The Saga of Gosta Berling

by Selma Lagerlof

  But then Lady Musica gives the cunning colonel a hint. He takes Ruster with him, and they go down in the cavaliers’ wing and bring up Lövenborg’s table, on which the keys are painted.

  “Look here, Lövenborg,” says Beerencreutz as they come back, “here’s your piano! Play now for Gösta!”

  Then Lövenborg stops crying and sits to play Beethoven for his distressed young friend. Now he will no doubt be happy again.

  Inside the old man’s head resound the most magnificent tones. He cannot help but think that Gösta hears how beautifully he is playing. Surely Gösta notices how well he is playing this evening. There are no more difficulties for him. He does his runs and trills quite effortlessly. He performs the most difficult reaches. He even wishes that the master himself could have heard him.

  The longer he plays, the more transported he becomes. He hears every note with a supernatural force.

  “Sorrow, sorrow,” he plays, “why should I not love you? Because your lips are cold, your cheeks withered, because your embraces suffocate, your glances petrify?

  “Sorrow, sorrow, you are one of those proud, lovely women whose love is hard to win, but which burns stronger than others. You repudiated woman, I set you to my heart and loved you. I caressed the cold from your limbs, and your love has filled me with blessedness.

  “Oh, how I have suffered! Oh, how I have longed since I lost the one I first held dear! Dark night it was within me and without me. In prayer I was submerged, in heavy, unheard prayers. Heaven was closed to my long waiting. No sweet spirit came from the star-strewn sky to my consolation.

  “But my longing tore asunder the concealing veil. You came, floating down to me on a bridge of moonbeams. You came in light, oh my beloved, and with lips smiling. Happy genies encircled you. They carried wreaths of roses. They played zither and flute. It was blessedness to see you.

  “But you vanished, you vanished! And there was no bridge of moonbeams for me when I wanted to follow you. On earth I lay, wingless, bound to matter. My complaint was like the roaring of a wild animal, like the deafening thunder of the sky. I wanted to send lightning as a messenger to you. I cursed the green earth. Might fire incinerate the plants and plague strike humankind! I invoked death and the abyss. I thought that torment in eternal fire would be sweetness compared to my suffering.

  “Sorrow, sorrow! It was then you became my friend. Why should I not love you, as one loves those proud, stern women whose love is hard to win but burns stronger than the others?”

  That was how he played, the poor mystic. He sat there, radiating enthusiasm and emotion, hearing the most marvelous tones, certain that Gösta too must hear them and be consoled.

  Gösta sat looking at him. At first he was bitter at this farce, but little by little he softened. He was irresistible, the old man, as he sat enjoying his Beethoven.

  And Gösta started to think how this man too, who was now so gentle and carefree, had been submerged in suffering, how he too had lost his beloved. And now he sat there, radiantly happy at his wooden table. Was that all that was required for a person’s happiness?

  He felt humiliated. “What, Gösta,” he said to himself, “can you no longer endure and persevere? You, who have been tempered in poverty all of your life, you, who have heard every tree in the forest, every tuft of grass on the meadow preach self-denial and patience, you, who have been brought up in a land where winter is harsh and summer meager, have you forgotten the art of enduring?

  “Oh, Gösta, a man must bear everything that life has to offer, with courage in his heart and a smile on his lips, otherwise he is no man. Feel loss as much as you want, if you have lost your beloved, let pangs of conscience tear and eat at your insides, but show yourself to be a man and a Värmlander! Let your gaze shine with joy and meet your friends with happy words!

  “Life is stern, nature is stern. But both of them generate courage and joy as a counterweight against its hardness; otherwise no one could endure them.

  “Courage and joy! It is as if these were life’s first duties. You have never betrayed them before, nor will you do so now.

  “Are you worse than Lövenborg, who sits there at his wooden piano, than all the other cavaliers, courageous, carefree, ever youthful? You know well enough that none of them has avoided suffering.”

  And then Gösta looks at them. Oh, such an entertainment! They sit there, all of them, deeply serious and listening to the music that no one can hear.

  Suddenly Lövenborg is wrenched from his dreams by a hearty laugh. He lifts his hands from the keys and listens as if in ecstasy. It is Gösta Berling’s old laughter, his good, amiable, contagious laughter. It is the sweetest music the old man has heard in his entire life.

  “Didn’t I know it, that Beethoven would help you, Gösta!” he exclaims. “Now you are well again.” Thus it was that good Lady Musica cured Gösta Berling’s melancholy.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE MINISTER OF BROBY

  Eros, all-governing god, you must realize that it often seems as if a person must have been freed from your dominion. All the sweet feelings that unite humankind seem dead in their hearts. Madness extends its claws toward the unfortunate, but then you arrive in your omnipotence, you master guardian of life, and, like the staff of a powerful saint, the dried-out heart blossoms.

  No one is stingier than the Broby minister, no one more isolated from people through meanness and mercilessness. His rooms are unheated in winter, he sits on an unpainted wooden bench, dresses in rags, lives on dry bread, and rages when a beggar steps inside his door. He lets the horse starve in the stable and sells the hay; his cows gnaw the dry grass by the roadside and the moss from the roof of the house. All the way up to the highway the bleating of the hungry sheep can be heard. The farmers throw gifts of food to him that their dogs will not eat, of clothes that their poor reject. His hand is extended in request, his back bowed in thanks. He begs from the rich, lends to the poor. If he sees a coin, his heart aches with anxiety until it finds itself in his pocket. Unhappy the man who is not ready for him the day payment is due!

  He married late, but it would have been better if he never had. His wife died, tormented and overexerted. Now his daughter is a servant among strangers. He is getting old, but age brings him no relief in his striving. The madness of stinginess never leaves him.

  But one fine day in the beginning of August a heavy coach arrives, pulled by four horses, up the hills of Broby. A fine old miss comes riding in great pomp, with a coachman and servant and chambermaid. She is coming to see the Broby minister. She was in love with him in the days of her youth.

  When he served as a tutor on her father’s estate, they loved each other, although the proud family separated them. And now she comes riding up the hills of Broby to see him before she dies. All that life has to offer her is to get to see the love of her youth again.

  The fine little miss sits in the great coach, dreaming. She is not driving up the hills of Broby to a poor little rectory. She is on her way to the cool, dense arbor down in the park, where her beloved waits. She sees him, he is young, he can kiss, he can love. Now, when she knows that she will see him, his image rises up before her with unusual clarity. So handsome he is, so handsome! He can swoon, he can burn, he fills her being with the fire of rapture.

  Now she is sallow, withered, and old. Perhaps he will not recognize her with her sixty years, but she is coming not to be seen, but to see, to see the beloved of her youth, who has avoided the onslaught of time unscathed, who is still young, lovely, warmhearted.

  She comes from so far away that she has not heard a word about the Broby minister.

  Then the coach rattles up the hills, and at the top the parsonage is visible.

  “For the sake of God’s mercy,” whimpers a beggar at the roadside, “a coin for a poor man!”

  The noble lady gives him a silver coin and asks if the Broby parsonage is in the vicinity.

  The beggar directs a shrewd, sharp glance at her.

  “The parson
age is over there,” he says, “but the minister is not at home; no one is home at the parsonage.”

  The fine little miss appears to turn completely pale. The cool arbor disappears, the beloved is not there. How could she imagine, after forty years of waiting, finding him there again?

  What business did the gracious miss have at the parsonage?

  The gracious miss has come to see the rector. She knew him in days gone by.

  Forty years and four hundred miles have separated them. And with the miles she has come closer, she has driven away the years with their burden of sorrows and memories, so that now when she has arrived at the rectory, she is again a twenty-year-old without sorrows, without memories.

  The beggar stands looking at her, sees her transformed before his eyes from twenty to sixty, and again from sixty to twenty.

  “The minister is coming home this afternoon,” he says. The gracious miss would be wisest in going down to the Broby inn and coming again in the afternoon. This afternoon the beggar guarantees that the rector will be home.

  The next moment the heavy coach with the little withered dame rolls down the hills to the inn, but the beggar stands trembling and watches her. He thinks he would like to fall down on his knees and kiss the wheel tracks.

  Elegant, fresh shaven, and polished, in shoes with shiny buckles, in silk stockings, in ruffles and cuffs, the Broby minister stands that same day at dinner before the dean’s wife in Bro.

  “A fine miss,” he says, “a count’s daughter. Do you think that I, a poor man, can ask her to come in to visit me? My floors are grimy, my parlor has no furniture, the dining room ceiling is green with mold and damp. Help me! Bear in mind that she is a noble count’s daughter!”

  “Say that he has gone away!”

  “Dear woman, she has traveled four hundred miles to see me, a poor man. She does not know my situation. I have no bed to offer her. I have no bed for her servants.”

  “Well, then, let her go back!”

  “For pity’s sake, woman! Don’t you understand what I mean? I would rather give everything I own, everything I have acquired with diligence and effort, than that she should leave without my having received her under my roof. She was twenty years old when I last saw her, and that is now forty years ago; think about that! Help me, so that I may see her in my home! Here is money, if money can help, but more than money is needed here.”

  Oh Eros! Women love you. They would rather take a hundred steps for you than one for other gods.

  At the deanery in Bro the rooms are emptied, the kitchen is emptied, the pantry is emptied. At the deanery in Bro the wagons are filled and driven up to the rectory. When the dean comes home from communion, he will enter empty rooms, crack open the kitchen door and ask about his dinner and find no one there. No dinner, no wife, no maid! Who can help it? Eros has so desired, Eros, all-governing.

  A little later in the afternoon the heavy coach comes rattling up the hills of Broby. And the little miss sits wondering whether a new mishap would not occur, if it really was true that she is now on her way to meet the one joy of her life.

  Then the coach turns into the parsonage, but it stops in the archway. The large coach is too wide, the archway too narrow. The coachman cracks his whip, the horses rear back, the servant swears, but the back wheels of the coach are helplessly stuck. The count’s daughter cannot come into the beloved’s yard.

  But someone is coming, there he comes! He lifts her out of the coach, he carries her in his arms, whose strength is unbroken, she is pressed in an embrace as warm as before, forty years ago. She looks into eyes that radiate as they did when they had only seen five-and-twenty springs.

  Then a storm of emotions comes over her, warmer than ever. She recalls that he once carried her up the stairs to the terrace. She, who believed that her love had lived all these years, she had nonetheless forgotten what it was like to be enclosed in strong arms, to look into young, radiant eyes.

  She does not see that he is old. She only sees his eyes, his eyes.

  She does not see the grimy floors, the ceiling green with damp, she sees only his radiant eyes. The Broby minister is a stately fellow, a handsome gentleman at that moment. He becomes handsome simply by looking at her.

  She hears his voice, his clear, strong voice; caressingly it sounds. Then he speaks only to her. To what end did he need furniture from the deanery for his empty rooms, to what end food, to what end servants? The old woman would hardly have missed any such things. She hears his voice and sees his eyes.

  Never, never before has she been so happy!

  How elegantly he bows, elegant and proud, as if she were a princess and he the favored one! He uses the many phrases of the old when he speaks to her. She simply smiles and is happy.

  Toward evening he offers her his arm, and they walk in his old, decrepit orchard. She sees nothing ugly and neglected. Overgrown bushes become clipped hedges, the weeds arrange themselves into even, glistening lawns, long lanes shadow her, and in niches of dark greenery glisten white statues of youth, of faithfulness, of hope, of love.

  She knows that he has been married, but she does not recall that. How could she recall something like that? She is twenty years old, after all, he twenty-five. He is of course only twenty-five, young, with ample powers. Is he the one who will become the stingy Broby minister, he, this smiling youth? At times forebodings of dark destinies brush past his ear. But the laments of the poor, the curses of the swindled, the jibes of contempt, the satirical songs, the mockery, none of this exists yet for him. His heart is burning simply with a pure and innocent love. Will the proud youth not one day love gold so that he would creep in the lowest filth, beg it from the wayfarer, suffer humiliation, suffer disgrace, suffer cold, suffer hunger in order to get it? Would he not starve his child, torment his wife for this same, miserable gold? It is impossible. He cannot be like that. He is a good person like everyone else. He is not a monster.

  The beloved of his youth does not walk at the side of a despised wretch, unworthy of the position he has dared accept! This she does not do.

  Oh Eros, all-governing god, not this evening! This evening he is not the Broby minister, nor the next day, nor the day after that.

  The following day she leaves. The archway is widened. The coach rolls down the hills of Broby as rapidly as the rested horses can run.

  Such a dream, such a magnificent dream! For these three days, not a cloud.

  Smiling she rides home to her palace and her memories. She never heard his name mentioned again, she never asked any questions about him. She would dream about this dream as long as she lived.

  The Broby minister sat in his desolate home and wept in desperation. She had made him young. Would he now get old? Would the evil spirit come back, and would he become despicable, as despicable as he had been?

  CHAPTER 23

  SQUIRE JULIUS

  Squire Julius carried his red-painted wooden trunk down from the cavaliers’ wing. He filled a small green keg that had accompanied him on many journeys with aromatic bitter-orange liquor, and in the large, carved food box he put butter, bread, and old cheese, sweetly alternating green and brown, fat ham and pancakes swimming in raspberry jam.

  Then Squire Julius departed and with tears in his eyes said farewell to all the magnificence of Ekeby. He caressed the worn bowling pins for the last time and the round-cheeked children at the ironworks. He went around to the arbors in the orchard and the grottoes in the park. He was in the stable and barn, stroking the horses across the hindquarters, tugging at the horn of the fierce bull, and letting the calves lick his bare hands. Finally he went with crying eyes up to the manor house, where the farewell breakfast awaited him.

  Woe to existence! How can it possess so much darkness? It was poison in the food, gall in the wine. The cavaliers’ throats were just as choked with emotion as his own. The fog of tears clouded their eyes. The farewell speeches were interrupted by sobbing. Woe to existence! His life would henceforth be one extended longing. Never woul
d he draw his lips into a smile; the songs would die away from his memory, as flowers die from an autumnal earth. He would fade away, fall off, wither like a frostbitten rose, like a thirsting lily. Never again would the cavaliers see poor Julius. Heavy premonitions passed over his soul, as shadows of storm-chased clouds pass over freshly cultivated fields. He was going home to die.

  Blooming with health and well-being, he stood now before them. Never again would they see him like that. Never again would they jokingly ask him when he last saw the tips of his toes, never again would they wish his cheeks into bowling balls. The evil was already ensconced in his liver and lungs. It gnawed and consumed. He had sensed it for a long time. His days were numbered.

  Oh, that the cavaliers of Ekeby would yet preserve the dead man in faithful memory! Oh, that they might not forget him!

  Duty called him. There at home sat his mother, waiting for him. For seventeen years she had awaited his arrival home from Ekeby. Now she had written a letter of summons, and he would obey. He knew that this would be his death, but he would obey like a good son.

  Oh, those heavenly banquets! Oh, the sweet shore meadows, the proud rapids! Oh, the exultant adventures, the white, smooth dance floors, the beloved cavaliers’ wing! Oh, fiddles and horns, oh, life of happiness and joy! It was death to be separated from all this.

  Then Squire Julius went out into the kitchen and said farewell to the household help. Each and every one, from the housekeeper to the almswoman, embraced and kissed him with overflowing emotion. The maids wept and lamented at his fate. That such a good, amusing gentleman would die, that they would never get to see him again!

  Squire Julius gave the order that his chaise should be pulled out of the wagon shed and his horse taken from the stable.

  His voice almost betrayed Squire Julius as he gave this order. So the chaise would not get to molder in peace at Ekeby, old Kajsa would be separated from the familiar manger! He did not want to say anything bad about his mother, but she ought to have thought about the chaise and about Kajsa, if she didn’t think about him. How would they endure the long journey?