Short Fiction by Selma Lagerlöf (android based ebook reader txt) 📕

flames went right up the chimney, and sparks and soot were whirled about by the wind, and fell down on the snow-decked roofs of the outhouses. And as the flames appeared above the chimney of the bathhouse, and rose like a fiery pillar above the farm, everyone suddenly felt that Christmas was at hand. The girl that was scrubbing the entrance floor began to hum, although the water was freezing in the bucket beside her. The men in the woodshed who were cutting Christmas logs began to cut two at a time, and swung their axes as merrily as if log-cutting were a mere pastime.

An old woman came out of the pantry with a large pile of cakes in her arms. She went slowly across the yard into the large red-painted dwelling-house, and carried them carefully into the best room, and put them down on the long seat. Then she spread the tablecloth on the table, and arranged the cakes in heaps, a large and a small cake in each heap. She was a singularly ugly old woman, with reddish hair, heavy drooping eyelids, and with a peculiar strained look about the mouth and chin, as if the muscles were too short. But being Christmas-eve, there was such a joy and peace over her that one did not notice how ugly she was.

But there was one person on the farm who was not happy, and that was the girl who was tying up the whisks made of birch twigs that were to be used for the baths. She sat near the fireplace, and had a whole armful of fine birch twigs lying beside her on the floor, but the withes with which she was to bind the twigs would not keep knotted. The best room had a narrow, low window, with small panes, and through them the light from the bathhouse shone into the room, playing on the floor and gilding the birch twigs. But the higher the fire burned the more unhappy was the girl. She knew that the whisks would fall to pieces as soon as one touched them, and that she would never hear the last of it until the next Christmas fire was lighted.

Just as she sat there bemoaning herself, the person of whom she was most afraid came into the room. It was her master, Ingmar Ingmarson. He was sure to have been to the bathhouse to see if the stove was hot enough, and now he wanted to see how the whisks were getting on. He was old, was Ingmar Ingmarson, and he was fond of everything old, and just because people were beginning to leave off bathing in the bathhouses and being whipped with birch twigs, he made a great point of having it done on his farm, and having it done properly.

Ingmar Ingmarson wore an old coat of sheep’s-skin, skin trousers, and shoes smeared over with pitch. He was dirty and unshaven, slow in all his movements, and came in so softly that one might very well have mistaken him for a beggar. His features resembled his wife’s features and his ugliness resembled his wife’s ugliness, for they were relations, and from the time the girl first began to notice anything she had learned to feel a wholesome reverence for anybody who looked like that; for it was a great thing to belong to the old family of the Ingmars, which had always been the first in the village. But the highest to which a man could attain was to be Ingmar Ingmarson himself, and be the richest, the wisest, and the mightiest in the whole parish.

Ingmar Ingmarson went up to the girl, took one of the whisks, and swung it in the air. It immediately fell to pieces; one of the twigs landed on the Christmas table, another on the big four-poster.

“I say, my girl,” said old Ingmar, laughing, “do you think one uses that kind of whisk when one takes a bath at the Ingmar’s, or are you very tender, my girl?”

When the girl saw that her master did not take it more seriously than that, she took heart, and answered that she could certainly make whisks that would not go to pieces if she could get proper withes to bind them with.

“Then I suppose I must try to get some for you, my girl,” said old Ingmar, for he was in a real Christmas humour.

He went out of the room, stepped over the girl who was scouring the floor, and remained standing on the doorstep, to see if there were anyone about whom he could send to the birch-wood for some withes. The farm hands were still busy cutting Yule logs; his son came out of the barn with the Christmas sheaf; his two sons-in-law were putting the carts into the shed so that the yard could be tidy for the Christmas festival. None of them had time to leave their work.

The old man then quietly made up his mind to go himself. He went across the yard as if he were going into the cowshed, looked cautiously round to make sure no one noticed him, and stole along outside the barn where there was a fairly good road to the wood. The old man thought it was better not to let anyone know where he was going, for either his son or his sons-in-law might then have begged him to remain at home, and old people like to have their own way.

He went down the road, across the fields, through the small pine-forest into the birch-wood. Here he left the road, and waded in the snow to find some young birches.

About the same time the wind at last accomplished what it had been busy with the whole day: it tore the snow from the clouds, and now came rushing through the wood with a long train of snow after it.

Ingmar Ingmarson had just stooped down and cut off a birch twig, when the wind came tearing along laden