full of green, my pale friend hid himself by day, but at night he stood at the edge of the wood, white and pale, with his scythe glittering in the moonlight.
Death stood there, and the creatures of the night saw him. Evening after evening the people at Berga heard how the fox howled to foretell his coming. The snake crawled up the sandy path to the very house. He could not speak, but they well understood that he came as a presage. And in the apple-tree outside the window of the captain’s wife the owl hooted. For everything in nature feels Death and trembles.
It happened that the judge from Munkerud, who had been at a festival at the Bro deanery, drove by Berga at two o’clock in the night and saw a candle burning in the window of the guest-room. He plainly saw the yellow flame and the white candle, and, wondering, he afterwards told of the candle which had burned in the summer night.
The gay daughters at Berga laughed and said that the judge had the gift of second sight, for there were no candles in the house, they were already burned up in March; and the captain swore that no one had slept in the guest-room for days and weeks; but his wife was silent and grew pale, for that white candle with the clear flame used to show itself when one of her family should be set free by Death.
A short time after, Ferdinand came home from a surveying journey in the northern forests. He came, pale and ill with an incurable disease of the lungs, and as soon as his mother saw him, she knew that her son must die.
He must go, that good son who had never given his parents a sorrow. He must leave earth’s pleasures and happiness, and the beautiful, beloved bride who awaited him, and the rich estates which should have been his.
At last, when my pale friend had waited a month, he took heart and went one night up to the house. He thought how hunger and privation had there been met by glad faces, so why should not he too be received with joy?
That night the captain’s wife, who lay awake, heard a knocking on the window-pane, and she sat up in bed and asked: “Who is it who knocks?”
And the old people tell that Death answered her:
“It is Death who knocks.”
Then she rose up, opened her window, and saw bats and owls fluttering in the moonlight, but Death she did not see.
“Come,” she said half aloud, “friend and deliverer! Why have you lingered so long? I have been waiting. I have called. Come and set my son free!”
The next day, she sat by her son’s sick-bed and spoke to him of the blissfulness of the liberated spirit and of its glorious life.
So Ferdinand died, enchanted by bright visions, smiling at the glory to come.
Death had never seen anything so beautiful. For of course there were some who wept by Ferdinand Uggla’s death-bed; but the sick man himself smiled at the man with the scythe, when he took his place on the edge of the bed, and his mother listened to the death-rattle as if to sweet music. She trembled lest Death should not finish his work; and when the end came, tears fell from her eyes, but they were tears of joy which wet her son’s stiffened face.
Never had Death been so fêted as at Ferdinand Uggla’s burial.
It was a wonderful funeral procession which passed under the lindens. In front of the flower-decked coffin beautiful children walked and strewed flowers. There was no mourning-dress, no crape; for his mother had wished that he who died with joy should not be followed to the good refuge by a gloomy funeral procession, but by a shining wedding train.
Following the coffin, went Anna Stjärnhök, the dead man’s beautiful, glowing bride. She had set a bridal wreath on her head, hung a bridal veil over her, and arrayed herself in a bridal dress of white, shimmering satin. So adorned, she went to be wedded at the grave to a mouldering bridegroom.
Behind her they came, two by two, dignified old ladies and stately men. The ladies came in shining buckles and brooches, with strings of milk-white pearls and bracelets of gold. Ostrich feathers nodded in their bonnets of silk and lace, and from their shoulders floated thin silken shawls over dresses of many-colored satin. And their husbands came in their best array, in high-collared coats with gilded buttons, with swelling ruffles, and in vests of stiff brocade or richly-embroidered velvet. It was a wedding procession; the captain’s wife had wished it so.
She herself walked next after Anna Stjärnhök, led by her husband. If she had possessed a dress of shining brocade, she would have worn it; if she had possessed jewels and a gay bonnet, she would have worn them too to do honor to her son on his festival day. But she only had the black silk dress and the yellowed laces which had adorned so many feasts, and she wore them here too.
Although all the guests came in their best array, there was not a dry eye when they walked forward to the grave. Men and women wept, not so much for the dead, as for themselves. There walked the bride; there the bridegroom was carried; there they themselves wandered, decked out for a feast, and yet—who is there who walks earth’s green pathways and does not know that his lot is affliction, sorrow, unhappiness, and death. They wept at the thought that nothing on earth could save them.
The captain’s wife did not weep; but she was the only one whose eyes were dry.
When the prayers were read, and the grave filled in, all went away to the carriages. Only the mother and Anna Stjärnhök lingered by the grave to bid their dead a last good-bye. The older woman sat down on the grave-mound, and Anna placed herself at her side.
“Anna,” said the captain’s wife, “I have said to God: ‘Let Death come and take away my son, let him take away him I love most, and only tears of joy shall come to my eyes; with nuptial pomp I will follow him to his grave, and my red rose-bush, which stands outside my chamber-window, will I move to him in the graveyard.’ And now it has come to pass my son is dead. I have greeted Death like a friend, called him by the tenderest names; I have wept tears of joy over my son’s dead face, and in the autumn, when the leaves are fallen, I shall plant my red rose-bush here. But do you know, you who sit here at my side, why I have sent such prayers to God?”
She looked questioningly at Anna Stjärnhök; but the girl sat silent and pale beside her. Perhaps she was struggling to silence inward voices which already there, on the grave of the dead, began to whisper to her that now at last she was free.
“The fault is yours,” said the captain’s wife.
The girl sank down as from a blow. She did not answer a word.
“Anna Stjärnhök, you were once proud and self-willed: you played with my son, took him and cast him off. But what of that? He had to accept it, as well as another. Perhaps too he and we all loved your money as much as you. But you came back, you came with a blessing to our home; you were gentle and mild, strong and kind, when you came again. You cherished us with love; you made us so happy, Anna Stjärnhök; and we poor people lay at your feet.
“And yet, and yet I have wished that you had not come. Then had I not needed to pray to God to shorten my son’s life. At Christmas he could have borne to lose you, but after he had learnt to know you, such as you now are, he would not have had the strength.
“You know, Anna Stjärnhök, who to-day have put on your bridal dress to follow my son, that if he had lived you would never have followed him in that attire to the Bro church, for you did not love him.
“I saw that you only came out of pity, for you wanted to relieve our hard lot. You did not love him. Do you not think that I know love, that I see it, when it is there, and understand when it is lacking. Then I thought: ‘May God take my son’s life before he has his eyes opened!’
“Oh, if you had loved him! Oh, if you had never come to us and sweetened our lives, when you did not love him! I knew my duty: if he had not died, I should have been forced to tell him that you did not love him, that you were marrying him out of pity. I must have made him set you free, and then his life’s happiness would have been gone. That is why I prayed to God that he might die, that I should not need to disturb the peace of his heart. And I have rejoiced over his sunken cheeks, exulted over his rattling breath, trembled lest Death should not complete his work.”
She stopped speaking, and waited for an answer; but Anna Stjärnhök could not speak, she was still listening to the many voices in her soul.
Then the mother cried out in despair:—
“Oh, how happy are they who may mourn for their dead, they who may weep streams of tears! I must stand with dry eyes by my son’s grave, I must rejoice over his death! How unhappy I am!”
Then Anna Stjärnhök pressed her hands against her breast. She remembered that winter night when she had sworn by her love to be these poor people’s support and comfort, and she trembled. Had it all been in vain; was not her sacrifice one of those which God accepts? Should it all be turned to a curse?
But if she sacrificed everything would not God then give His blessing to the work, and let her bring happiness, be a support, a help, to these people?
“What is required for you to be able to mourn for your son?” she asked.
“That I shall not believe the testimony of my old eyes. If I believed that you loved my son, then I would grieve for his death.”
The girl rose up, her eyes burning. She tore off her veil and spread it over the grave, she tore off her wreath and laid it beside it.
“See how I love him!” she cried. “I give him my wreath and veil. I consecrate myself to him. I will never belong to another.”
Then the captain’s wife rose too. She stood silent for a while; her whole body was shaking, and her face twitched, but at last the tears came,—tears of grief.
If dead things love, if earth and water distinguish friends from enemies, I should like to possess their love. I should like the green earth not to feel my step as a heavy burden. I should like her to forgive that she for my sake is wounded by plough and harrow, and willingly to open for my dead body. And I should like the waves, whose shining mirror is broken by my oars, to have the same patience with me as a mother has with an eager child when it climbs up on her knee, careless of the uncrumpled silk of her dress.
The spirit of life still dwells in dead things. Have you not seen it? When strife and hate fill the earth, dead things must suffer too. Then the waves are wild and ravenous; then the fields are niggardly as a miser. But woe to him for whose sake the woods sigh and the mountains weep.
Memorable was the year when the pensioners were in power. If one could tell of everything which happened that year to the people by Löfven’s shores a world would be surprised. For then old love wakened, then new was kindled. Old hate blazed up, and long cherished revenge seized its prey.
From Ekeby this restless infection went forth; it spread first through the manors and estates, and drove men to ruin and to crime. It ran from village to village, from cottage to cottage. Everywhere hearts became wild, and brains confused. Never did the dance whirl so merrily at the cross-roads; never was the beer-barrel so quickly emptied; never was so much grain turned into brandy. Never were there so many balls; never was the way shorter from the angry word to the knife-thrust. But the uneasiness was not only among men. It spread through all living things. Never had wolf and bear ravaged so fiercely; never had fox and owl howled so terribly, and plundered so boldly; never did the sheep go so often astray in the wood; never did so much sickness rage among the cattle.
He who will see how everything hangs together must leave the towns and live in a lonely hut at the edge of the forest; then he will learn to notice nature’s every sign and to understand how the dead things depend on the living. He will see that when there is restlessness on the earth, the peace of the dead things is disturbed. The people know it. It is in such times that the wood-nymph puts out the charcoal-kiln, the sea-nymph breaks the boat to pieces, the river-sprite sends illness, the goblin starves the cow. And it was so that year. Never had the spring freshets done so much damage. The mill and smithy at Ekeby were not the only offerings. Never had the lightning laid waste so much already before midsummer—after midsummer came the drought.
As long as the long days lasted, no rain came. From the middle of June till the beginning of September, the country was bathed in continual sunshine.
The rain refused to fall, the earth to nourish, the winds to blow. Sunshine only streamed down on the earth. The grass was not yet high and could not grow; the rye was without nourishment, just when it should have collected food in its ears; the wheat, from which most of the bread was baked, never came up more than a few inches; the late sowed turnips never sprouted; not even the potatoes could draw sustenance from that petrified earth.
At such times they begin to be frightened far away in the forest huts, and from the mountains the terror comes down to the calmer people on the plain.
“There is some one whom God’s hand is seeking!” say the people.
And each one beats his breast and says: “Is it I? Is it from horror of me that the rain holds back? Is it in wrath against me that the stern earth dries up and hardens?—and the perpetual sunshine,—is it to heap coals of fire on my head? Or if it is not I, who is it whom God’s hand is seeking?”
It was a Sunday in August. The service was over. The people wandered in groups along the sunny roads. On all sides they saw burned woods and ruined crops. There had been many forest fires; and what they had spared, insects had taken.
The gloomy people did not lack for subjects of conversation. There were many who could tell how hard it had been in the years of famine of eighteen hundred and eight and nine, and in the cold winter of eighteen hundred and twelve, when the sparrows froze to death. They knew how to make bread out of bark, and how the cows could be taught to eat moss.
There was one woman who had tried a new kind of bread of cranberries and corn-meal. She had a sample with her, and let the people taste it. She was proud of her invention.
But over them all floated the same question. It stared from every eye, was whispered by every lip: “Who is it, O Lord, whom Thy hand seeks?”
A man in the gloomy crowd which had gone westward, and struggled up Broby hill, stopped a minute before the path which led up to the house of the mean Broby clergyman. He picked up a dry stick from the ground and threw it upon the path.
“Dry as that stick have the prayers been which he has given our Lord,” said the man.
He who walked next to him also stopped. He took up a dry branch and threw it where the stick had fallen.
“That is the proper offering to that priest,” he said.
The third in the crowd followed the others’ example.
“He has been like the drought; sticks and straw are all that he has let us keep.”
The fourth said: “We give him back what he has given us.”
And the fifth: “For a perpetual disgrace I throw this to him. May he dry up and wither away like this branch!”
“Dry food to the dry priest,” said the sixth.
The people who came after see what they are doing and hear what they say. Now they get the answer to their long questioning.
“Give him what belongs to him! He has brought the drought on us.”
And each one stops, each one says his word and throws his branch before he goes on.
In the corner by the path there soon lies a pile of sticks and straw,—a pile of shame for the Broby clergyman.
That was their only revenge. No one lifted his hand against the clergyman or said an angry word to him. Desperate hearts cast off part of their burden by throwing a dry branch on the pile. They did not revenge themselves. They only pointed out the guilty one to the God of retribution.
“If we have not worshipped you rightly, it is that man’s fault. Be pitiful, Lord, and let him alone suffer! We mark him with shame and dishonor. We are not with him.”
It soon became the custom for every one who passed the vicarage to throw a dry branch on the pile of shame.
The old miser soon noticed the pile by the roadside. He had it carried away,—some said that he heated his stove with it. The next day a new pile had collected on the same spot, and as soon as he had that taken away a new one was begun.
The dry branches lay there and said: “Shame, shame to the Broby clergyman!”
Soon the people’s meaning became clear to him. He understood that they pointed to him as the origin of their misfortune. It was in wrath at him God let the earth languish. He tried to laugh at them and their branches; but when it had gone on a week, he laughed no more. Oh, what childishness! How can those dry sticks injure him? He understood that the hate of years sought an opportunity of expressing itself. What of that?—he was not used to love.
For all this he did not become more gentle. He had perhaps wished to improve after the old lady had visited him; now he could not. He would not be forced to it.
But gradually the pile grew too strong for him. He thought of it continually, and the feeling which every one cherished took root also in him. He watched the pile, counted the branches which had been added each day. The thought of it encroached upon all other thoughts. The pile was destroying him.
Every day he felt more and more the people were right. He grew thin and very old in a couple of weeks. He suffered from remorse and indisposition. But it was as if everything depended on that pile. It was as if his remorse would grow silent, and the weight of years be lifted off him, if only the pile would stop growing.
Finally he sat there the whole day and watched; but the people were without mercy. At night there were always new branches thrown on.
One day Gösta Berling passed along the road. The Broby clergyman sat at the roadside, old and haggard. He sat and picked out the dry sticks and laid them together in rows and piles, playing with them as if he were a child again. Gösta was grieved at his misery.
“What are you doing, pastor?” he says, and leaps out of the carriage.
“Oh, I am sitting here and picking. I am not doing anything.”
“You had better go home, and not sit here in the dust.”
“It is best that I sit here.”
Then Gösta Berling sits down beside him.
“It is not so easy to be a priest,” he says after a while.
“It is all very well down here where there are people,” answers the clergyman. “It is worse up there.”
Gösta understands what he means. He knows those parishes in Northern Värmland where sometimes there is not even a house for the clergyman, where there are not more than a couple of people in ten miles of country, where the clergyman is the only educated man. The Broby minister had been in such a parish for over twenty years.
“That is where we are sent when we are young,” says Gösta. “It is impossible to hold out with such a life; and so one is ruined forever. There are many who have gone under up there.”
“Yes,” says the Broby clergyman; “a man is destroyed by loneliness.”
“A man comes,” says Gösta, “eager and ardent, exhorts and admonishes, and thinks that all will be well, that the people will soon turn to better ways.”
“Yes, yes.”
“But soon he sees that words do not help. Poverty stands in the way. Poverty prevents all improvement.”
“Poverty,” repeats the clergyman,—“poverty has ruined my life.”
“The young minister comes up there,” continues Gösta, “poor as all the others. He says to the drunkard: Stop drinking!”
“Then the drunkard answers,” interrupts the clergyman: “Give me something which is better than brandy! Brandy is furs in winter, coolness in summer. Brandy is a warm house and a soft bed. Give me those, and I will drink no more.”
“And then,” resumes Gösta, “the minister says to the thief: You shall not steal; and to the cruel husband: You shall not beat your wife; and to the superstitious: You shall believe in God and not in devils and goblins. But the thief answers: Give me bread; and the cruel husband says: Make us rich, and we will not quarrel; and the superstitious say: Teach us better. But who can help them without money?”
“It is true, true every word,” cried the clergyman. “They believed in God, but more in the devil, and most in the mountain goblin. The crops were all turned into the still. There seemed to be no end to the misery. In most of the gray cottages there was want. Hidden sorrow made the women’s tongues bitter. Discomfort drove their husbands to drink. They could not look after their fields or their cattle. They made a fool of their minister. What could a man do with them? They did not understand what I said to them from the pulpit. They did not believe what I wanted to teach them. And no one to consult, no one who could help me to keep up my courage.”
“There are those who have stood out,” says Gösta. “God’s grace has been so great to some that they have not returned from such a life broken men. They have had strength; they have borne the loneliness, the poverty, the hopelessness. They have done what little good they could and have not despaired. Such men have always been and still are. I greet them as heroes. I will honor them as long as I live. I was not able to stand out.”
“I could not,” added the clergyman.
“The minister up there thinks,” says Gösta, musingly, “that he will be a rich man, an exceedingly rich man. No one who is poor can struggle against evil. And so he begins to hoard.”
“If he had not hoarded he would have drunk,” answers the old man; “he sees so much misery.”
“Or he would become dull and lazy, and lose all strength. It is dangerous for him who is not born there to come thither.”
“He has to harden himself to hoard. He pretends at first; then it becomes a habit.”
“He has to be hard both to himself and to others,” continues Gösta; “it is hard to amass. He must endure hate and scorn; he must go cold and hungry and harden his heart: it almost seems as if he had forgotten why he began to hoard.”
The Broby clergyman looked startled at him. He wondered if Gösta sat there and made a fool of him. But Gösta was only eager and earnest. It was as if he was speaking of his own life.
“It was so with me,” says the old man quietly.
“But God watches over him,” interrupts Gösta. “He wakes in him the thoughts of his youth when he has amassed enough. He gives the minister a sign when His people need him.”
“But if the minister does not obey the sign, Gösta Berling?”
“He cannot withstand it,” says Gösta, and smiles. “He is so moved by the thought of the warm cottages which he will help the poor to build.”
The clergyman looks down on the little heaps he had raised from the sticks of the pile of shame. The longer he talks with Gösta, the more he is convinced that the latter is right. He had always had the thought of doing good some day, when he had enough,—of course he had had that thought.
“Why does he never build the cottages?” he asks shyly.
“He is ashamed. Many would think that he did what he always had meant to do through fear of the people.”
“He cannot bear to be forced, is that it?”
“He can however do much good secretly. Much help is needed this year. He can find some one who will dispense his gifts. I understand what it all means,” cries Gösta, and his eyes shone. “Thousands shall get bread this year from one whom they load with curses.”
“It shall be so, Gösta.”
A feeling of transport came over the two who had so failed in the vocation they had chosen. The desire of their youthful days to serve God and man filled them. They gloated over the good deeds they would do. Gösta would help the minister.
“We will get bread to begin with,” says the clergyman.
“We will get teachers. We will have a surveyor come, and divide up the land. Then the people shall learn how to till their fields and tend their cattle.”
“We will build roads and open new districts.”
“We will make locks at the falls at Berg, so that there will be an open way between Löfven and Väner.”
“All the riches of the forest will be of double blessing when the way to the sea is opened.”
“Your head shall be weighed down by blessings,” cries Gösta.
The clergyman looks up. They read in one another’s eyes the same burning enthusiasm.
But at the same moment the eyes of both fall on the pile of shame.
“Gösta,” says the old man, “all that needs a young man’s strength, but I am dying. You see what is killing me.”
“Get rid of it!”
“How, Gösta Berling?”
Gösta moves close up to him and looks sharply into his eyes. “Pray to God for rain,” he says. “You are going to preach next Sunday. Pray for rain.”
The old clergyman sinks down in terror.
“If you are in earnest, if you are not he who has brought the drought to the land, if you had meant to serve the Most High with your hardness, pray God for rain. That shall be the token; by that we shall know if God wishes what we wish.”
When Gösta drove down Broby hill, he was astonished at himself and at the enthusiasm which had taken hold of him. But it could be a beautiful life—yes, but not for him. Up there they would have none of his services.
In the Broby church the sermon was over and the usual prayers read. The minister was just going to step down from the pulpit, but he hesitated, finally he fell on his knees and prayed for rain.
He prayed as a desperate man prays, with few words, without coherency.
“If it is my sin which has called down Thy wrath, let me alone suffer! If there is any pity in Thee, Thou God of mercy, let it rain! Take the shame from me! Let it rain in answer to my prayer! Let the rain fall on the fields of the poor! Give Thy people bread!”
The day was hot; the sultriness was intolerable. The congregation sat as if in a torpor; but at these broken words, this hoarse despair, every one had awakened.
“If there is a way of expiation for me, give rain—”
He stopped speaking. The doors stood open. There came a violent gust of wind. It rushed along the ground, whirled into the church, in a cloud of dust, full of sticks and straw. The clergyman could not continue; he staggered down from the pulpit.
The people trembled. Could that be an answer?
But the gust was only the forerunner of the thunderstorm. It came rushing with an unheard-of violence. When the psalm was sung, and the clergyman stood by the altar, the lightning was already flashing, and the thunder crashing, drowning the sound of his voice. As the sexton struck up the final march, the first drops were already pattering against the green window-panes, and the people hurried out to see the rain. But they were not content with that: some wept, others laughed, while they let the torrents stream over them. Ah, how great had been their need! How unhappy they had been! But God is good! God let it rain. What joy, what joy!
The Broby clergyman was the only one who did not come out into the rain. He lay on his knees before the altar and did not rise. The joy had been too violent for him. He died of happiness.
The child was born in a peasant’s house east of the Klar river. The child’s mother had come seeking employment one day in early June.
She had been unfortunate, she had said to the master and mistress, and her mother had been so hard to her that she had had to run away from home. She called herself Elizabeth Karlsdotter; but she would not say from whence she came, for then perhaps they would tell her parents that she was there, and if they should find her, she would be tortured to death, she knew it. She asked for no pay, only food and a roof over her head. She could work, weave or spin, and take care of the cows,—whatever they wanted. If they wished, she could also pay for herself.
She had been clever enough to come to the farm-house bare-foot, with her shoes under her arm; she had coarse hands; she spoke the country dialect; and she wore a peasant woman’s clothes. She was believed.
The master thought she looked sickly, and did not count much on her fitness for work. But somewhere the poor thing must be. And so she was allowed to stop.
There was something about her which made every one on the farm kind to her. She had come to a good place. The people were serious and reticent. Her mistress liked her; when she discovered that she could weave, they borrowed a loom from the vicarage, and the child’s mother worked at it the whole summer.
It never occurred to any one that she needed to be spared; she had to work like a peasant girl the whole time. She liked too to have much work. She was not unhappy. Life among the peasants pleased her, although she lacked all her accustomed conveniences. But everything was taken so simply and quietly there. Every one’s thoughts were on his or her work; the days passed so uniform and monotonous that one mistook the day and thought it was the middle of the week when Sunday came.
One day at the end of August there had been haste with the oat crop, and the child’s mother had gone out with the others to bind the sheaves. She had strained herself, and the child had been born, but too soon. She had expected it in October.
Now the farmer’s wife stood with the child in the living room to warm it by the fire, for the poor little thing was shivering in the August heat. The child’s mother lay in a room beyond and listened to what they said of the little one. She could imagine how the men and maids came up and looked at him.
“Such a poor little thing,” they all said, and then followed always, without fail:—
“Poor little thing, with no father!”
They did not complain of the child’s crying: they thought a child needed to cry; and, when everything was considered, the child was strong for its age; had it but a father, all would have been well.
The mother lay and listened and wondered. The matter suddenly seemed to her incredibly important. How would he get through life, the poor little thing?
She had made her plans before. She would remain at the farm-house the first year. Then she would hire a room and earn her bread at the loom. She meant to earn enough to feed and clothe the child. Her husband could continue to believe that she was unworthy. She had thought that the child perhaps would be a better man if she alone brought it up, than if a stupid and conceited father should guide it.
But now, since the child was born, she could not see the matter in the same way. Now she thought that she had been selfish. “The child must have a father,” she said to herself.
If he had not been such a pitiful little thing, if he had been able to eat and sleep like other children, if his head had not always sunk down on one shoulder, and if he had not so nearly died when the attack of cramp came, it would not have been so important.
It was not so easy to decide, but decide she must immediately. The child was three days old, and the peasants in Värmland seldom wait longer to have the child baptized. Under what name should the baby be entered in the church-register, and what would the clergyman want to know about the child’s mother?
It was an injustice to the child to let him be entered as fatherless. If he should be a weak and sickly man, how could she take the responsibility of depriving him of the advantages of birth and riches?
The child’s mother had noticed that there is generally great joy and excitement when a child comes into the world. Now it seemed to her that it must be hard for this baby to live, whom every one pitied. She wanted to see him sleeping on silk and lace, as it behoves a count’s son. She wanted to see him encompassed with joy and pride.
The child’s mother began to think that she had done its father too great an injustice. Had she the right to keep him for herself? That she could not have. Such a precious little thing, whose worth it is not in the power of man to calculate, should she take that for her own? That would not be honest.
But she did not wish to go back to her husband. She feared that it would be her death. But the child was in greater danger than she. He might die any minute, and he was not baptized.
That which had driven her from her home, the grievous sin which had dwelt in her heart, was gone. She had now no love for any other than the child.
It was not too heavy a duty to try to get him his right place in life.
The child’s mother had the farmer and his wife called and told them everything. The husband journeyed to Borg to tell Count Dohna that his countess was alive, and that there was a child.
The peasant came home late in the evening; he had not met the count, for he had gone away, but he had been to the minister at Svartsjö, and talked with him of the matter.
Then the countess heard that her marriage had been declared invalid, and that she no longer had a husband.
The minister wrote a friendly letter to her, and offered her a home in his house.
A letter from her own father to Count Henrik, which must have reached Borg a few days after her flight, was also sent to her. It was just that letter in which the old man had begged the count to hasten to make his marriage legal, which had indicated to the count the easiest way to be rid of his wife.
It is easy to imagine that the child’s mother was seized with anger more than sorrow, when she heard the peasant’s story.
She lay awake the whole night. The child must have a father, she thought over and over again.
The next morning the peasant had to drive to Ekeby for her, and go for Gösta Berling.
Gösta asked the silent man many questions, but could find out nothing. Yes, the countess had been in his house the whole summer. She had been well and had worked. Now a child was born. The child was weak; but the mother would soon be strong again.
Gösta asked if the countess knew that the marriage had been annulled.
Yes, she knew it now. She had heard it yesterday.
And as long as the drive lasted Gösta had alternately fever and chills.
What did she want of him? Why did she send for him?
He thought of the life that summer on Löfven’s shores. They had let the days go by with jests and laughter and pleasure parties, while she had worked and suffered.
He had never thought of the possibility of ever seeing her again. Ah, if he had dared to hope! He would have then come into her presence a better man. What had he now to look back on but the usual follies!
About eight o’clock in the evening he arrived, and was immediately taken to the child’s mother. It was dark in the room. He could scarcely see her where she lay. The farmer and his wife came in also.
Now you must know that she whose white face shone in the dimness was always the noblest and the purest he knew, the most beautiful soul which had ever arrayed itself in earthly dust. When he once again felt the bliss of being near her, he longed to throw himself on his knees and thank her for having again appeared to him; but he was so overpowered by emotion that he could neither speak nor act.
“Dear Countess Elizabeth!” he only cried.
“Good-evening, Gösta.”
She gave him her hand, which seemed once more to have become soft and transparent. She lay silent, while he struggled with his emotion.
The child’s mother was not shaken by any violently raging feelings when she saw Gösta. It surprised her only that he seemed to consider her of chief importance, when he ought to understand that it now only concerned the child.
“Gösta,” she said gently, “you must help me now, as you once promised. You know that my husband has abandoned me, so that my child has no father.”
“Yes, countess; but that can certainly be changed. Now that there is a child, the count can be forced to make the marriage legal. You may be certain that I shall help you!”
The countess smiled. “Do you think that I will force myself upon Count Dohna?”
The blood surged up to Gösta’s head. What did she wish then? What did she want of him?
“Come here, Gösta,” she said, and again stretched out her hand. “You must not be angry with me for what I am going to say; but I thought that you who are—who are—”
“A dismissed priest, a drunkard, a pensioner, Ebba Dohna’s murderer; I know the whole list—”
“Are you already angry, Gösta?”
“I would rather that you did not say anything more.”
But the child’s mother continued:—
“There are many, Gösta, who would have liked to be your wife out of love; but it is not so with me. If I loved you I should not dare to speak as I am speaking now. For myself I would never ask such a thing, Gösta; but do you see, I can do it for the sake of the child. You must understand what I mean to beg of you. Of course it is a great degradation for you, since I am an unmarried woman who has a child. I did not think that you would be willing to do it because you are worse than others; although, yes, I did think of that too. But first I thought that you could be willing, because you are kind, Gösta, because you are a hero and can sacrifice yourself. But it is perhaps too much to ask. Perhaps such a thing would be impossible for a man. If you despise me too much, if it is too loathsome for you to give your name to another man’s child, say so! I shall not be angry. I understand that it is too much to ask; but the child is sick, Gösta. It is cruel at his baptism not to be able to give the name of his mother’s husband.”
He, hearing her, experienced the same feeling as when that spring day he had put her on land and left her to her fate. Now he had to help her to ruin her life, her whole future life. He who loved her had to do it.
“I will do everything you wish, countess,” he said.
The next day he spoke to the dean at Bro, for there the banns were to be called.
The good old dean was much moved by his story, and promised to take all the responsibility of giving her away.
“Yes,” he said, “you must help her, Gösta, otherwise she might become insane. She thinks that she has injured the child by depriving it of its position in life. She has a most sensitive conscience, that woman.”
“But I know that I shall make her unhappy,” cried Gösta.
“That you must not do, Gösta. You must be a sensible man now, with wife and child to care for.”
The dean had to journey down to Svartsjö and speak to both the minister there and the judge. The end of it all was that the next Sunday, the first of September, the banns were called in Svartsjö between Gösta Berling and Elizabeth von Thurn.
Then the child’s mother was carried with the greatest care to Ekeby, and there the child was baptized.
The dean talked to her, and told her that she could still recall her decision to marry such a man as Gösta Berling. She ought to first write to her father.
“I cannot repent,” she said; “think if my child should die before it had a father.”
When the banns had been thrice asked, the child’s mother had been well and up several days. In the afternoon the dean came to Ekeby and married her to Gösta Berling. But no one thought of it as a wedding. No guests were invited. They only gave the child a father, nothing more.
The child’s mother shone with a quiet joy, as if she had attained a great end in life. The bridegroom was in despair. He thought how she had thrown away her life by a marriage with him. He saw with dismay how he scarcely existed for her. All her thoughts were with her child.
A few days after the father and mother were mourning. The child had died.
Many thought that the child’s mother did not mourn so violently nor so deeply as they had expected; she had a look of triumph. It was as if she rejoiced that she had thrown away her life for the sake of the child. When he joined the angels, he would still remember that a mother on earth had loved him.
All this happened quietly and unnoticed. When the banns were published for Gösta Berling and Elizabeth von Thurn in the Svartsjö church, most of the congregation did not even know who the bride was. The clergyman and the gentry who knew the story said little about it. It was as if they were afraid that some one who had lost faith in the power of conscience should wrongly interpret the young woman’s action. They were so afraid, so afraid lest some one should come and say: “See now, she could not conquer her love for Gösta; she has married him under a plausible pretext.” Ah, the old people were always so careful of that young woman! Never could they bear to hear anything evil of her. They would scarcely acknowledge that she had sinned. They would not agree that any fault stained that soul which was so afraid of evil.
Another great event happened just then, which also caused Gösta’s marriage to be little discussed.
Major Samzelius had met with an accident. He had become more and more strange and misanthropic. His chief intercourse was with animals, and he had collected a small menagerie at Sjö.
He was dangerous too; for he always carried a loaded gun, and shot it off time after time without paying much attention to his aim. One day he was bitten by a tame bear which he had shot without intending it. The wounded animal threw itself on him, and succeeded in giving him a terrible bite in the arm. The beast broke away and took refuge in the forest.
The major was put to bed and died of the wound, but not till just before Christmas. Had his wife known that he lay ill, she could have resumed her sway over Ekeby. But the pensioners knew that she would not come before their year was out.
Under the stairs to the gallery in the Svartsjö church is a lumber-room filled with the grave-diggers’ worn-out shovels, with broken benches, with rejected tin labels and other rubbish.
There, where the dust lies thickest and seems to hide it from every human eye, stands a chest, inlaid with mother-of-pearl in the most perfect mosaic. If one scrapes the dust away, it seems to shine and glitter like a mountain-wall in a fairy-tale. The chest is locked, and the key is in good keeping; it may not be used. No mortal man may cast a glance into that chest. No one knows what is in it. First, when the nineteenth century has reached its close, may the key be placed in the lock, the cover be lifted, and the treasures which it guarded be seen by men.
So has he who owned the chest ordained.
On the brass-plate of the cover stands an inscription: “Labor vincit omnia.” But another inscription would be more appropriate. “Amor vincit omnia” ought to stand there. For the chest in the rubbish room under the gallery stairs is a testimony of the omnipotence of love.
O Eros, all-conquering god!
Thou, O Love, art indeed eternal! Old are people on the earth, but thou hast followed them through the ages.
Where are the gods of the East, the strong heroes who carried weapons of thunderbolts,—they who on the shores of holy rivers took offerings of honey and milk? They are dead. Dead is Bel, the mighty warrior, and Thot, the hawk-headed champion. The glorious ones are dead who rested on the cloud banks of Olympus; so too the mighty who dwelt in the turreted Valhalla. All the old gods are dead except Eros, Eros, the all-powerful!
His work is in everything you see. He supports the race. See him everywhere! Whither can you go without finding the print of his foot? What has your ear perceived, where the humming of his wings has not been the key-note? He lives in the hearts of men and in the sleeping germ. See with trembling his presence in inanimate things!
What is there which does not long and desire? What is there which escapes his dominion? All the gods of revenge will fall, all the powers of strength and might. Thou, O Love, art eternal!
Old Uncle Eberhard is sitting at his writing-desk,—a splendid piece of furniture with a hundred drawers, with marble top and ornaments of blackened brass. He works with eagerness and diligence, alone in the pensioners’ wing.
Oh, Eberhard, why do you not wander about wood and field in these last days of the departing summer like the other pensioners? No one, you know, worships unpunished the goddess of wisdom. Your back is bent with sixty and some years; the hair which covers your head is not your own; the wrinkles crowd one another on your brow, which arches over hollow eyes; and the decay of old age is drawn in the thousand lines about your empty mouth.
Oh, Eberhard, why do you not wander about wood and field? Death parts you just so much the sooner from your desk, because you have not let life tempt you from it.
Uncle Eberhard draws a thick stroke under his last line. From the desk’s innumerable drawers he drags out yellowed, closely scribbled manuscripts, all the different parts of his great work,—that work which is to carry on Eberhard Berggren’s name through all time. But just as he has piled up manuscript on manuscript, and is staring at them in silent rapture, the door opens, and in walks the young countess.
There she is, the old men’s young mistress,—she whom they wait on and adore more than grandparents wait on and adore the first grandson. There she is whom they had found in poverty and in sickness, and to whom they had now given all the glory of the world, just as the king in the fairy tale did to the beautiful beggar girl he found in the forest. It is for her that the horn and violin now sound at Ekeby,—for her everything moves, breathes, works on the great estate.
She is well again, although still very weak. Time goes slowly for her alone in the big house, and, as she knows that the pensioners are away, she wishes to see what it looks like in the pensioners’ wing, that notorious room.
So she comes softly in and looks up at the whitewashed walls and the yellow striped bed-curtains, but she is embarrassed when she sees that the room is not empty.
Uncle Eberhard goes solemnly towards her, and leads her forward to the great pile of paper.
“Look, countess,” he says; “now my work is ready. Now shall what I have written go out into the world. Now great things are going to happen.”
“What is going to happen, Uncle Eberhard?”
“Oh, countess, it is going to strike like a thunderbolt, a bolt which enlightens and kills. Ever since Moses dragged him out of Sinai’s thunder-cloud and put him on the throne of grace in the innermost sanctuary of the temple, ever since then he has sat secure, the old Jehovah; but now men shall see what he is: Imagination, emptiness, exhalation, the stillborn child of our own brain. He shall sink into nothingness,” said the old man, and laid his wrinkled hand on the pile of manuscript. “It stands here; and when people read this, they will have to believe. They will rise up and acknowledge their own stupidity; they will use crosses for kindling-wood, churches for storehouses, and clergymen will plough the earth.”
“Oh, Uncle Eberhard,” says the countess, with a slight shudder, “are you such a dreadful person? Do such dreadful things stand there?”
“Dreadful!” repeated the old man, “it is only the truth. But we are like little boys who hide their faces in a woman’s skirt as soon as they meet a stranger: we have accustomed ourselves to hide from the truth, from the eternal stranger. But now he shall come and dwell among us, now he shall be known by all.”
“By all?”
“Not only by philosophers, but by everybody; do you understand, countess, by everybody.”
“And so Jehovah shall die?”
“He and all angels, all saints, all devils, all lies.”
“Who shall then rule the world?”
“Do you believe that any one has ruled it before? Do you believe in that Providence which looks after sparrows and the hair of your head? No one has ruled it, no one shall rule it.”
“But we, we people, what will we become—”
“The same which we have been—dust. That which is burned out can burn no longer; it is dead. We about whom the fire of life flickers are only fuel. Life’s sparks fly from one to another. We are lighted, flame up, and die out. That is life.”
“Oh, Eberhard, is there no life of the spirit?”
“None.”
“No life beyond the grave?”
“None.”
“No good, no evil, no aim, no hope?”
“None.”
The young woman walks over to the window. She looks out at the autumn’s yellowed leaves, at dahlias and asters which hang their heavy heads on broken stalks. She sees the Löfven’s black waves, the autumn’s dark storm-clouds, and for a moment she inclines towards repudiation.
“Uncle Eberhard,” she says, “how ugly and gray the world is; how profitless everything is! I should like to lie down and die.”
But then she hears a murmur in her soul. The vigor of life and its strong emotions cry out for the happiness of living.
“Is there nothing,” she breaks out, “which can give life beauty, since you have taken from me God and immortality?”
“Work,” answers the old man.
But she looks out again, and a feeling of scorn for that poor wisdom creeps over her. The unfathomable rises before her; she feels the spirit dwelling in everything; she is sensible of the power which lies bound in seemingly dead material, but which can develop into a thousand forms of shifting life. Dizzily she seeks for a name for the presence of God’s spirit in nature.
“Oh, Eberhard,” she says, “what is work? Is it a god? Has it any meaning in itself? Name another!”
“I know no other,” answered the old man.