The Story of Gösta Berling by Selma Lagerlöf (readnow txt) 📕

“Of course they thought, children,” answered the old people.

“But not as we think,” we insisted.

But the old people did not understand what we meant.

But we thought of the strange spirit of self-consciousness which had already taken possession of us. We thought of him, with his eyes of ice and his long, bent fingers⁠—he who sits there in the soul’s darkest corner and picks to pieces our being, just as old women pick to pieces bits of silk and wool.

Bit by bit had the long, hard, crooked fingers picked, until our whole self lay there like a pile of rags, and our best impulses, our most original thoughts, everything which we had done and said, had been examined, investigated, picked to pieces, and the icy eyes had looked on, and the toothless mouth had laughed in derision and whispered⁠—

“See, it is rags, only rags.”

There was also one of the people of that time who had opened her soul to the spirit with the icy eyes. In one of them he sat, watching the causes of all actions, sneering at both evil and good, understanding everything, condemning nothing, examining, seeking out, picking to pieces, paralyzing the emotions of the heart and the power of the mind by sneering unceasingly.

The beautiful Marianne bore the spirit of introspection within her. She felt his icy eyes and sneers follow every step, every word. Her life had become a drama where she was the only spectator. She had ceased to be a human being, she did not suffer, she was not glad, nor did she love; she carried out the beautiful Marianne Sinclair’s role, and self-consciousness sat with staring, icy eyes and busy, picking fingers, and watched her performance.

She was divided into two halves. Pale, unsympathetic, and sneering, one half sat and watched what the other half was doing; and the strange spirit who picked to pieces her being never had a word of feeling or sympathy.

But where had he been, the pale watcher of the source of deeds, that night, when she had learned to know the fullness of life? Where was he when she, the sensible Marianne, kissed Gösta Berling before a hundred pairs of eyes, and when in a gust of passion she threw herself down in the snowdrift to die? Then the icy eyes were blinded, then the sneer was weakened, for passion had raged through her soul. The roar of adventure’s wild hunt had thundered in her ears. She had been a whole person during that one terrible night.

Oh, you god of self-mockery, when Marianne with infinite difficulty succeeded in lifting her stiffened arms and putting them about Gösta’s neck, you too, like old Beerencreutz, had to turn away your eyes from the earth and look at the stars.

That night you had no power. You were dead while she sang her love-song, dead while she hurried down to Sjö after the major, dead when she saw the flames redden the sky over the tops of the trees.

For they had come, the mighty storm-birds, the griffins of demoniac passions. With wings of fire and claws of steel they had come swooping down over you, you icy-eyed spirit; they had struck their claws into your neck and flung you far into the unknown. You have been dead and crushed.

But now they had rushed on⁠—they whose course no sage can predict, no observer can follow; and out of the depths of the unknown had the strange spirit of self-consciousness again raised itself and had once again taken possession of Marianne’s soul.

During the whole of February Marianne lay ill at Ekeby. When she sought out the major at Sjö she had been infected with smallpox. The terrible illness had taken a great hold on her, who had been so chilled and exhausted. Death had come very near to her, but at the end of the month she had recovered. She was still very weak and much disfigured. She would never again be called the beautiful Marianne.

This, however, was as yet only known to Marianne and her nurse. The pensioners themselves did not know it. The sickroom where smallpox raged was not open to anyone.

But when is the introspective power greater than during the long hours of convalescence? Then the fiend sits and stares and stares with his icy eyes, and picks and picks with his bony, hard fingers. And if one looks carefully, behind him sits a still paler creature, who stares and sneers, and behind him another and still another, sneering at one another and at the whole world.

And while Marianne lay and looked at herself with all these staring icy eyes, all natural feelings died within her.

She lay there and played she was ill; she lay there and played she was unhappy, in love, longing for revenge.

She was it all, and still it was only a play. Everything became a play and unreality under those icy eyes, which watched her while they were watched by a pair behind them, which were watched by other pairs in infinite perspective.

All the energy of life had died within her. She had found strength for glowing hate and tender love for one single night, not more.

She did not even know if she loved Gösta Berling. She longed to see him to know if he could take her out of herself.

While under the dominion of her illness, she had had only one clear thought: she had worried lest her illness should be known. She did not wish to see her parents; she wished no reconciliation with her father, and she knew that he would repent if he should know how ill she was. Therefore she ordered that her parents and everyone else should only know that the troublesome irritation of the eyes, which she always had when she visited her native country, forced her to sit in a darkened room. She forbade her nurse to say how ill she was; she forbade the pensioners to go after the doctor at Karlstad. She had of course smallpox,