The Saga of Gosta Berling

by Selma Lagerlof

  During the long days of summer, no rain came. From the middle of June to the beginning of September the Lövsjö district was bathed in uninterrupted sunshine.

  The rain refused to fall, the earth to nourish, the winds to blow. Sunshine alone streamed down over the earth. Oh, that beautiful sunshine, that life-granting sunshine, how can I tell of its evil deeds? Sunshine is like love: who doesn’t know the outrages he has committed, and who can keep from forgiving him? Sunshine is like Gösta Berling: it gives delight to everyone, because everyone keeps quiet about the bad things it has caused.

  Such a drought after midsummer would probably not be as calamitous in other regions as in Värmland. But spring had come late there. The grass was not far along and would never grow out. The rye remained without nourishment, just when it needed to gather food in its ears. The spring grain, from which most bread was baked at that time, bore thin, small clusters on straws a quarter of an ell high. The late-sown turnips could never grow; not even the potatoes were able to suck nourishment from this petrified earth.

  During such years they start to worry off in the forest cabins, and from the hills fear creeps down to the calmer folk on the cultivated plain.

  “The hand of God is seeking someone,” the people say.

  And everyone beats their chests and says, “Is it me? Oh, Mother, oh, Nature, is it me? Is it out of fear for me that the stern earth is dried and hardened? And this endless sunshine, does it stream in its gentleness every day from a cloud-free sky to heap glowing coals on my head? Or if it isn’t me, who is it the hand of God is seeking?”

  While the rye withers in its small ears, while the potato cannot gather nourishment from the earth, while the livestock, red eyed and panting from the heat, huddle together around the dried-up springs, while worry about the future squeezes the heart, strange talk goes through the area.

  “This kind of affliction doesn’t happen without a reason,” the people say. “Who is it the hand of God is seeking?”

  It was a Sunday in August. The church service was over. The people wandered along in flocks on the blazing hot roads. Round about them they saw scorched forests and ruined harvests. The rye was set in shocks, but it stood sparsely with thin sheaves. Those who had debris to burn had good and easy labor that year, but then many a time it also happened that they set fire to the dry forest. And what the forest fire spared, the insects had taken: the pine forest had shed its leaves and stood bare as a deciduous forest in autumn; the leaves of the birches hung split apart with bare veins and ruined blades.

  The gloomy flocks did not lack topics for conversation. There were many who could tell about how hard it had been during the famine years of 1808 and ’09 and during the cold winter of 1812, when the sparrows froze to death. Starvation was not foreign to them; they had encountered his stern countenance before. They knew how to prepare bark for bread and how the cows could be accustomed to eating moss.

  There was a woman who had made attempts with a new type of bread from lingonberry and barley meal. She had samples of it with her and let people have a taste. She was proud of her invention.

  But the same question hovered over them all; it stared out of all their eyes, was whispered on all their lips.

  “Who is it, O Lord, your hand is seeking?”

  “You God of severity, who has denied you offerings of prayers and good deeds, because you take from us our poor bread?”

  One man in these somber flocks, who had gone westward across the sound bridge and struggled up the Broby hills, stopped a moment before the road that led up to the residence of the stingy Broby minister. He picked up a dry stick from the ground and threw it onto the rectory lane.

  “Dry as that stick have those prayers been, which he has given our Lord,” said the man.

  The one who was walking closest to him stopped too. He picked up a dry twig and threw it where the stick had fallen.

  “This is the right offering for that minister,” he said.

  The third in the flock followed the given pattern. “He has been like a drought. Sticks and straw are all that he has let us keep.”

  The fourth said, “We are giving him back what he has given us.”

  And the fifth: “For eternal shame I throw this to him. May he dry up and wither, like this twig has dried up!”

  “Dry fodder for the drought minister,” said the sixth.

  People who are behind them see what they are doing and hear what they are saying. Now they get many answers to their long questioning.

  “Give him what is due to him! He has brought the drought upon us,” it was said among the crowd.

  And each one of them stops, each one of them has his say and throws his branch, before he goes on.

  In the corner between the roads there was soon a pile of sticks and straws: a pile of shame for the Broby minister.

  This was the people’s entire revenge. No one raised his hand against the minister or said an unkind word to him personally. Desperate hearts unloaded part of their burden by throwing a dry twig on this pile. They did not take revenge themselves. They simply pointed out the guilty one before the god of retribution.

  “If we have not worshipped you rightly, see, it’s that man’s fault. Be merciful, Lord, and let him suffer alone! We mark him with shame and dishonor. We are not one with him.”

  Very quickly it became the custom that everyone who went past the rectory threw a dry twig on the pile of shame. “May God and man see it!” thought each passerby. “I too despise him, who has brought the wrath of God upon us.”

  The old miser soon noticed the pile at the roadside. He had it taken away. Some said that he fired his kitchen stove with it. The next day at the same place a new pile had been gathered, and as soon as he had this one taken away, a new one was thrown up.

  The dry twigs lay there saying, “Shame, shame on the Broby minister!”

  These were hot, dry dog days. Heavy with smoke, saturated with fumes, the air settled over the area, oppressive as despair to breathe in. Thoughts became dizzy in overheated brains. The minister in Broby had become the demon of drought. To the farmers it seemed as if the old miser sat guarding the wellsprings of heaven.

  Soon the people’s opinion became clear to the Broby minister. He realized that they singled him out as the origin of the misfortune. It was in wrath at him that God let the earth languish. Sailors who suffered distress on the boundless sea cast lots. He was the man who was to go overboard. He tried to laugh at them and their twigs, but when this had gone on a week, he was no longer laughing. Oh, such childishness! How could these dry twigs injure him? He understood that years-long hatred was seeking an opportunity to vent itself. What of it! He was not used to love.

  He did not become gentler from such things. Perhaps he had wished to better himself, ever since the old miss had visited him. Now he could not. He would not be forced into improvement.

  But by and by that pile became too much for him. He had to think about it constantly, and the opinion that everyone felt took root in him too. It was the most appalling testimony, this throwing of dry twigs. He took notice of this pile, counted the branches that had been added each day. The thought of it spread out and encroached on all other thoughts. The pile was destroying him.

  With each day he had to agree with the people more and more. He declined and grew old in a few weeks. He had pangs of conscience and cramps. But it was as if everything would latch onto this pile. It was as if the pangs of conscience would have been silenced and the weight of age again fall away from him, if only the pile had stopped growing.

  Finally he sat there for whole days and watched. But the people were merciless; at night too new twigs were thrown there.

  One day Gösta Berling came traveling along the road. The Broby minister was sitting by the roadside, old and decrepit. He sat, picking at the dry sticks and placing them together in rows and heaps, playing with them as if he had become a child again. Gösta became distressed at his misery.

  “What are you doing, p
astor?” he says, jumping quickly out of the carriage.

  “Oh, I’m sitting here gathering. I’m not really doing anything.”

  “Pastor, you should go home and not sit here in the dust of the road.”

  “It’s probably best that I sit here in any case.”

  Then Gösta Berling sits down beside him.

  “It’s not so good being a minister,” he says after a while.

  “It seems to work out down here, where there are people,” answers the minister. “It’s worse up there.”

  Gösta understands what he is saying. He knows about those parishes in northern Värmland, where sometimes there isn’t a house for the minister; the large forest parishes, where the Finns live in smoke lodges; the poor areas with a few people per square mile, where the minister is the parish’s only gentleman. The Broby minister had been in such a parish for over twenty years.

  “That’s where we’re sent when we’re young,” says Gösta. “It’s impossible to endure life there. And then you’re ruined forever. There are many who have gone under up there.”

  “Yes, there are,” says the Broby minister. “Loneliness destroys you.”

  “You arrive,” says Gösta, “eager and passionate, you talk and admonish, and you think that everything will be fine, that the people will soon follow better paths.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “But soon you notice that words don’t help. Poverty stands in the way. Poverty hinders all improvement.”

  “Poverty,” repeats the minister. “Poverty has destroyed my life.”

  “The young minister comes up there,” explains Gösta, “poor like everyone else. He says to the drinker: ‘Lay off drinking!’”

  “Then the drinker replies,” the minister puts in: “‘Then give me something better than liquor! Liquor is a fur in the winter, coolness in summer. Liquor is a warm cabin and a soft bed. Give me that, and I won’t drink anymore!’”

  “And then,” Gösta resumes, “the minister says to the thief: ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ and to the mean-spirited: ‘Thou shalt not strike thy wife,’ and to the superstitious: ‘Thou shalt believe in God and not in the devil and trolls.’ But then the thief replies: ‘Give me bread!’ and the mean-spirited says: ‘Make us rich, and we won’t argue!’ and the superstitious: ‘Teach me better!’ But who can help them without money?”

  “It’s true, every word is true!” exclaims the old man. “They believe in God, even more in the devil, but mostly in the trolls in the hills and the gnome in the barn. All the crops were destroyed in the liquor kettle. No one could see any end to the misery. In most of the gray cabins hunger prevailed. Hidden sorrow made the women’s tongues bitter. Tension at home drove the men out to drink. They could not tend the fields and livestock. They feared the gentry and made a fool of the minister. What could you do with them? What I told them from the pulpit, they didn’t understand. What I wanted to teach them, they didn’t believe. And no one to take counsel with, no one who could help me keep my courage up!”

  “There are those who have endured,” says Gösta. “God’s mercy has been so great over some that they haven’t returned from such a life as broken men. Their strength has been sufficient; they have endured loneliness, poverty, hopelessness. They have done the little good they could and not despaired. There have always been such men, and there still are. I want to hail them as heroes. I want to honor them, as long as I live. I would not have been able to endure.”

  “I couldn’t,” adds the minister.

  “The minister up there thinks,” says Gösta thoughtfully, “that he will become a rich man, an exceedingly wealthy man. No poor person can fight against evil. And then he starts to hoard.”

  “If he didn’t hoard, he would drink,” answers the old man, “he sees so much misery.”

  “Or become sluggish and lazy and lose all energy. Going up there is dangerous for anyone who isn’t born there.”

  “He has to harden himself in order to hoard. He pretends at first, then it becomes a habit.”

  “He must be hard both to himself and to others,” Gösta continues. “Hoarding is difficult. He must put up with hatred and contempt, he has to freeze and starve and harden his heart: it is almost as if he forgot why he started hoarding.”

  The Broby minister looked at him shyly. He wondered whether Gösta was making fun of him. But Gösta was all eagerness and gravity. It was as if he were talking about his own case.

  “That’s how it’s been for me,” says the old man quietly.

  “But God protects him,” Gösta puts in. “He awakens in him the thoughts of his youth, when he has hoarded enough. He gives the minister a sign when the people of God need him.”

  “But what if the minister doesn’t obey the sign, Gösta Berling?”

  “He cannot resist it,” says Gösta, smiling happily. “He is enticed so sweetly by the thought of the warm huts that he can help the poor to build.”

  The minister looks down at the small buildings he has erected with the sticks from the pile of shame. The longer he talks with Gösta, the more convinced he becomes that Gösta is right. He has always had this idea of doing good, once he has acquired enough. He clings to this: of course he had this idea.

  “So why hasn’t he ever built those huts?” he asks shyly.

  “He’s ashamed. Many might think that out of fear of the people he was doing what he had always meant to do.”

  “He doesn’t tolerate being forced, that’s how it is.”

  “Yet he could help in secret. Much help is needed this year. He can find someone who can dole out his gifts. I understand the meaning of it all!” exclaims Gösta, and his eyes are radiant. “This year thousands will receive their bread from the one whom they shower with curses.”

  “So it will be, Gösta.”

  A feeling of intoxication came over these two, who had been so little able to fulfill the calling they had chosen. The desire of their youth to serve God and people was upon them. They rev eled in the good deeds they would perform. Gösta would be the minister’s helper.

  “Now we must get bread to start with,” says the minister.

  “We must get schoolteachers. We must get surveyors here, to distribute the land. Then the people will learn to tend the fields and care for the livestock.”

  “We must build roads and break new ground.”

  “We should build canals down at Berg rapids, so that there is an open passage between Löven and Vänern.”

  “All the wealth that is in the forest will be a double blessing when the passage to the sea is opened.”

  “Your head will be weighed down with blessings!” exclaims Gösta.

  The minister looks up. They read in each other’s eyes the same, flaming rapture.

  But at the same moment both of their gazes are drawn to the pile of shame.

  “Gösta,” says the old man, “all this would require a healthy man’s energies, but I am about to die. You see what is killing me.”

  “Take it away!”

  “How, Gösta Berling?”

  Gösta moves close to him and looks him sharply in the eyes. “Pray to God for rain!” he says. “You will preach next Sunday, pastor. Pray to God then for rain!”

  The old minister collapses in dismay.

  “If this is serious, pastor, if you are not the one who has brought drought upon the land, if you have wanted to serve the Most High with his hardness, then pray to God for rain! That will be the sign. By that we will know whether God wants what we want.”

  When Gösta again traveled down the hills of Broby, he was astonished at himself and the rapture that had seized him. But this could yet become a fine life. Yes, but not for him. Up there they didn’t want to hear of his services.

  In Broby church the sermon was just concluded, and the usual prayers were read. The minister was just about to step down from the pulpit. But he hesitated. Finally he fell to his knees up there and prayed for rain.

  He prayed as a desperate person pray
s, with few words without real coherence.

  “If it is my sin that has called forth your wrath, punish only me! If there is compassion with you, you God of mercy, let it rain! Take the shame from me! Let it rain on my prayer! Let rain fall on the fields of the poor! Give your people bread!”

  The day was hot; it was insufferably muggy. The congregation sat as if in a stupor, but at these broken words, this hoarse desperation, everyone woke up.

  “If there is still a path to rehabilitation for me, grant rain . . .”

  He fell silent. The doors stood open. Now a powerful gust of wind came rushing. It moved along the ground, whirling up toward the church and sending a cloud of dust within, full of sticks and straw. The minister could not go on. He staggered down from the pulpit.

  The people shuddered. Could this be an answer?

  But the gust of wind was only the precursor to the thunder-storm. It was coming at a velocity without equal. When the hymn was sung and the minister was standing at the altar, the lightning was already flashing and the thunder broke out, covering up the sound of his words. As the organist played the recessional hymn, the first drops of rain were already pattering against the green windowpanes, and the people all stormed out to look at the rain. But they were not content to look: some wept, others laughed, all while they let the torrential rain stream down over them. Oh, how great their need had been! How unfortunate they had been! But God is good. God lets the rain fall. What happiness, what happiness!

  The Broby minister was the only one who did not come out into the rain. He was on his knees at the altar and did not get up. The happiness was too powerful for him. He died of joy.

  CHAPTER 30

  THE CHILD’S MOTHER

  The child was born in a peasant cottage east of the Klara River. The child’s mother had come there looking for a position one day at the beginning of June. Things had gone badly for her, she said to the farm folk, and her mother had treated her so harshly that she had to run away from home. She called herself Elisabet Karlsdotter, but she would not say where she was from, for then perhaps they would tell her parents that she was there, and if they found 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 or tend the cows, whatever they wanted. If they wished, she could also pay for herself.