Short Fiction Selma Lagerlöf (best book club books of all time .txt) 📖

at the boy. “You can weep all you like,” he said, “but that does not take me in.”

“Oh, oh,” cried Petter Nord, “I am no thief. I hid the note as a joke⁠—to make you angry. I wanted to pay you back for the mice. I am not a thief. Will no one listen to me. I am not a thief.”

“Uncle,” said Edith, “if you have tortured him enough now, perhaps we may go back to bed?”

“I know, of course, that it sounds terrible,” said Halfvorson, “but it cannot be helped.” He was gay, in very high spirits. “I have had my eye on you for a long time,” he said to the boy. “You have always something you are tucking away when I come into the shop. But now I have caught you. Now I leave witnesses, and now I am going for the police.”

The boy gave a piercing scream. “Will no one help me, will no one help me?” he cried. Halfvorson was gone, and the old woman who managed his house came up to him.

“Get up and dress yourself, Petter Nord! Halforson has gone for the police, and while he is away you can escape. The young lady can go out into the kitchen and get you a little food. I will pack your things.”

The terrible weeping instantly ceased. After a short time of hurry the boy was ready. He kissed both the women on the hand, humbly, like a whipped dog. And then off he ran.

They stood in the door and looked after him. When he was gone, they drew a sigh of relief.

“What will Halfvorson say?” said Edith.

“He will be glad,” answered the housekeeper.

“He put the money there for the boy, I think. I guess that he wanted to be rid of him.”

“But why? The boy was the best one we have had in the shop for many years.”

“He probably did not want him to give testimony in the affair with the brandy.”

Edith stood silent and breathed quickly. “It is so base, so base,” she murmured. She clenched her fist towards the office and towards the little pane in the door, through which Halfvorson could see into the shop. She would have liked, she too, to have fled out into the world, away from all this meanness. She heard a sound far in, in the shop. She listened, went nearer, followed the noise, and at last found behind a keg of herring the cage of Petter Nord’s white mice.

She took it up, put it on the counter, and opened the cage door. Mouse after mouse scampered out and disappeared behind boxes and barrels.

“May you flourish and increase,” said Edith. “May you do injury and revenge your master!”

II

The little town lay friendly and contented under its red hill. It was so embedded in green that the church tower only just stuck up out of it. Garden after garden crowded one another on narrow terraces up the slope, and when they could go no further in that direction, they leaped with their bushes and trees across the street and spread themselves out between the scattered farmhouses and on the narrow strips of earth about them, until they were stopped by the broad river.

Complete silence and quiet reigned in the town. Not a soul was to be seen; only trees and bushes, and now and again a house. The only sound to be heard was the rolling of balls in the bowling-alley, like distant thunder on a summer day. It belonged to the silence.

But now the uneven stones of the marketplace were ground under iron-shod heels. The noise of coarse voices thundered against the walls of the town-hall and the church was thrown back from the mountain, and hastened unchecked down the long street. Four wayfarers disturbed the noonday peace.

Alas, for the sweet silence, the holiday peace of years! How terrified they were! One could almost see them betaking themselves in flight up the mountain slopes.

One of the noisy crew who broke into the village was Petter Nord, the Värmland boy, who six years before had run away, accused of theft. Those who were with him were three longshoremen from the big commercial town that lies only a few miles away.

How had little Petter Nord been getting on? He had been getting on well. He had found one of the most sensible of friends and companions.

As he ran away from the village in the dark, rainy February morning, the polska tunes seethed and roared in his ears. And one of them was more persistent than all the others. It was the one they all had sung during the ring dance.

Christmas time has come,
Christmas time has come,
And after Christmas time comes Easter.
That is not true at all,
That is not true at all,
For Lent comes after Christmas feasting.

The fugitive heard it so distinctly, so distinctly. And then the wisdom that is hidden in the old ring dance forced itself upon the little pleasure-loving Värmland boy, forced itself into his very fibre, blended with every drop of blood, soaked into his brain and marrow. It is so; that is the meaning. Between Christmas and Easter, between the festivals of birth and death, comes life’s fasting. One shall ask nothing of life; it is a poor, miserable fast. One shall never trust it, however it may appear. The next moment it is gray and ugly again. It is not its fault, poor thing, it cannot help it!

Petter Nord felt almost proud at having cheated life out of its most profound secret.

He thought he saw the pallid Spirit of Fasting creeping about over the earth in the shape of a beggar with Lenten twigs2 in her hand. And he heard how she hissed at him: “You have wished to celebrate the festival of joy and merry moods in the midst of the time of fasting, which is called life. Therefore shame and dishonor shall befall you, until you change your ways.”

He had changed his ways,