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

sun-dried grass
Flaming with fire for a moment’s space;
From the whirling smoke-clouds the fiery sparks
Drove the birds of heaven with piercing cries.
Let them return! Thou burnest no more!⁠—
Wilt burn nevermore.

“Child, thou hast loved, but now nevermore
Shalt thou hear love’s murmuring voice.
Thy young heart’s strength, like a weary child
That sits still and tired on the hard school-bench,
Yearns for freedom and pleasure.
But no man calleth it more like a forgotten song;
No one sings it more⁠—nevermore.

“Child, the end has now come!
And with it gone love and love’s joy.
He whom thou lovedst as if he had taught thee
With wings to hover through space,
He whom thou lovedst as if he had given thee
Safety and home when the village was flooded,
Is gone, who alone understood
The key to the door of thy heart.

“I ask but one thing of thee, O my beloved:
‘Lay not upon me the load of thy hate!’
That weakest of all things, the poor human heart,
How can it live with the pang and the thought
That it gave pain to another?

“O my beloved, if thou wilt kill me,
Use neither dagger nor poison nor rope!
Say only you wish me to vanish
From the green earth and the kingdom of life,
And I shall sink to my grave.

“From thee came life of life; thou gavest me love,
And now thou recallest thy gift, I know it too well.
But do not give me thy hate!
I still have love of living! Oh, remember that;
But under a load of hate I have but to die.”

X The Young Countess

The young countess sleeps till ten o’clock in the morning, and wants fresh bread on the breakfast-table every day. The young countess embroiders, and reads poetry. She knows nothing of weaving and cooking. The young countess is spoiled.

But the young countess is gay, and lets her joyousness shine on all and everything. One is so glad to forgive her the long morning sleep and the fresh bread, for she squanders kindness on the poor and is friendly to everyone.

The young countess’s father is a Swedish nobleman, who has lived in Italy all his life, retained there by the loveliness of the land and by one of that lovely land’s beautiful daughters. When Count Henrik Dohna travelled in Italy he had been received in this nobleman’s house, made the acquaintance of his daughters, married one of them, and brought her with him to Sweden.

She, who had always spoken Swedish and had been brought up to love everything Swedish, is happy in the land of the bear. She whirls so merrily in the long dance of pleasure, on Löfven’s shores, that one could well believe she had always lived there. Little she understands what it means to be a countess. There is no state, no stiffness, no condescending dignity in that young, joyous creature.

It was the old men who liked the young countess best. It was wonderful, what a success she had with old men. When they had seen her at a ball, one could be sure that all of them, the judge at Munkerud and the clergyman at Bro and Melchior Sinclair and the captain at Berga, would tell their wives in the greatest confidence that if they had met the young countess thirty or forty years ago⁠—

“Yes, then she was not born,” say the old ladies.

And the next time they meet, they joke with the young countess, because she wins the old men’s hearts from them.

The old ladies look at her with a certain anxiety. They remember so well Countess Märta. She had been just as joyous and good and beloved when she first came to Borg. And she had become a vain and pleasure-seeking coquette, who never could think of anything but her amusements. “If she only had a husband who could keep her at work!” say the old ladies. “If she only could learn to weave!” For weaving was a consolation for everything; it swallowed up all other interests, and had been the saving of many a woman.

The young countess wants to be a good housekeeper. She knows nothing better than as a happy wife to live in a comfortable home, and she often comes at balls, and sits down beside the old people.

“Henrik wants me to learn to be a capable housekeeper,” she says, “just as his mother is. Teach me how to weave!”

Then the old people heave a sigh: first, over Count Henrik, who can think that his mother was a good housekeeper; and then over the difficulty of initiating this young, ignorant creature in such a complicated thing. It was enough to speak to her of heddles, and harnesses, and warps, and woofs,2 to make her head spin.

No one who sees the young countess can help wondering why she married stupid Count Henrik. It is a pity for him who is stupid, wherever he may be. And it is the greatest pity for him who is stupid and lives in Värmland.

There are already many stories of Count Henrik’s stupidity, and he is only a little over twenty years old. They tell how he entertained Anna Stjärnhök on a sleighing party a few years ago.

“You are very pretty, Anna,” he said.

“How you talk, Henrik!”

“You are the prettiest girl in the whole of Värmland.”

“That I certainly am not.”

“The prettiest in this sleighing party at any rate.”

“Alas, Henrik, I am not that either.”

“Well, you are the prettiest in this sledge, that you can’t deny.”

No, that she could not.

For Count Henrik is no beauty. He is as ugly as he is stupid. They say of him that that head on the top of his thin neck has descended in the family for a couple of hundred years. That is why the brain is so worn out in the last heir.

“It is perfectly plain that he has no head of his own,” they say. “He has borrowed his father’s. He does not dare to bend it; he is afraid of losing it⁠—he is already yellow and wrinkled. The head has been in use with both his