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

still colder. Self-consciousness sat and sneered at her attempt to act love.

“Gösta,” she said, making a last effort, “I have never intentionally wronged you, even if it may seem so. I beg of you, forgive me!”

“I cannot forgive you.”

She knew that if she had possessed a real feeling she could have won him back. And she tried to play the impassioned. The icy eyes sneered at her, but she tried nevertheless. She did not want to lose him.

“Do not go, Gösta! Do not go in anger! Think how ugly I have become! No one will ever love me again.”

“Nor I, either,” he said. “You must accustom yourself to see your heart trampled upon as well as another.”

“Gösta, I have never loved anyone but you. Forgive me. Do not forsake me! You are the only one who can save me from myself.”

He thrust her from him.

“You do not speak the truth,” he said with icy calmness. “I do not know what you want of me, but I see that you are lying. Why do you want to keep me? You are so rich that you will never lack suitors.”

And so he went.

And not until he had closed the door, did regret and pain in all their strength take possession of Marianne’s heart.

It was love, her heart’s own child, who came out of the corner where the cold eyes had banished him. He came, he for whom she had so longed when it was too late.

When Marianne could with real certainty say to herself that Gösta Berling had forsaken her, she felt a purely physical pain so terrible that she almost fainted. She pressed her hands against her heart, and sat for hours in the same place, struggling with a tearless grief.

And it was she herself who was suffering, not a stranger, nor an actress. It was she herself. Why had her father come and separated them? Her love had never been dead. It was only that in her weak condition after her illness she could not appreciate his power.

O God, O God, that she had lost him! O God, that she had waked so late!

Ah, he was the only one, he was her heart’s conqueror! From him she could bear anything. Hardness and angry words from him bent her only to humble love. If he had beaten her, she would have crept like a dog to him and kissed his hand.

She did not know what she would do to get relief from this dull pain.

She seized pen and paper and wrote with terrible eagerness. First she wrote of her love and regret. Then she begged, if not for his love, only for his pity. It was a kind of poem she wrote.

When she had finished she thought that if he should see it he must believe that she had loved him. Well, why should she not send what she had written to him? She would send it the next day, and she was sure that it would bring him back to her.

The next day she spent in agony and in struggling with herself. What she had written seemed to her paltry and so stupid. It had neither rhyme nor metre. It was only prose. He would only laugh at such verses.

Her pride was roused too. If he no longer cared for her, it was such a terrible humiliation to beg for his love.

Sometimes her good sense told her that she ought to be glad to escape from the connection with Gösta, and all the deplorable circumstances which it had brought with it.

Her heart’s pain was still so terrible that her emotions finally conquered. Three days after she had become conscious of her love, she enclosed the verses and wrote Gösta Berling’s name on the cover. But they were never sent. Before she could find a suitable messenger she heard such things of Gösta Berling that she understood it was too late to win him back.

But it was the sorrow of her life that she had not sent the verses in time, while she could have won him.

All her pain fastened itself on that point: “If I only had not waited so long, if I had not waited so many days!”

The happiness of life, or at any rate the reality of life, would have been won to her through those written words. She was sure they would have brought him back to her.

Grief, however, did her the same service as love. It made her a whole being, potent to devote herself to good as well as evil. Passionate feelings filled her soul, unrestrained by self-consciousness’s icy chill. And she was, in spite of her plainness, much loved.

But they say that she never forgot Gösta Berling. She mourned for him as one mourns for a wasted life.

And her poor verses, which at one time were much read, are forgotten long ago. I beg of you to read them and to think of them. Who knows what power they might have had, if they had been sent? They are impassioned enough to bear witness of a real feeling. Perhaps they could have brought him back to her.

They are touching enough, tender enough in their awkward formlessness. No one can wish them different. No one can want to see them imprisoned in the chains of rhyme and metre, and yet it is so sad to think that it was perhaps just this imperfection which prevented her from sending them in time.

I beg you to read them and to love them. It is a person in great trouble who has written them.

“Child, thou hast loved once, but nevermore
Shalt thou taste of the joys of love!
A passionate storm has raged through thy soul
Rejoice thou hast gone to thy rest!
No more in wild joy shall thou soar up on high
Rejoice, thou hast gone to thy rest!
No more shalt thou sink in abysses of pain,
Oh, nevermore.

“Child, thou hast loved once, but nevermore
Shall your soul burn and scorch in the flames.
Thou wert as a field of brown,