The Saga of Gosta Berling

by Selma Lagerlof

  He, whom you loved so, as if he had taught you

  to fly on wings into air, into space.

  He, whom you loved so, as if he had given you

  the only certain spot in a flooded village,

  he is gone, he, who alone knew how to

  open the door to your heart.

  *

  I will ask you for a single thing, you my beloved:

  Never place on me the burden of hate!

  The weakest of all things weak, is not this a human heart?

  How would it live under the cutting thought

  that it would to another be torment?

  Oh, my beloved, if you would murder me,

  acquire no dagger, buy not poison or rope!

  But let me simply know that you would see me vanish

  from earth’s verdant meadows, from the richness of life,

  and I will sink into the grave.

  You gave me the life of life. To me you gave love.

  And now you take back your gift. Oh, I know it well,

  but do not exchange it for hate!

  I still love to live. Oh, remember that!

  But I know I would die under hatred’s burden.

  CHAPTER 10

  THE YOUNG COUNTESS

  The young countess sleeps until ten o’clock in the morning and wants fresh bread on the breakfast table every day. The young countess does tambour stitching and reads poetry. She knows nothing about weaving and food preparation. The young countess is spoiled.

  But the young countess is happy and lets her cheerfulness shine over everything and everyone. Her long morning sleep and the fresh bread are gladly forgiven, for she lavishes good deeds on the poor and is friendly to everyone.

  The father of the young countess is a Swedish aristocrat who has lived in Italy his whole life, detained there by the beautiful countryside and one of that beautiful country’s loveliest daughters. When Count Henrik Dohna was traveling in Italy, he had been received in the home of this nobleman, made the acquaintance of his daughters, married one of them, and brought her with him to Sweden.

  She, who had always been able to speak Swedish and was brought up to love everything Swedish, feels quite at home up in the bear country. She spins around so happily in the long dance of amusements that whirl around Löven’s long lake that one might believe she had always lived up there. Little does she understand, however, what it is to be a countess. There is no ostentation, no stiffness, no condescending dignity in this young, happy being.

  It was the old gentlemen who liked the young countess the most. It was remarkable what success she had with old gentlemen. When they had seen her at a ball, then you could be certain that the whole lot of them—the judge in Munkerud and the dean in Bro and Melchior Sinclaire and the captain at Berga—would explain to their wives in deepest confidence, that if they had met the young countess forty or thirty years ago . . .

  “Yes, then she was not even born yet,” the old wives say.

  And the next time they meet, they tease the young countess for taking the old gentlemen’s hearts from them.

  The old wives view her with a certain anxiety. They remember Countess Märta so well. She had been just as happy and good and beloved when she came to Berga the first time. And of her there had only become a vain, pleasure-seeking coquette, who nowadays could think of nothing but her diversions. “If she only had a husband who could keep her to work!” the old wives say. “If only she could set up a loom!” For setting up looms: that consoles all sorrows, that devours all interests, that has been the salvation of many women.

  The young countess would gladly become a good housewife. She knows nothing better than living as a happy wife in a good home, and she often comes to the large gatherings and sits down with the old women.

  “Henrik really wants me to learn to be a capable housekeeper,” she says, “like his mother is. Teach me how you set up a loom!”

  Then the old women let out a twofold sigh: first for Count Henrik, who believes that his mother is a capable housekeeper, and second, over the difficulty of initiating this young, ignorant being in such complicated things. You only need to talk with her about lea and heddle, about harness and pulleys, about plain weave and tabby, before her head starts spinning, much less when the talk goes to bird’s-eye and goose-eye and overshot.

  No one who sees the young countess can help but wonder why she married the stupid Count Henrik.

  Pity the person who is stupid! You have to feel sorry for him, wherever he is. And you have to feel the sorriest for anyone who is stupid and lives in Värmland.

  There were already many stories about Count Henrik’s stupidity, and he is no more than a few years over the age of twenty. It might be mentioned how he entertained Anna Stjärnhök at a sleighing party a few years ago.

  “You are beautiful, Anna,” he said.

  “You talk, Henrik.”

  “You are the most beautiful in all of Värmland.”

  “I am certainly not.”

  “You are the most beautiful at this sleighing party anyway.”

  “Oh, Henrik, I’m not either.”

  “Yes, but you must be the most beautiful in this sleigh. That you can’t deny.”

  No, that she couldn’t.

  For Count Henrik is not beautiful. He is as ugly as he is stupid. They usually say about him that the head that sits on his thin neck has been handed down in his family for a few hundred years. That is why the brain is so used up in the most recent heir. “It is clear that he has no head of his own,” it is said. “He’s borrowed his father’s. And he doesn’t dare bow his head; he’s afraid of losing it. He already has yellowed skin and a wrinkled forehead. That head has probably been in use on both the father and the grandfather. Why else would his hair be so thin and his lips so bloodless and his chin so pointed?”

  He always has troublemakers around him who entice him into saying stupid things and then collect them, spread them, enable them.

  It is a good thing for him that he doesn’t notice anything. He is solemn and dignified in all his conduct. Can he imagine that others are not that way too? Dignity has settled into his body: he moves deliberately, he walks straight, he never twists his head without his whole body following along.

  He had been in Munkerud at the judge’s a few years before. He had come riding, wearing a high hat, yellow trousers, and shiny boots, and sat stiff and proud in the saddle. All went well upon his arrival. But when he was to ride away again, it happened that one of the hanging branches in the lane of birches knocked off his hat. He got off, put on the hat, and again rode forth under the same branch. Again the hat was knocked off. This was repeated four times.

  Finally the sheriff went up to him and said, “What if you were to ride to one side of the branch next time?”

  The fifth time he came successfully past the branch.

  But it is the case, however, that the young countess likes him despite his old man’s head. She didn’t know of course that in his own country he was surrounded by such a martyr’s crown of stupidity, when she saw him down in Rome. Abroad there had been some of the radiance of youth about him, and they had been united under such extremely romantic circumstances. You should only hear the countess tell about how Count Henrik had to abduct her. Monks and cardinals had fallen into a rage because she wanted to abandon her mother’s religion, to which she had previously adhered, and become a Protestant. The hoi polloi had been in an uproar. Her father’s palace had been besieged. Henrik was pursued by bandits. Mother and sister had pleaded with him to forgo the marriage. But her father was furious that the Italian mob would hinder him from giving his daughter to whomever he wanted. He ordered Count Henrik to abduct her. And so, because it was impossible for them to get married at home without it being discovered, she and Henrik sneaked away on backstreets and all kinds of dark roads to the Swedish consulate. And when she had renounced her Catholic faith there and become a Protestant, they were immediately wed and sent off northward in a rapidly d
riven travel carriage. “There wasn’t time to read the banns, you see. There just wasn’t time,” the young countess would say. “And it was gloomy of course getting married at a consulate and not in one of the beautiful churches, but otherwise Henrik would have had to be without me. Down there everyone is so hot tempered, Papa and Mama and cardinals and monks, everyone is hot tempered. That was why everything had to be done so secretively, and if the people had seen us sneak away from home, they would surely have killed the both of us to save my soul. Henrik was of course already doomed to damnation.”

  But the young countess loves her husband, even since they have come home to Borg and are living a more settled life. She loves the radiance in him from the ancient name and his heroic forefathers. She likes to see how her presence softens the stiffness in his being and to hear how his voice becomes tender when she is talking to him. And besides, he cares for her and spoils her, and then after all she is married to him. The young countess can simply not imagine that a married woman would not love her husband.

  In a certain respect he also corresponds to her ideal of manliness. He is upright and a lover of truth. He has never gone back on his given word. She considers him a true nobleman.

  On the eighth of March Sheriff Scharling celebrates his birthday, and then a lot of people are traveling up the Broby hills. Then people from the east and west, familiar and unfamiliar, invited and uninvited, always come to the sheriff’s farm. All are welcome. All will find plenty of food and drink, and in the ballroom there will be elbow room enough for eager dancers from seven parishes.

  The young countess is coming too, just as she goes any place where dance and merriment can be expected.

  But the young woman is not happy when she arrives. It is as if she had a premonition that now it was her turn to be dragged into the wild hunt of adventure.

  On the way she sat, observing the sinking sun. It came down from a clear sky, leaving no gold rims on puffy clouds behind. Pale gray twilight air, shot through by cold storm winds, blanketed the area.

  The young countess saw how the day and the night were fighting and how all living things were seized with terror at the struggle between the two mighty forces. The horses hastened away with the last load so as to soon come under a roof. The woodcutters hurried home from the forest, the maids from the barn. The wild animals were howling at the forest edge. The day, the favorite of humankind, had been conquered.

  The light went out, colors turned pale. Cold and ugliness were all she saw. What she had hoped, what she had loved, what she had done seemed to her also to be enshrouded in the gray twilight. It was the hour of fatigue, defeat, powerlessness, for her as for all of nature.

  She was thinking that her own heart, which now in its sparkling joy enveloped existence in purple and gold, she was thinking that this heart would perhaps one day lose its power to light up her world.

  “Oh powerlessness, my own heart’s powerlessness!” she said to herself. “Suffocating gray twilight goddess, one day you will be the mistress of my soul. Then I will see life as ugly and gray, as perhaps it really is, then my hair will whiten, my back be bent, my brain paralyzed.”

  Just then the sleigh turned into the sheriff’s farm, and as the young countess was just then looking up, her eyes fell on a grated window in a side building and at a sternly staring face behind it.

  This face belonged to the majoress at Ekeby, and the young woman knew that now her enjoyment was ruined for that evening.

  It is possible to be happy when you don’t see sorrow, simply hear it being talked about like a guest in a foreign land. It is harder to preserve the heart’s happiness when you stand eye to eye with night-black, sternly staring distress.

  The countess probably knows that Sheriff Scharling has put the majoress in jail, and that she must undergo interrogation for the acts of violence she carried out at Ekeby the same night the great ball was held there. But she has simply not imagined that she would be kept in custody there at the sheriff’s farm, so close to the ballroom that from there you could see into her room, so close that she must hear the dance music and the happy clamor. And now the thought of her takes away all the countess’s joy.

  The young countess does dance both a waltz and a quadrille. She does take part in both the minuet and the anglaise, but between each dance she has to slip over to the window and look over at the side building. There is light in the majoress’s window, and she can see how she paces back and forth in her room. She seems to never rest, but paces constantly.

  The countess has no joy at all from the dance. She is only thinking about how the majoress is pacing back and forth in her prison, like a captured animal. She marvels that all the others can dance. Certainly there are many who are just as upset as she from knowing that the majoress is so near to them, and yet there is no one who lets on. A forbearing people live in Värmland.

  But for every time she has looked out, her feet move more heavily in the dance, and laughter seems to catch in her throat.

  The sheriff’s wife notices her, as she wipes the condensation from the windowpane to see out, and comes over to her.

  “Such a nuisance! Oh, such a nuisance this is!” she whispers to the countess.

  “I think it’s almost impossible to dance this evening,” the countess whispers back.

  “It’s not my wish either that we have a ball here while she is imprisoned there,” answers Mrs. Scharling. “She has been in Karlstad the whole time since she was arrested. Now her interrogation will soon take place, and that’s why she was brought here today. We couldn’t put her in the miserable jail at the courthouse, so she had to be in the weaving room in the side building. She should have been allowed to be in my drawing room, countess, if all of these people hadn’t been coming just today. You hardly know her, countess, but she has been like a mother and a queen to all of us. What will she think of us, who are dancing here, while she is in such great distress? It’s just as well that most of them don’t know she’s there.”

  “She ought never to have been arrested,” the young countess says sternly.

  “No, that is a true word, countess, but there was no other way, if even worse misfortunes weren’t going to happen. No one thought she would set fire to her own haystacks and drive away the cavaliers, but the major of course was prowling around on the hunt for her. God knows what he would have done if she hadn’t been locked up. Scharling has had to suffer a lot of mortification because he arrested the majoress, countess. Even in Karlstad they were dissatisfied with him, because he didn’t look the other way about everything that was happening at Ekeby. But he did what he believed was best.”

  “But now she’ll be convicted, won’t she?” says the countess.

  “Oh no, countess, she won’t be convicted. The majoress at Ekeby will probably be set free, but that is still too much for her, all of this that she has had to bear in recent days. She’ll probably go crazy. You can understand, such a proud woman, how can she stand being treated like a criminal? I think that it would have been best if she had been allowed to go free. Perhaps she would have escaped on her own.”

  “Let her loose!” says the countess.

  “Anyone other than the sheriff or his wife can do it, of course,” whispers Mrs. Scharling. “We do have to guard her. Especially tonight, when so many of her friends are here, two fellows are standing guard outside the door, so that no one can get in to her. But if someone were to take her out, countess, then we would both be happy, both Scharling and I.”

  “Might I be allowed to go to her?” says the young countess.

  Mrs. Scharling grasps her eagerly around the wrist and leads her out. In the entryway they throw on a pair of shawls, and then they hurry across the yard.

  “It’s not certain that she will talk even to us,” says the sheriff’s wife. “But she can still see that we haven’t forgotten her.”

  They come into the first room of the side building, where the two men are guarding the barred door, and without being obstructed they go in t
o the majoress. She is staying in a large room, filled with looms and other equipment. It is actually used as a weaving room, but it has bars on the windows and strong locks on the door, so that in emergencies it can be used as a jail.

  Inside the majoress continues to pace without paying visible heed to them.

  She has embarked on a long journey these days. She cannot recall anything other than that she is walking the hundred and twenty-some miles up to her mother, who is sitting up there in the Älvdal forests, waiting for her. She never has time to rest. She has to walk. Restless urgency has overtaken her. Her mother is over ninety. Soon she will be dead.

  She has measured up the length of the floor in ells, and now she is counting the laps, adding up the ells to cords and the cords to half miles and miles.

  Her way seems heavy and long, and yet she dares not rest. She wades forth through deep drifts. She hears the endless forests sighing over her as she walks. She rests in the Finn’s cabin and in the charcoal burner’s hut of branches. Sometimes, when there is no other person within several miles, she has to break off branches into a shelter and rest under the root of an overturned spruce.

  And finally she has reached the goal, the hundred and twenty- some miles are over, the forest opens, and red buildings stand on a snow-covered yard. The Klara River rushes foaming along in a series of small rapids, and from the familiar roar she hears that she is home.

  And her mother, who could see her coming, begging, just as she knew she would, comes to meet her.

  When the majoress has come that far, she always looks up, glances around her, sees the closed door, and knows where she is.

  Then she wonders if she is going crazy and sits down to think and rest. But after a while she is in motion again, adding up the ells and cords to half miles and miles, taking brief rests in Finn cabins and sleeping neither night nor day, before she has again covered those more than one hundred and twenty miles.