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

is only walking and striking the blades of grass with his stick. But Maurits will persuade him fast enough that the best thing for him to do is to give Maurits a position as manager of one of his steelworks, if he does not care to give him the works outright. Maurits has grown so practical since he has been in love. He often says: “Is it not best for me, who am to be a great landowner, to make myself familiar with it all? What is the use of taking my bar examinations?”

They are walking directly under the window and nothing prevents them from seeing that she is sitting there; but as they do not mind it, no one can ask that she shall not hear what they are saying. It is really just as much her affair as it is Maurits’s.

Then Uncle Theodore suddenly stops and he looks angry. He looks quite furious, she thinks, and she almost calls to Maurits to take care. But it is too late, for Uncle Theodore has seized Maurits, crushed his ruffle, and is shaking him till he twists like an eel. Then he slings him from him with such force that Maurits staggers backwards and would have fallen if he had not found support in a tree trunk. And there Maurits stands and gasps “What?” Yes, what else should he say?

Ah, never has she admired Maurits’s self-control so much! He does not throw himself upon Uncle Theodore and fight him. He only looks calmly superior, merely innocently surprised. She understands that he controls himself so that the journey may not be for nothing. He is thinking of her, and is controlling himself.

Poor Maurits! it seems that his uncle is angry with him on her account. He asks if Maurits does not know that his uncle is a bachelor when he brings his betrothed here without bringing her mother with him. Her mother! Downie is offended in Maurits’s behalf. It was her mother who had excused herself and said that she could not leave the bakery. Maurits answers so too, but his uncle will accept no excuses.⁠—Well, his mother, then; she could have done her son that service. Yes, if she had been too haughty they had better have stayed where they were. What would they have done if his old lady had not been able to come? And how could a betrothed couple travel alone through the country?⁠—Really, Maurits was not dangerous. No, that he had never believed, but people’s tongues are dangerous.⁠—Well, and finally it was that chaise! Had Maurits ferreted out the most ridiculous vehicle in the whole town? To let that child shake thirty miles in a chaise, and to let him raise a triumphal arch for a chaise!⁠—He would like to shake him again! To let his uncle shout hurrah for a tip-cart! He was getting too unreasonable. How she admired Maurits for being so calm! She would like to join in the game and defend Maurits, but she does not believe that he would like it.

And before she goes to sleep, she lies and thinks out everything she would have said to defend Maurits. Then she falls asleep and starts up again, and in her ears rings an old saying:⁠—

“A dog stood on a mountain-top,
He barked aloud and would not stop.
His name was you, His name was I,
His name was all in Earth and Sky.
What was his name?
His name was why.”

The saying had irritated her many a time. Oh, how stupid she had thought the dog was! But now half asleep, she confuses the dog “What” with Maurits and she thinks that the dog has his white forehead. Then she laughs. She laughs as easily as she cries. She has inherited that from her father.

II

How has “it” come? That which she dares not call by name?

“It” has come like the dew to the grass, like the color to the rose, like the sweetness to the berry, imperceptibly and gently without announcing itself beforehand.

It is also no matter how “it” came or what “it” is. Were it good or evil, fair or foul, still it is forbidden; that which never ought to exist. “It” makes her anxious, sinful, unhappy.

“It” is that of which she never wishes to think. “It” is what shall be torn away and thrown out; and yet it is nothing that can be seized and caught. She shuts her heart to “it,” but it comes in just the same. “It” turns back the blood in her veins and flows there, drives the thoughts from her brain and reigns there, dances through her nerves and trembles in her fingertips. It is everywhere in her, so that if she had been able to take away everything else of which her body consisted and to have left “it” behind, there would remain a complete impression of her. And yet “it” was nothing.

She wishes never to think of “it,” and yet she has to think of “it” constantly. How has she become so wicked? And then she searches and wonders how “it” came.

Ah Downie! How tender are our souls, and how easily awakened are our hearts!

She was sure that “it” had not come at breakfast, surely not at breakfast.

Then she had only been frightened and shy. She had been so terrified when she came down to breakfast and found no Maurits, only Uncle Theodore and the old lady.

It had been a clever idea of Maurits to go hunting; although it was impossible to discover what he was hunting in midsummer, as the old lady remarked. But he knew of course that it was wise to keep away from his uncle for a few hours until the latter became calm again. He could not know that she was so shy, nor that she had almost fainted when she had found him gone and herself left alone with uncle and the old lady. Maurits had never been shy. He did not know what torture it