Excited and curious, Frida thrust her head into the girls’ room: “If you please, Miss Hedvig,—you ought to let me make your bed on a day like this.”
Hedvig was leaning over her narrow bed with her black hair full of curling papers. She would soon be fifteen years old now. Her breasts were already filling out beneath her bodice. Her lips were very red, and looked almost skinless, in her long pale face.
“No,” she said vehemently, “Kristin must come up.”
For some time past Hedvig had made her own bed. She could not bear Frida to touch anything of hers. She seemed to shiver as in a cold draught and her teeth began to chatter as soon as the plump, laughing hussy came near her. But the maid did not pay her back in the same coin. The excellent Frida had no stiff-necked pride. With a mixture of good nature and bad conscience she only became more servile. “Kristin? very well.”
Humming softly as usual she vanished down the stairs.
Laura yawned, stretched herself lazily and shook her fair hair. For all her laziness her arch eyes sparkled. She was not in the least like her elder sister:
“You really are mad, Hedvig,” she said, jumping out of the bed.
Then Kristin came puffing and muttering up the stairs. Her old black frock had not shrunk as she herself had done, and it seemed almost empty when she sank down on 38the edge of the bed. Her hands twitched and trembled as if they had gone to sleep in her lap and were dreaming of knitting needles.
“Well, Hedvig, do you know your catechism, so that we need not be ashamed of you?”
Laura came up, stark naked, with a lather of soap on her neck:
“Know her catechism? when she is overflowing with it!”
The old woman had no smile for this fresh, plump young thing.
“Are you not ashamed, child, to talk like that of God’s word? And you won’t be ready in time either.”
Hedvig had done her hair and Kristin helped her on with the white frock that reached almost to her ankles. She fumbled a long time with the fastenings at the back, and then she arranged the pleats with bony, trembling fingers.
“Just like dressing a little bride,” she muttered. “And truth it is that it is the best of bridegrooms you are meeting today!”
But behind Kristin’s back Hedvig stole a glance at herself in the mirror. It was with a shy, unsteady look she saw her own image. There was not a spark of fresh and natural joy.
Now it was breakfast time. The other children, arrayed in their poor best, were already sitting round the table. But it was impossible to get Hedvig down. She remained in the little girls’ room, and in the end Kristin had to take a plate of porridge to her. Laura also soon came running back. A new frock was anyhow a new frock. And this was almost the beginning of long skirts and putting the hair up. And perhaps she might even see Hedvig cry!
A carriage was heard crunching the gravel outside. Hedvig jumped up. It was only old Hermansson. Yes! of course he must come with them. She sank down on her chair again. Laura was looking at her with big greedy eyes, purring like a cat.
39“He is also coming,” she said suddenly in a sleek little voice. “I heard him order the dog-cart.”
Hedvig turned pale, just as one’s knuckles whiten when one clenches one’s fist.
“What he?”
“Mr. Brundin, of course.”
Over Hedvig’s face spread an expression of anxious and obstinate defiance which made it look almost old. Everybody was waiting about for an opportunity to point her out, everybody—
“What right has he to come. His place is among the farmhands.” And with that she pushed Laura out of the room and locked the door.
But then she stole to the window and stood there hidden by the curtain.
Then the bailiff, Brundin, came driving in his little dog-cart. He wore a fur coat, a top hat thrust back on his head, and red dogskin gloves.
Hedvig devoured him with her eyes, just like a boy who steals his first glass of strong drink, and is frightened when it burns his throat. Then she caught sight of Peter. He was standing some distance away with his coarse red hands hanging out of his short sleeves. He pulled a face at the bailiff and then looked furtively up at the girls’ room. Hedvig ran away from the window, and sat down in a corner fidgetting with her handkerchief. She looked as if she had been struck.
Now they were calling her. Now she must go down—“God! if only it were over,” she thought. Stiffly and hesitatingly, as if afraid to lose her balance, she greeted old Hermansson. But she shot past the outstretched hand of Brundin as if impelled by an invisible force, rushed out to the carriage and crept into a corner. With her pale face and her screwed-up eyes, she looked like some strange creature of the twilight which had been forced out into the merciless spring sunshine.
40Old Kristin had to run after her with her coat and hat.
At last the carriage was full and they started off. Out in the yard in the sunshine it was still temptingly warm. The lilac bushes had great green buds and the damp soil of the flower beds was steaming round the bulbs. But in the avenue they met the cold air from the dirty snow in the ditches. And whenever a little cloud hid the sun for a moment, they were back in winter again. It was one of those treacherous and dangerous days when the cautious and the wise, such as old Hermansson, prefer to keep their fur coats on.
It was some distance to the Church, which was situated at a crossing of two roads, by the side of a plain which was chequered by the black, brown, and green of fallow land, pastures, and young rye.
Behind it rose a bare slope sprinkled with juniper trees which resembled dark solid flames. The Church was very old, without a tower. With its high black roof, its coarse walls of rustic stone, it resembled a fortress, a barn, or a cellar. And there was a musty smell beneath the vaulted roof, for in spite of the big rusty stove, the cold winter air still lingered.
With the troop of children close upon his heels old Hermansson squeezed himself into the high narrow pew. He did so the more calmly as the pew was at this moment the most respectable place. But to Mr. Brundin the hard wooden seat of duty at once seemed repugnant.
Hedvig stealthily joined the other children who were to be confirmed, and sat down under the pulpit.
The clergyman was an old shaggy-bearded man with a face like granite and reindeer-moss. This teacher of Our Lord began the catechism in a dry, hard voice, as if he were engaged in an interrogation on the four rules of arithmetic rather than in partaking of the divine sacrament. In this severe old Church, confronted by this severe old man, the gospel seemed to be a vain mockery and punishment, 41the great punishment, the only reality. It was strange to hear the young girlish voices answer his lifeless voice as it spelled out, without a spark of fire, the long record of judgment. It was as if Death had been sitting on a stone and piped a tune on a dry bone, while frightened Echo answered from the green shores of life. There was in the quick, breathless repetition of the lesson every degree of fear, from the side-glance which would avoid the whip, down to the low trembling sigh that dies out in a sob. But he who had ears to hear would nevertheless have been startled by Hedvig’s voice. She knew her lesson and her voice did not shake, but there was something unnaturally tense, something of keenest anguish in her voice.
What sort of a God was it whom Hedvig feared and whom she was to receive today at the altar rails. Let us pause to reflect on his origin and on his history, which is much older than Hedvig’s first meeting with the clergyman. From the beginning, he was a God from the Servants’ Hall and he was an inheritance from Hedvig’s first horror, the Bogey Man!
We never escape from our first impressions and experiences. They bind us with the fibres of deep-seated roots which we never draw up into the full light of consciousness.
There Kristin, severe and foreboding, stood over the little sugar thief whom she had caught: “Hedvig, if you do not leave the sugar box alone, the Bogey Man will come and take you.”
From the beginning these two experiences blended, and each by unfortunate association strengthened the influence of the other. The more frightened she grew of the Bogey Man, the more she thought of the sugar box, and the more she thought of the sugar box, the more frightened she grew of the Bogey Man. At last he overshadowed her whole existence. He was in the dark hole under the kitchen stairs; in Kristin’s big black book; in the dull eyes of her moribund apoplectic father, in the hawk-like face of her 42grandfather in there over the green sofa. The darker it grew, the more dangerous the Bogey Man became. She ate her supper slowly, slowly, in order to postpone the inevitable. Alone and silent in her fear, she sat amongst her sisters and brothers who romped and struggled round about her. Then they were driven to bed. “Please, Kristin, don’t pull down the blind. Dear Kristin, please leave the lamp a little longer.”
It was no use. In vain she pulled the bedclothes over her head, the Bogey Man was still there, the blackest thing in the darkness. And he came sneaking into her dreams and groped with his shadow hands about her little trembling heart so that she often awoke with a loud shriek in the middle of the night.
In her terror, Hedvig attached herself more and more closely to old Kristin, who knew all about all these ominous mysteries. And thus it came about that God succeeded to the Bogey Man.
But this intimacy during the long hours of twilight with an old, tired, and harried creature who had not the sense to spare tender ears, was dangerous. In everyday life Kristin’s God was a mean and nagging kitchen-God whose chief business was to punish the maids’ laziness and pilfering. But he had also his greater and more threatening moods when he emerged from his past in a small soldiers’ cottage in a mighty Sm?land forest in order to punish incendiaries and murderers and to look after brownies and trolls. When on Sunday evenings Kristin sat reading aloud from the Old Testament her voice would assume an expression of cruel lamentation, something submissively threatening which gripped Hedvig with a deep awe of the people through the dim and distant ages.
In the dark, Hedvig grew frightened of God. Not even school when it began with its monotonous and mechanical cramming, not even the alleviating joys of companionship, could kill her fear. Amidst the noise of the class-room 43she sat alone in communion with both the great and the dangerous. Before she could read properly, she spelled out greedily and eagerly the tale of the fall of man and the ten commandments. Especially the seventh commandment made a deep impression on her. Here was the terrible fascination of the unknown. By and by she began to read the Bible for herself. There was much to brood over, much that nourished her fears, which now began to undergo strange transformation. She could sit for hours thinking of such expressions as “circumcision,” “menstruation,” then she imagined she bore a son. Her gaze fastened on passages concerning the sin of fornication, the great Babylonian harlot, Absolom’s exploits on the roof of the house with King David’s concubines.
The darkness enclosing Hedvig’s God began to be oppressive. His too early threats provoked the very sins which he intended to prevent. She brooded over evil till at last it began to stir in her blood. Her ever present fear developed into stealthy, premature curiosity. It was no longer anything so white and innocent as sugar that Hedvig now stole. No! In the forbidden box now lay worm eaten, half rotten fruit fallen from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. But there was still the same fatal and even more intimate association of ideas as in the case of the sugar and the Bogey Man.
Soon Hedvig’s curiosity found something different from the shadowy figures of the old rat-eaten family Bible to brood over and to spy out, namely, the bailiff and Frida.
That sultry night when Peter caught her peeping under the blind into Brundin’s window had been a fateful night in her life. The discovery of the secret of the bailiff’s wing was the greatest and most dangerous discovery she had yet made. Hot and cold by turns, tempted, frightened, caught in the act, she had crept to bed. Her soul was outraged. Night and day the memory of that scene remained with her. She was afraid of Peter, disgusted with Frida, 44but could not get the man out of her thoughts. It was like an obsession. She avoided him, scarcely greeted him, could not for anything in the world look him in the face. But secretly she devoured him with her eyes. His bold, wicked self-assurance had some inexpressible allurement for her. She found herself incessantly following this sinner, and then fled, frightened and ashamed, to her bed. But as she had shaped her God out of fear, he had no pity and could not help her. This girlish love might have been the means of leading her out into the fresh air if it had not been of such a strange and stunted kind. As it was, it only threw her back more and more upon herself.
Such was the Hedvig who now knelt by the altar rails and received the bread and the wine from the hand of the old clergyman. She had grown up in the shadow of her own dreams like one of those long white shoots that grew down in the deep darkness. Not one poor single little bud of her being had been able to open out in the clear sunshine of the busy, living world. In a pew behind sat the genteel farmer, Brundin, with his pert military moustache, not for a moment suspecting that he was a terrible Behemoth, sucking the nourishment out of a poor little woman’s soul.
Communion was over. The girls rose with tear-stained faces and walked slowly, hesitatingly, down the aisle. Hedvig was pale and dry-eyed. Outside it had suddenly begun to snow, wet ice-cold snow, and it was pathetic to see her as she stood amongst these thinly clad, shivering children, slowly and awkwardly bidding each other good-bye, and looking like butterflies that have left their chrysalis too soon and have no flowers to rest on. The girl from Selambshof was better dressed than the poor peasant girls. And she was the prettiest of them too. But she looked more forlorn and colder than the poor lonely little snow-drops that shivered amongst the snowflakes on a poor man’s grave behind her.
45Old Hermansson had something to say to the Vicar. Brundin came up to Hedvig and made his compliments.
“Well, Hedvig, that went off splendidly! Now you are a big grown-up lady and I suppose I must call you Miss Hedvig. But we must not let it snow any longer on your white hat.”
He led her to the carriage which was waiting with the hood up, helped her in and fastened the apron. Hedvig drew back as if his touch had scorched her. When he had gone she sat there trembling and with chattering teeth. Will he drive before or after us, she thought. If he drives before us, I can sit and look at him the whole time. But when her guardian at last arrived and they started with Brundin in front, she stared obstinately at a hole in the apron, because she was afraid of God.
Both old Hermansson and Brundin were to stay for dinner. A gloomy snow light filled the dining-room and there was a fire burning, just as in mid-winter. Hedvig sat stiff and silent in the place of honour, and scarcely tasted the food. Then her guardian solemnly drew forth a present from his coat pocket. It was a little watch with Hedvig’s initials engraved on it. He made a short admonitory speech before giving it to her and hoped that she would learn to make the same good use of time as he had done when he was young. He even finished with a little verse:
“May this watch the right time tell
To a little girl who works right well.”
Hedvig sat fidgetting on her chair with downcast eyes, as if she were being scolded. It was with difficulty that she stood up and returned thanks for the gift with a stiff curtsey.
Now it was Brundin’s turn to put his hand in his pocket. He pulled out a red case, opened the lid with a snap and, bowing gallantly, handed her a narrow gold brooch.
46“Well, Miss Hedvig, I also take the liberty of offering a simple little gift. Please accept it, Miss Hedvig. Hall-marked!”
Hedvig blanched. Her glass trembled against the edge of her plate as she set it down. Her dark eyes fastened, wide-open with fright, on a spot on the wall opposite. She stretched out her hand like a blind man and groped for the case. But she stopped half way. She had suddenly caught sight of Frida, who, with a bottle of port in one hand and a napkin in the other, forgot her duties and bent over Brundin’s shoulder to stare greedily at the glittering ornament. Hedvig’s voice, unnaturally tense, suddenly cut the silence:
“No, I don’t want the brooch—give it to ... to Frida instead.”
She covered her face with her hands and ran upstairs and threw herself on her bed.
Nobody round the table said anything. Frida tittered a little. Then she stood crimson and fidgetted for a moment before she could pull herself together and go out. Brundin muttered something that sounded like a curse, and sat silently playing with his little fair moustache, looking half embarrassed and half self-satisfied. Peter almost collapsed with excitement.
Now Brundin will be kicked out, he thought, and an agreeable, cold shiver passed through his bones. Old Hermansson had become rigid, with his spoon half way between his mouth and his plate and looking very upset. At last Laura’s voice broke the spell:
“Hedvig is mad,” she said and jumped up as she sat on her chair, for she had a curious trick of being able to jump whilst sitting.
“There now, she is spoiling everything,” thought Peter, and gave her a pinch under the table. Quite right, old Hermansson did not seize Brundin by the collar and kick him out. Instead he rose with slow dignity, and took up the case and the brooch:
47“I will teach this ill-bred girl how to receive a well-meant gift,” he said, with an air that promised full amends to Brundin. Then he stalked off after Hedvig.
He found her lying full length on her bed in her white frock, which looked like a shroud. She lay there dry-eyed staring up at the ceiling.
“Now put this brooch in your frock, Hedvig, and go down and say thank you nicely,” he said.
A shiver passed through her and the skin on her thin arms looked like goose flesh.
“Please, please, leave me alone,” she begged.
“Put the brooch on at once!”
“No, no, it is sinful,” she stammered and turned her face to the wall.
Then old Hermansson thought he ought not to insist any longer. He left the case on the table beside the bed and went downstairs again.
“The poor child has had a trying day today,” he said to the bailiff. “She seems strangely upset. I thought I ought to let her put off her apologies.”
Then he returned to his tart.
But up in her room Hedvig lay with the red case on her breast. Suddenly she tore out the brooch and stuck the pin deep into her left hand. Then she sucked drop after drop of the slowly oozing blood.