p. 33

Of all his writings this winter and this spring, at least one reached its destination; on the last of April it was published in the bi‐weekly edition of the Evening News:

Cultured Lady
will find rest in country in return
for some help in garden and house‐
hold. Reply by letter marked “Tact”
to the office of this newspaper.

On the fifteenth of May she came. By then he was almost through in the garden, and that was just as well; she didn’t look suited for work. She was far too stout for that.

She came toward evening and went to bed early, tired from the journey. But he stayed up long with the other answers, the other pictures. Although, naturally, even she had sent a picture of a round, cheerful face, down to half an inch below the collar—no one could have guessed just from the picture that the rest would be so overwhelming. Naturally he’d had full‐length pictures, several of them. But they hadn’t really told him very much, nor did they now as he tried to make up his mind whether he had made the wrong choice or not.

A strange moment. In the folding bed above his head his brother had died. A quiet, modest death after a quiet, modest life. Everything had become even more quiet after that—now! now she was turning over, and the ceiling creaked; he felt that the whole house was creaking. Again he stared down into the other answers, again she turnedp. 34 over—and it was like a new fear. He shuddered as if he were doing something forbidden, as if he were being unfaithful to her up there—to her whom he had, after all, settled on for now! He removed the letters and the pictures, removed them quickly—in their place he brought out his almanac and wrote himself to a kind of calm, entered three pencil notes that he had neglected to record while he had been waiting. Blue anemone, April 15; coltsfoot, April 17; daphne, April 25.

“Oh thou clerk, thou clerk, thou parish clerk.…”

But now, of course, he can laugh at that little story. By no manner of means is he to be regarded as a dried‐up herb anymore; he himself can see in the mirror that there is a new light in his eyes, a new buoyancy about his shoulders.

For the unexpected happened. Or what he had dreamed about when composing the ad happened. Or quite simply this: that after the night of new fear and new doubt there came a day of self‐confidence and contentment.

Several such days.

Of course it’s still true that she’s not inclined to move much. She has not yet been as far into the garden as the fence, and it doesn’t look as if she has any intention of going that far either. And it’s exceptional for her to set the table or clear it; on the other hand it’s a rule without exception that he still does the dishes. And two plates again instead of one, and two soup bowls into the bargain now. And two knives, two forks, two spoons. At coffee time—this, too, was one of the things he had wondered andp. 35 dreamed about after the ad—at coffee time she would come out with the tray all set; clear over in the square patch where he was fussing around with the medicinal herbs he would hear her woman’s voice:

“Coffee’s ready!”

It didn’t turn out that way. The woman’s voice is there, it’s there a good deal ahead of the coffee hour, but it says, as she sits there heavy and immovable in his only garden chair, the one his brother bought:

“I’m beginning to feel like a cup of coffee, Kilstadius!”

He has told himself that he is disappointed; at long last he has searched his inner self to find out if he really is disappointed. Has rolled over his tongue a reminder about the words in the advertisement concerning help in the home and interest in the garden and herbs—

More and more the desire to voice such a reminder has disappeared and another desire has taken its place; almost every day, bending over the cultivated hyoscyamus and tanacetum, he becomes impatient, looks at his watch several times each half hour, longs to go in to his job of setting the tray. As far as he can see, he has become a real gallant, not the master of the house as he had thought. It was a foolish thought! Less and less does he own up to it, and if the roles had been switched, it seems to him now that his role is not such a bad one—he’s been waiting on himself alone long enough!

He has asked her to read the publication which came as printed matter and which no one but the parish clerk could have sent. Youth Magazine is the name of it. And someone has marked with a blue crayon:

p. 36

“In South America, it is said, there may be found a strange plant which grows only in moist places. In such places it will put down roots and become green for a while until the soil has dried up again. Then it frees itself from the ground, curls up, and is carried by the wind to some other moist place which may be miles and miles away, where the same process is repeated. It keeps on wandering and stopping where there is water until the ground again becomes dry. Finally it is just a bundle of dry roots and dry twigs after all its wanderings.”

“That’s supposed to be me,” he said.

And laughed, now he can laugh.

But she understood nothing, blue‐eyed she understood nothing.

“Old—and dry. After all the wanderings.”

“But you aren’t old, Kilstadius,” she said.

She had mentioned something about music. But in passing she had let fall a word about her birthday, on the sixth of June. One week before that he had made up an ad again. It didn’t go as far as the Evening Post; it just appeared in the local News. He took it to the editor himself.

And this time he felt no hesitation in choosing the answer that looked most luxuriant, as it were:

One manual organ, six stops.

The driver helps him carry the organ into the living room; then they have a glass of juice in the kitchen—the bus is early and there’s only an old woman left in it. He says his guest is a teacher, a school teacher on leave of absence.p. 37 She doesn’t miss the school, he says, but she misses music. Now she’s having her after‐dinner nap.

He begins to polish the organ with a rag.

She plays “Alte Kameraden” so it’s like a changing of the guard right in his house, like a parade in Berlin in the old days! And he picks up courage from the music; they’ll soon find out whom they’ve bitten! He is checking off words in “50,000 foreign‐loan words”—abdicate = give up of one’s free will—the honors he never asked for; abnormal = not following the usual rules—but then he never has gone along in their grooves; absurd = senseless, stupid, foolish—that’s just what the idea is that he should therefore be inferior to them in any way; antagonist = foe, enemy—of two kinds, one of them bigoted = two‐faced, and the other cynical = coarse, unseemly; fiasco = failure, create a fiasco—well, that may be so; inquiet = uneasy—is how they will never get to see him anymore—with utter calm he will stand up against their conspiracy = secret order!

He doesn’t get any further today; much to his surprise he hears her in the kitchen and rushes down the stairs. That will never do! Not on her birthday! Gently but firmly he shoves her out into the garden chair again.

He treats her to a birthday cake; he treats her to a reading aloud from last winter’s bulky briefcase:

“The fact that I undertook my journey at such an advanced age completely alone and totally unprepared to make my way among thieves and bandits in three continents has aroused considerable amazement and interest in the countries I traversed.…”

She interrupts him, tells him once more he’s not so very old. From the paper rises a little of the agony, the agony of fear from that evening when he was writing this—is she,p. 38 too, one of those who would belittle his contribution? But her eyes are just china‐blue; he makes corrections and deletions in his notebook and continues:

“Since, as has already been related, I had been accosted all the way both on my outward and homeward journeys, it was with a certain wondering, indeed almost fear, that I approached my native country where I had suffered so terribly for many decades. I had a small foretaste of what was now about to befall me when I boarded the Swedish ferry at Sassnitz. I was not allowed to buy anything, neither food nor coffee, and got only insolent answers when I asked for something.…”

Here he had been unable to write on; from Sassnitz, from Trelleborg, he was suddenly at the home of his relatives:

“They received me so disgracefully,” he says now, “so disgracefully that we won’t spoil your birthday with that. Only my brother showed that he really thought highly of me for having been able to undertake such a journey. Maybe it wasn’t envy that the others felt.…”

“Oh yes,” she interrupts him again, “of course it was envy.”

She becomes animated, quite animated for her:

“It galled them. They were thinking of the money. Anyone can see that such a journey must have cost an awful lot of money.”

“Alte Kameraden” awakens his memories—as soon as it started to rain and he rescued the coffee set and the little bit of cake that was left (she had certainly donep. 39 honor to the cake!) and they have sat down in his room, it becomes the turn of Frau Neumann in Sassnitz.

“Now maybe I can get some help with a letter that I should have sent long ago,” he says.

She has told him that she knows a little German.

It’s true, he has been writing it for several years. But it is of the utmost importance that it should not provide the least opportunity for misinterpretation in any direction—Frau Neumann had tortured his days and nights enough, after all!

He reads in German from a yellowed paper:

“You will without doubt remember that I, the undersigned, spent the night in your hotel while on my way to Jerusalem.”

If he reads slowly, she can follow it.

“I have only good things to say about your hotel, but your behavior has made me very.…”

“Stories of love affairs,” he says. “They tried to make a laughing‐stock of me before the whole world with tales of love affairs. I was accosted in every country.”

“You conducted yourself in such a way that there can be no doubt that you had heard shameful slander concerning my circumstances.…”

“How could this be possible?” he had burst out on sheet after sheet, impotent and trembling. Now he is calmer.

“I must make it clear to Frau Neumann,” he says, “that she was not the only one, that it was like this in all of the countries. And that this simply couldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for the secret ‘conspiracies that exist nowadays’”—this is the title he has given one of his notebooks. “She shall be forced to confess how she got hold of, where she got hold of all those disgraceful things. I am going to publish the results, and it’s going to be of very great interest to certain persons!”

p. 40

He himself can hear how his voice is soaring up into a treble, but that is really the only similarity to his former outbursts—the organ tones mingled with the cuckoo’s call this June make all the old misery appear so distant.

About another persecution down in Germany, when he was working on an estate called Frörup twelve miles west of Hadersleben.

“When the owner there reported the arrival of the Swede to the local policeman, he was able to tell him what happened in my childhood.”

“Working?” she says. “Were you working, Kilstadius? Weren’t you traveling?”

There is a little wrinkle across her nose.

“Of course I was traveling,” he replies. “I just had to take work to improve my finances. I used to do that quite often.”

“I see,” she says and looks at him thoughtfully.

In the evening she plays, but not “Alte Kameraden” anymore, rather a song in a gloomy tune, with gloomy words:

The day which just passed will never return— The law of change does command— But the deeds that you did are of deepest concern;In God’s Book they are writ by His hand.

The basses among the six stops reinforce retu‐u‐urn. conce‐e‐ern—not entirely gloomy, though; he is not alone anymore. Peace, and not just twilight, rests over the garden. But over Frau Neumann in Sassnitz flutters a swarm of the bats of repentance and qualms and fear—

p. 41

She doesn’t miss her school yet, she says. And now she has her music, too.

“But not many people come here,” she says that same day.

She has moved the garden chair so she can see the road.

That’s why he is happy, in spite of the dry herb, when the parish clerk comes. His errand is to say that alas, alas, it won’t be possible to arrange for a lecture just now. “…you know how it is. People don’t want to sit around indoors during midsummer.”

“But in the fall, Kilstadius, in the fall.”

But in the fall might she perhaps be gone?

She doesn’t seem to be sorry, however; in her joy she seems to have forgotten his lecture. She twitters her “cup of coffee now, Kilstadius,” coaxes the parish clerk to take a seat in the garden chair but so playfully that it is she herself who drops down into it, as usual.

And of course they are fellow teachers, aren’t they, so they probably have quite a lot to talk about; their voices drift in to Kilstadius by the stove. It pleases him, indeed it does, that she has someone to visit with her at long last—it pleases him that the parish clerk can see what a paradise he’s really got now. And his annoyance at the canceled lecture—in a way it’s good not to have to think about it anymore; he has finished only the first part.—Three coffee spoons, three cups, three saucers, a dish for the cookies, sugar, cream, that’s it.

Imagined you now as my bride .     .     .     .     .     .     . Imagined you my little wife

it says in his poetry album. “Fantastic Excursions into Time and Space and into Eternity and Infinity” is going to be the title of his lecture—he can see the rows of faces before him, he’ll give them something to think about onp. 42 their way home in the raw autumn darkness; he’ll make the tail of pride droop in each one of them!

“Man’s Thought,” he has written, “man’s Thought, that uneasy roamer, is freer than anything else on earth. Nothing can stop him from making excursions into the times and spaces to which his mistress, the brain, chooses to dispatch him. From a subterranean dungeon he can easily spring up to the regions of the Milky Way, to where only the astronomer can reach with his sine lines.”

He has continued in a new notebook, another ten lines: “He moves through time as easily to the days of creation as to the day of doom, lingers in wonder where life was kindled, and flees in terror where it is extinguished. With regard to excursions in time and space, Thought is omnipotent like God himself. In only two cases is he impotent: if he is directed toward the beginning of eternity or toward the ultimate infinity. Then he is seized with giddiness and immediately turns back and wants to stay home, for he can achieve nothing.…”

This giddiness he himself has felt. The second lecture is to deal with the journey back, with the world down here:

“When a seasoned person in his mature age casts a critical glance back on his own past life and on the lives of his fellow men without reflecting very deeply on causes and effects, he will easily come to the misleading conviction that Providence perpetrates a barbarous injustice against the sensible beings whom She has assigned to places down here in the valleys of earth, most of which may be called vales of tears. On the one side you see vice and crime triumph and receive an abundance of the gifts of the earth; on the other side you see talented and dedicated persons struggle in vain against poverty and adversity and disease, sinking ever deeper into misery until many of them remain at the bottom of the abyss. Our modern reformers.…”

p. 43

Now the lid of the coffee pot is drumming, drumming like applause. How utterly ignorant is the parish clerk out there, and even if his notebooks will go back into their place on the shelf today too—between a book entitled “The Troubles of the Soul” and a pamphlet he got from an agricultural inspector, “A Few Words About Peat Moss”—they won’t remain there long anymore!

“You sure took your time!” she says.

She laughs to the parish clerk.

“But help yourself now!”

He overheard the word “asylum” at the post office. But it wasn’t about him; it was about the bride at Haglycka who refuses to get up anymore.

When he gets back home, he is in a bitter mood.

“I, for one, never got any help,” he says. “Never any help or friendliness even at the hospital. I have had a lot of experiences both in Stockholm and in the country yet have never been treated with anything but scorn and brutality. This nurses’ association.…”

Today he says this to provoke her. She has been out for a walk with the parish clerk. She has a cousin who is a nurse.

“There are many kind persons among them,” she says. “My cousin is really a very kind person.”

“She may well be,” he admits. “But still, helping with the blockade!”

All of a sudden his voice rises to a screaming pitch, and his cheeks turn red.

“Can’t you see that that’s why I went to Jerusalem! To put an end to that blockade! At least the one against mep. 44 personally! I wrote a pamphlet. I sold nineteen copies, that’s all; there are four hundred and eighty—one left up there in the attic!”

And now he continues in the words of the pamphlet; he knows them by heart:

“Any scoundrel can treat me just as he likes. Here at home they tried again and again to have me committed for persecution mania.”

He tosses his head and upper body backward:

“Nobody dared to start writing in earnest, though! Just shouting, ‘Crucify him, crucify him, and give us Barrabas!’ Why, in the first house I entered in Germany.…”

“Frau Neumann,” she says, and her voice trembles.

He can hear that she is scared, but now he is going to prove to her once and for all how far‐reaching the ramifications and organization of this persecution are! She’s not going to hide behind the parish clerk! He strides up and down the room; now he is lecturing to her about the gang of card sharps and crooks in Barcelona. About the Sociedad de la Innocenza, the protectors of innocence, in the horrible black dresses and high conical hats with slits for the eyes and mouth. “A similar gang rose up in America, with the only difference that their ghastly garb was snow white as a symbol of their noble work—which was murder and crime! The Ku Klux Klan.…”

She stares at him, terrified.

“Haha!” he laughs, carried away with her fear, with his own fear. “And now we shall soon get to the parish clerk. The Ku Klux Klan was banned, but the members organized themselves instead as the Independent Order of Good Templars! A scoundrel by the name of Hickman! In due time this order got to Sweden and introduced the secret blockade upon Swedish soil!”

As the words are spoken, he feels the thick lines underp. 45 the words in his notebook; he underlines them once more in the air with a mighty sweep of his right hand.

“And this blockade is so secret that only a few Good Templars know about it; all the others have no idea of the company they are in! That is what is so dangerous and terrifying. But they are useful all the same, for they help to spread degrading gossip about the unhappy persons who are victims of the blockade. The parish clerk is such a gossip monger.…”

Again all his confidence collapses—the cancellation of his lecture is proof of the deceitfulness of confidence, the letter to Professor Gadelius to which he never got a reply is proof, the seed potatoes he had to wait for till the middle of May, till the day before she arrived—further proof!

She tells him that those are trifles, little coincidences, quite harmless little events—oh! he has the answer; he takes a sentence from a notebook where he has collected the “Sayings of Great Men”: “What merely scratches the nail of one penetrates into the innermost heart of another and burns like poison!”

In the evening she sings:

I sometimes wish that I A winging dove might be, O’er deserts’ sandy wastes to fly From perils hastily.

And in the morning, when the mowing machines are rattling again, the dove is winging away. By the first bus. Not to the sandy wastes, just to her cousin. O’er deserts’ sandy wastes, instead, who flew o’er deserts’ sandy wastes?p. 46 Cast about by the winds? The dry herb. Or else what did the parish clerk mean?

When evening comes again, he takes a walk to the churchyard and back. He does not meet anyone, stops at the wall of a stable and throws his water. Then he hears the horse inside sighing. A long, heavy sigh.