The Inferno, August Strindberg [classic english novels TXT] 📗

wasps worry me by day, and gnats by night. At the village shop there is nothing to be had. Because there is no other sort, I must use rose-coloured ink. Strange, too! In a packet of cigarette papers which I buy there is a single rose-coloured one among a hundred white. It is a miniature hell, and I, who am accustomed to bear great sufferings, suffer inexpressibly from these needle-pricks, all the more that my mother-in-law believes that I am not satisfied by her kind attentions.

September 17th.⁠—I awake at night and hear the church clock of the village strike thirteen. Immediately I feel the electric band encircle me, and think I hear a noise in the attic above me.

September 19th.⁠—I search the attic and discover a dozen distaffs, the wheels of which remind me of electric machines. I open a large box; it is empty; only five staves painted black, the use of which is unknown to me, lie in the form of a pentagram at the bottom of the box. Who has played me this trick, and what does it mean? I do not venture to ask anything about it, and the riddle remains unsolved.

Between midnight and two o’clock a terrible storm breaks out. As a rule a storm exhausts itself and soon subsides; this one, however, remains raging for two hours over the village. Every lightning flash is a personal attack on me, but none of them strike me.

In the evening my mother-in-law relates to me the history of the district. What a monstrous collection of domestic and other tragedies, consisting of adulteries, divorces, lawsuits between relatives, murders, thefts, violations, incests, slanders. The castles, the villas, the huts are occupied by unhappy people of all kinds, and I cannot take my walks without thinking of Swedenborg’s hells. Beggars, imbeciles of both sexes, sick persons and cripples line the high roads or kneel at the foot of a crucifix, a Madonna, or a martyr. At night the wretched creatures try to escape their sleeplessness and their bad dreams by wandering about in the meadows and woods in order to fatigue themselves, and to be able to sleep. Members of good society, well-educated ladies, even a pastor, are among them.

Not far from us is a convent which serves as a penitentiary and rescue home. It is a real prison, in which the strictest rules prevail. In the winter when the thermometer registers twenty degrees of frost, the penitents must sleep on the cold stone pavement of their cells, and their hands and feet, which they cannot warm, are covered with chilblains.

Among the others is a woman who has sinned with a priest, which is a deadly sin. Tortured by pangs of conscience, she flies in her despair to her confessor, who, however, refuses her absolution and the sacrament. A deadly sin entails damnation. Then the wretched creature loses her reason, imagines that she is dead, wanders from village to village and implores the priests to be merciful and to bury her in consecrated ground. Shunned and driven away everywhere, she wanders about, howling like a wild beast, and those who see her cross themselves and exclaim, “She is damned!” No one doubts but that her soul is already in hell, while her shadow, a wandering corpse, wanders about as a terrible warning.

They tell me of a man who, possessed by the Devil, has so altered his personality that the Evil One can make him utter blasphemies against his will. After long search they discover a suitable exorcist in a young Franciscan monk of acknowledged purity of life. He prepares himself by fast and penance; the great day comes, and the possessed man makes his confession in church before the people. Thereupon the young monk sets to work and succeeds, after prayers and conjurations which last an entire day, in driving out the Devil. The alarmed spectators have not ventured to relate the details of the affair. A year later the young monk dies. These and still more tragic narratives confirm me in my conviction that this district has been marked out as a place for penance, and there must be some mysterious connection between this neighbourhood and Swedenborg’s hell. Has he perhaps visited this part of upper Austria, and, just as Dante describes the region south of Naples, drawn from nature in his account of hell?

After a couple of weeks have passed in work and study I am again unsettled, as with the setting in of autumn my aunt and mother-in-law wish to live together in Klam. We therefore break up our camp. In order to preserve my independence, I hire a cottage consisting of two rooms, so as to be quite close to my little daughter.

The first evening after settling in my new quarters I am overcome by a terrible depression, as though the air were poisoned. I go to my mother-in-law: “If I sleep up there you will find me dead in bed tomorrow. Shelter a pilgrim for this night, my good mother!”

The rose-coloured room is at once placed at my disposal, but, good heavens! how it has altered since my aunt’s departure! There is black furniture in it; the empty pigeonholes of a bookcase gape like so many jaws; a tall iron oven, ornamented with ugly devices of salamanders and dragons, confronts me like a spectre. In a word, there reigns such a disharmony in the room as makes me feel poorly. Moreover, every irregularity upsets my nerves, for I am a man of ordered habits who does everything at stated hours. In spite of my efforts to conceal my dissatisfaction, my mother-in-law reads my thoughts.

“Always dissatisfied, my child?”

She does her best to allay my discontent, but when the spirit of dissension is once aroused, everything is in vain. She tries to remember my favourite dishes, but everything goes wrong. There is nothing I dislike more than calf’s head with brown butter.

“Here is something nice,” she says to me, “expressly for you,” and sets calf’s