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

earth to be quite flat, without stones, without hills or seas, so that she could dance everywhere. From the cradle to the grave she would like to dance in her small, thin-soled, satin slippers.

But rumor is not very merciful to young women.

When the guests come to dinner at Borg, the men generally, after the meal, go into the count’s room to sleep and smoke; the old ladies sink down in the easy-chairs in the drawing-room, and lean their venerable heads against the high backs; but the countess and Anna Stjärnhök go into the blue cabinet and exchange endless confidences.

The Sunday after the one when Anna Stjärnhök took Ulrika Dillner back to Berga they are sitting there again.

No one on earth is so unhappy as the young girl. All her gayety is departed, and gone is the glad defiance which she showed to everything and everybody who wished to come too near her.

Everything which had happened to her that day has sunk back into the twilight from which it was charmed; she has only one distinct impression left⁠—yes, one, which is poisoning her soul.

“If it really was not God who did it,” she used to whisper to herself. “If it was not God, who sent the wolves?”

She asks for a sign, she longs for a miracle. She searches heaven and earth. But she sees no finger stretched from the sky to point out her way.

As she sits now opposite the countess in the blue cabinet, her eyes fall on a little bunch of hepaticas which the countess holds in her white hand. Like a bolt it strikes her that she knows where the flowers have grown, that she knows who has picked them.

She does not need to ask. Where else in the whole countryside do hepaticas bloom in the beginning of April, except in the birch grove which lies on the slopes of Ekeby?

She stares and stares at the little blue stars; those happy ones who possess all hearts; those little prophets who, beautiful in themselves, are also glorified by the splendor of all the beauty which they herald, of all the beauty which is coming. And as she watches them a storm of wrath rises in her soul, rumbling like the thunder, deadening like the lightning. “By what right,” she thinks, “does Countess Dohna hold this bunch of hepaticas, picked by the shore at Ekeby?”

They were all tempters: Sintram, the countess, everybody wanted to allure Gösta Berling to what was evil. But she would protect him; against all would she protect him. Even if it should cost her heart’s blood, she would do it.

She thinks that she must see those flowers torn out of the countess’s hand, and thrown aside, trampled, crushed, before she leaves the little blue cabinet.

She thinks that, and she begins a struggle with the little blue stars. Out in the drawing-room the old ladies lean their venerable heads against the chair-backs and suspect nothing; the men smoke their pipes in calm and quiet in the count’s room; peace is everywhere; only in the little blue cabinet rages a terrible struggle.

Ah, how well they do who keep their hands from the sword, who understand how to wait quietly, to lay their hearts to rest and let God direct! The restless heart always goes astray; ill-will makes the pain worse.

But Anna Stjärnhök believes that at last she has seen a finger in the sky.

“Anna,” says the countess, “tell me a story!”

“About what?”

“Oh,” says the countess, and caresses the flowers with her white hand. “Do not you know something about love, something about loving?”

“No, I know nothing of love.”

“How you talk! Is there not a place here which is called Ekeby⁠—a place full of pensioners?”

“Yes,” says Anna, “there is a place which is called Ekeby, and there are men there who suck the marrow of the land, who make us incapable of serious work, who ruin growing youth, and lead astray our geniuses. Do you want to hear of them? Do you want to hear love-stories of them?”

“Yes. I like the pensioners.”

So Anna Stjärnhök speaks⁠—speaks in short sentences, like an old hymnbook, for she is nearly choking with stormy emotions. Suppressed suffering trembles in each word, and the countess was both frightened and interested to hear her.

“What is a pensioner’s love, what is a pensioner’s faith?⁠—one sweetheart today, another tomorrow, one in the east, another in the west. Nothing is too high for him, nothing too low; one day a count’s daughter, the next day a beggar girl. Nothing on earth is so capacious as his heart. But alas, alas for her who loves a pensioner. She must seek him out where he lies drunk at the wayside. She must silently look on while he at the card-table plays away the home of her childhood. She must bear to have him hang about other women. Oh, Elizabeth, if a pensioner asks an honorable woman for a dance she ought to refuse it to him; if he gives her a bunch of flowers she ought to throw the flowers on the ground and trample on them; if she loves him she ought rather to die than to marry him. There was one among the pensioners who was a dismissed priest; he had lost his vestments for drunkenness. He was drunk in the church. He drank up the communion wine. Have you ever heard of him?”

“No.”

“After he had been dismissed he wandered about the country as a beggar. He drank like a madman. He would steal to get brandy.”

“What is his name?”

“He is no longer at Ekeby. The major’s wife got hold of him, gave him clothes, and persuaded your mother-in-law, Countess Dohna, to make him tutor to your husband, young Count Henrik.”

“A dismissed priest!”

“Oh, he was a young, powerful man, of good intelligence. There was no harm in him, if he only did not drink. Countess Märta was not particular. It amused her to quarrel with the neighboring clergymen. Still, she ordered him to say nothing of his past life