Short Fiction, Selma Lagerlöf [uplifting novels txt] 📗

dimness of the forest. The hunter’s name was Tönne. His real work was to cultivate the earth, but he also could do other things. He collected herbs, boiled tar, dried punk, and often went hunting. The dancer was called Jofrid. Her father was a charcoal burner. She tied brooms, picked juniper berries and brewed ale of the white-flowering myrtle. They were both very poor.

They had never met before in the big wood, but now they thought that all its paths wound into a net, in which they ran forward and back and could not possibly escape one another. They never knew how to choose a way where they did not meet.

Tönne had once had a great sorrow. He had lived with his mother for a long while in a miserable, wattled hut, but as soon as he was grown up he was seized with the idea to build her a warm cabin. During all his leisure moments he went into the clearing, cut down trees and hewed them into squared pieces. Then he hid the timber in dark crannies under moss and branches. It was his intention that his mother should not know anything of all this work before he was ready to build the house. But his mother died before he could show her what he had collected; before he had time to tell her what he had wished to do. He, who had worked with the same zeal as David, King of Israel, when he gathered treasures for the temple of God, grieved most bitterly over it. He lost all interest in the building. For him the brushwood shelter was good enough. Yet he was hardly better off in his home than an animal in its hole.

When he, who had always heretofore crept about alone, was now seized with the desire to seek Jofrid’s company, it certainly meant that he would like to have her for his sweetheart and his bride. Jofrid also waited daily for him to speak to her father or to herself about the matter. But Tönne could not. This showed that he was of a race of slaves. The thoughts that came into his head moved as slowly as the sun when he travels across the sky. And it was more difficult for him to shape those thoughts to connected speech than for a smith to forge a bracelet out of rolling grains of sand.

One day Tönne took Jofrid to one of the clefts, where he had hidden his timber. He pulled aside the branches and moss and showed her the squared beams. “That was to have been mother’s house,” he said. The young girl was strangely slow in understanding a young man’s thoughts. When he showed her his mother’s logs she ought to have understood, but she did not understand.

Then he decided to make his meaning even plainer. A few days later he began to drag the logs up to the place between the cairns, where he had seen Jofrid for the first time. She came as usual along the path and saw him at work. Nevertheless she went on without saying anything. Since they had become friends she had often given him a good handshake, but she did not seem to want to help him with the heavy work. Tönne still thought that she ought to have understood that it was now her house which he meant to build.

She understood it very well, but she had no desire to give herself to such a man as Tönne. She wished to have a strong and healthy husband. She thought it would be a poor livelihood to marry anyone who was weak and dull. Still, there was much which drew her to that silent, shy man. She thought how hard he had worked to gladden his mother and had not enjoyed the happiness of being ready in time. She could weep for his sake. And now he was building the house just where he had seen her dance. He had a good heart. And that interested her and fixed her thoughts on him, but she did not at all wish to marry him.

Every day she went over the heather field and saw the log cabin grow, miserable and without windows, with the sunlight filtering in through the leaky walls.

Tönne’s work progressed very quickly, but not with care. His timbers were not bent square, the lark was scarcely taken off. He laid the floor with split young trees. It was uneven and shaky. The heather, which grew and blossomed under it⁠—for at year had passed since the day when Tönne had lain aleep behind King Atle’s pile⁠—pushed up bold red clusters through the cracks, and ants without number wandered out and in, inspecting the fragile work of man.

Wherever Jofrid went during those days, the thought never left her that a house was being built for her there. A home was being prepared for her upon the heath. And she knew that if she did not enter there as mistress, the bear and the fox would make it their home. For she knew Tönne well enough to understand that if he found he had worked in vain, he would never move into the new house. He would weep, poor man, when he heard that she would not live there. It would be a new sorrow for him, as deep as when his mother died. But he had himself to blame, because he had not asked her in time.

She thought that she gave him a sufficient hint in not helping him with the house. She often felt impelled to do so. Every time she saw any soft, white moss, she wanted to pick it to fill in the leaky walls. She longed, too, to help Tönne to build the chimney. As he was making it, all the smoke would gather in the house. But it did not matter how it was. No food would ever be cooked there, no ale brewed. Still it was odious that the