Short Fiction, Selma Lagerlöf [uplifting novels txt] 📗

Oh Valdemar, King of Denmark, it will be your fate to meet death also. Then you will lie on your bed, hear and see much and suffer great pains. You shall hear that scraping of the trowels, those cries for vengeance. Where are the consecrated bells that drown the martyrdom of the soul? Where are they, with their wide, bronze throats, whose tongues cry out to God for grace for you? Where is that air trembling with harmony, which bears the soul up to God’s space?

Oh help Esrom, help Soró, and you big bells of Lund!

What a gloomy story that picture told! It seemed curious and strange to come out into the park, in glowing sunshine, among living human beings.

It was Christmas night, a real Christmas night.

The goblins raised the mountain roofs on lofty gold pillars and celebrated the midwinter festival. The brownies danced around the Christmas porridge in new red caps. Old gods wandered about the heavens in gray storm cloaks, and in the Österhaninge graveyard stood the horse of Hel.3 He pawed with his hoof on the frozen ground; he was marking out the place for a new grave.

Not very far away, at the old manor of Årsta, Mamsell Fredrika was lying asleep. Årsta is, as everyone knows, an old haunted castle, but Mamsell Fredrika slept a calm, quiet sleep. She was old now and tired out after many weary days of work and many long journeys⁠—she had almost traveled round the world⁠—therefore she had returned to the home of her childhood to find rest.

Outside the castle sounded in the night a bold fanfare. Death mounted on a gray charger had ridden up to the castle gate. His wide scarlet cloak and his hat’s proud plumes fluttered in the night wind. The stern knight sought to win an adoring heart, therefore he appeared in unusual magnificence. It is of no avail, Sir Knight, of no avail! The gate is closed, and the lady of your heart asleep. You must seek a better occasion and a more suitable hour. Watch for her when she goes to early mass, stern Sir Knight, watch for her on the church-road!

Old Mamsell Fredrika sleeps quietly in her beloved home. No one deserves more than she the sweetness of rest. Like a Christmas angel she sat but now in a circle of children, and told them of Jesus and the shepherds, told until her eyes shone, and her withered face became transfigured. Now in her old age no one noticed what Mamsell Fredrika looked like. Those who saw the little, slender figure, the tiny, delicate hands and the kind, clever face, instantly longed to be able to preserve that sight in remembrance as the most beautiful of memories.

In Mamsell Fredrika’s big room, among many relics and souvenirs, there was a little, dry bush. It was a Jericho rose, brought back by Mamsell Fredrika from the far East. Now in the Christmas night it began to blossom quite of itself. The dry twigs were covered with red buds, which shone like sparks of fire and lighted the whole room.

By the light of the sparks one saw that a small and slender but quite elderly lady sat in the big armchair and held her court. It could not be Mamsell Fredrika herself, for she lay sleeping in quiet repose, and yet it was she. She sat there and held a reception for old memories; the room was full of them. People and homes and subjects and thoughts and discussions came flying. Memories of childhood and memories of youth, love and tears, homage and bitter scorn, all came rushing towards the pale form that sat and looked at everything with a friendly smile. She had words of jest or of sympathy for them all.

At night everything takes its right size and shape. And just as then for the first time the stars of heaven are visible, one also sees much on earth that one never sees by day. Now in the light of the red buds of the Jericho rose one could see a crowd of strange figures in Mamsell Fredrika’s drawing-room. The hard ma chère mère was there, the goodnatured Beata Hvardagslag, people from the East and the West, the enthusiastic Nina, the energetic, struggling Hertha in her white dress.

“Can anyone tell me why that person must always be dressed in white?” jested the little figure in the armchair when she caught sight of her.

All the memories spoke to the old woman and said: “You have seen and experienced so much; you have worked and earned so much! Are you not tired? will you not go to rest?”

“Not yet,” answered the shadow in the yellow armchair. “I have still a book to write. I cannot go to rest before it is finished.”

Thereupon the figures vanished. The Jericho rose went out, and the yellow armchair stood empty.

In the Österhaninge church the dead were celebrating midnight mass. One of them climbed up to the bell-tower and rang in Christmas; another went about and lighted the Christmas candles, and a third began with bony fingers to play the organ. Through the open doors others came swarming in out of the night and their graves to the bright, glowing House of the Lord. Just as they had been in life they came, only a little paler. They opened the pew doors with rattling keys and chatted and whispered as they walked up the aisle.

“They are the candles she has given the poor that are now shining in God’s house.”

“We lie warm in our graves as long as she gives clothes and wood to the poor.”

“She has spoken so many noble words that have opened the hearts of men; those words are the keys of our pews.”

“She has thought beautiful thoughts of God’s love. Those thoughts raise us from our graves.”

So they whispered and murmured before they sat down in the pews and bent their pale