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Red Room, a novel by August Strindberg |
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Chapter 28. From Beyond The Grave |
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_ CHAPTER XXVIII. FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE The snow was falling lightly and silently, clothing the street in pure white, as Falk and Sellén were walking to the infirmary in the south-eastern suburb of Kingsholm, to call for Borg on their way to the Red Room. "It's strange that the first snow should create an almost solemn impression," said Sellén. "The dirty ground is transformed to...." "Are you sentimental?" scoffed Falk. "Oh, no! I was merely talking from the point of view of a landscape painter." They continued their way in silence, wading through the whirling snow. "The Kingsholm with its infirmaries always strikes me as uncanny," remarked Falk, after a pause. "Are you sentimental?" scoffed Sellén. "Not at all, but this part of the town always makes that impression on me." "Nonsense! It doesn't make any impression at all; you imagine it does. Here we are, and Borg's windows are lit up. Perhaps he's got some nice corpses to-night." They were standing before the door of the institute. The huge building with its many dark windows glared at them as if it were inquiring what they wanted at that hour of the night. They passed the round flower bed, and entered the small building on the right. At the very back of the room Borg was sitting alone in the lamplight, working at the mutilated body of a man who had hanged himself. "Good evening," said Borg, laying aside his knife. "Would you like to see an old friend?" He did not wait for the answer--which was not forthcoming--but lighted a lantern, took his overcoat and a bunch of keys. "I didn't know that we had any friends here," said Sellén, desperately clinging to a flippant mood. "Come along!" said Borg. They crossed the yard and entered the large building; the creaking door closed behind them, and the little piece of candle, a remnant from the last card party, threw its red, feeble glimmer on the white walls. The two strangers tried to read Borg's face, wondering whether he was up to some trick, but the face was inscrutable. They turned to the left and went along a passage which echoed to their footsteps in a way which suggested that they were being followed. Falk kept close behind Borg and tried to keep Sellén at his back. "Over there!" said Borg, standing still in the middle of the passage. Nobody could see anything but walls. But they heard a low trickling sound, like the falling of a gentle rain and became aware of a strange odour, resembling the smell of a damp flower-bed or a pine-wood in October. "To the right!" said Borg. The right wall was made of glass, and behind it, on their backs, lay three white bodies. Borg selected a key, opened the glass door, and entered. "Here!" he said, standing still before the second of the three. It was Olle. He lay there as quietly, with his hands folded across his chest, as if he were taking an afternoon nap. His drawn-up lips created the impression that he was smiling. He was well-preserved. "Drowned?" asked Sellén, who was the first to regain his self-possession. "Drowned," echoed Borg. "Can either of you identify his clothes?" Three miserable suits were hanging against the wall. Sellén at once picked out the right one; a blue jacket with sporting buttons, and a pair of black trousers, rubbed white at the knees. "Are you certain?" "Ought to know my own coat--which I borrowed from Falk." Sellén drew a pocket-book from the breast pocket of the jacket, it was saturated with water and covered with green algæ, which Borg called enteromorph. He opened it by the light of the lantern and examined its contents--two or three overdue pawn-tickets and a bundle of papers tied together, on which was written: To him who cares to read. "Have you seen enough?" asked Borg. "Then let's go and have a drink." The three mourners (friend was a word only used by Levin and Lundell when they wanted to borrow money) went to the nearest public-house as representatives of the Red Room. Beside a blazing fire and behind a battery of bottles, Borg began the perusal of the papers which Olle had left behind, but more than once he had to have recourse to Falk's skill as an "autographer," for the water had washed away the words here and there; it looked as if the writer's tears had fallen on the sheets, as Sellén facetiously remarked. "Stop talking now," said Borg, emptying his glass of grog with a grimace which exhibited all his back teeth; "I am going to read, and I beg of you not to interrupt me." * * * * * "'TO HIM WHO CARES TO READ. "'I have a right to take my life, all the more so because not only does my act not interfere with the interests of a fellow-creature, but rather it contributes to the happiness, as it is called, of at least one person; a place and four hundred cubic feet of air will become vacant. "'My motive is not despair, for an intelligent individual never despairs, but I take this step with a fairly calm conscience; that an act of this kind throws one's mind into a certain state of excitement will be easily understood by everybody; to postpone it from fear of what might come hereafter is only worthy of a slave clutching at any excuse, so that he might stay in a world where he cannot have suffered much. At the thought of going, a burden seems to fall from my shoulders; I cannot fare worse, I might fare better. If there is no life beyond the grave, death must be happiness; as great a happiness at least as sleep in a soft bed after hard physical labour. Nobody who has ever observed how sleep relaxes every muscle, and how the soul gradually steals away, can fear death. "'Why does humanity make so much ado about death? Because it has burrowed so deeply into the earth, that a tearing away from it is bound to be painful. I put off from the shore long ago; I have no family bonds, no social, national, or legal ties which could hold me back, and I'm going simply because life has no longer any attraction for me. "'I do not want to encourage those who are well content to follow my example; they have no reason to do so, and therefore they cannot judge my act. I have not considered the point whether it is cowardly or not--to that aspect of the question I am indifferent; moreover, it is a private matter; I never asked to come here and therefore I have a right to go when I please. "'My reason for going? There are so many reasons and they are so complicated that I have neither the time nor the ability to explain them. I will only mention the most obvious, those which had the greatest influence on myself and on my act. "'My childhood and youth were one long continuation of manual labour; you who do not know what it means to labour from sunrise to sunset, only to fall into a heavy sleep when the toil is over, you have escaped the curse of the fall, for it is a curse to feel one's spiritual growth arrested while one's body sinks deeper and deeper into the earth. A man who walks behind the ploughing cattle day in day out, and sees nothing but the grey clouds, will end by forgetting the blue sky above his head; a man who takes a spade and digs a hole while the sun scorches his skin, will feel that he is sinking into the parched ground and digging a grave for his soul. You know nothing of this, you who play all day long, and work a little only during an idle hour between luncheon and dinner; you who rest your spirit when the earth is green and enjoy nature as an ennobling and elevating spectacle. The toiler on the land never sees the spirit of Nature. To him the field is bread, the forest timber, the sea a wash-tub, the meadow cheese and milk--everything is earth, soulless earth! "'When I saw one-half of humanity engaged in fostering their spiritual growth, while the other half had merely time to attend to their bodily needs, I thought at first that there existed two laws for two different species of man. But my intellect denied this. My spirit rebelled and I resolved that I, too, would escape the curse of the fall--I became an artist. "'I can analyse the much-talked-of artistic instinct because I was endowed with it myself. It rests on a broad base of longing for freedom, freedom from profitable labour; for this reason a German philosopher defined Beauty as the Unprofitable; as soon as a work of art is of practical use, betrays a purpose or a tendency its beauty vanishes. Further-more the instinct rests on pride; man wants to play God in art, not that he wants to create anything new--he can't do that--but because he wants to improve, to arrange, to recreate. He does not begin by admiring his model, Nature, but by criticizing it. Everything is full of faults and he longs to correct them. "'This pride, spurring a man on to never-ceasing effort, and the freedom from work--the curse of the fall--beget in the artist the illusion that he is standing above his fellow creatures; to a certain extent this is true, but unless he were constantly recalling this fact he would find himself out, that is to say find the unreal in his activity and the unjustifiable in his escape from the profitable. This constant need of appreciation of his unprofitable work makes him vain, restless, and often deeply unhappy; as soon as he comes to a clear understanding of himself he becomes unproductive and goes under, for only the religious mind can return to slavery after having once tasted freedom. "'To differentiate between genius and talent, to look upon genius as a separate quality, is nonsense, and argues a faith in special manifestation. The great artist is endowed with a certain amount of ability to acquire some kind of technical skill. Without practice his ability dies. Somebody has said: genius is the infinite capacity for taking pains. This is, like so many other things, a half-truth. If culture be added--a rare thing because knowledge makes all things clear, and the cultured man therefore rarely becomes an artist--and a sound intellect, the result is genius, the natural product of a combination of favourable circumstances. "'I soon lost faith in the sublime character of my hobby--heaven forbid that I should call it my profession--for my art was incapable of expressing a single idea; at the most it could represent the body in a position expressing an emotion accompanying a thought--or, in other words, express a thought at third hand. It is like signalling, meaningless to all who cannot read the signals. I only see a red flag, but the soldier sees the word of command: Advance! After all, even Plato, who was a fine intellectualist and an idealist into the bargain, realized the futility of art, calling it but the semblance of a semblance (-reality); wherefore he excluded the artist from his ideal state. He was in earnest! "'I tried to find my way back into slavery, but I could not. I tried to find in it my most sacred duty; I tried to resign myself, but I did not succeed. My soul was taking harm, and I was on the way to becoming a beast; there were times when I fancied that all this toil was a positive sin, in as far as it checked the greater aim of spiritual development; at such times I played truant for a day, and fled to nature, absorbed in unspeakably blissful meditations. But then again this bliss appeared to me in the light of a selfish pleasure as great, greater even, than the pleasure I used to feel in my artistic work; conscience, the sense of duty, overtook me like a fury and drove me back to my yoke, which then seemed beautiful--for a day. "'To escape from this unbearable state of mind, and win light and peace, I go to face the Unknown. You who behold my dead body, say--do I look unhappy in death?" * * * * * "'NOTES MADE WHILE WALKING: "'The plan of the world is the deliverance of the idea from the form; art, on the other hand, attempts to imprison the idea in a sensuous form, so as to make it visible. Therefore.... "'Everything corrects itself. When artistic traffic in Florence surpassed all bounds Savonarola came--the profound thinker! and spoke his "All this is futile." And the artists--and what artists they were! made a pyre of their masterpieces--Oh! Savonarola! "'What was the object of the iconoclasts in Constantinople? What did the baptists and breakers of images want in the Netherlands? I dare not state it for fear of being branded. "'The great striving of our time: division of labour benefits the species but sentences the individual to death. What is the species? The conception of the whole; the philosophers call it the idea and the individuals believe what they say and lay down their lives for the idea! "'It is a strange thing that the will of the princes and the will of the people always clashes. Isn't there a very simple and easy remedy? "'When, at a riper age, I again read through my school-books, I was astonished to find that we human beings are so little removed from the beasts in the fields. I reread Luther's Catechism in those days; I made a few annotations, and drafted a plan for a new Catechism. (Not to be sent in to the Commissioners; what I am going to say now is all that I have written.) "'The first Commandment destroys the doctrine of one God, for it assumes other gods, an assumption granted by Christianity. "'Note. Monotheism which is so highly extolled has had an adverse influence on humanity; it has robbed it of the love and respect for the One and True God, by leaving Evil unexplained. "'The second and third Commandments are blasphemous; the author puts petty and stupid commands in the mouth of the Lord; commands which are an insult to His omniscience; if the author were living in our days, a charge of blasphemy would be brought against him. "'The fifth Commandment should read as follows: "Your inbred feeling of respect for your parents shall not induce you to admire their faults; you shall not honour them beyond their deserts; under no circumstances do you owe your parents any gratitude; they have not done you a service by bringing you into this world; selfishness and the civil code of laws compel them to clothe and feed you. The parents who expect gratitude from their children (there are some who even demand it) are like usurers; they are willing to risk the capital as long as the interest is being paid."'" "'Note 1. The reason why parents (more especially fathers) hate their children so much more frequently than they love them arises from the fact that the presence of children has an adverse influence on the financial position of the parents. There are parents who treat their children as if they were shares in a joint stock company, from which they expect constant dividends. "'Note 2. This Commandment has resulted in the most terrible of all forms of government, in the tyranny of the family, from which no revolution can deliver us. There is more need for the foundation of societies for the protection of children than for societies for the protection of animals. "'To be continued. * * * * * "'Sweden is a colony which has passed her prime, the period when she was a great power, and like Greece, Italy, and Spain, she is now sinking into eternal sleep. "'The terrible reaction which set in after 1865, the year of the death of all hope, has had a demoralising effect on the new generation. History has not witnessed for a long time a greater indifference to the general welfare, a greater selfishness, a greater irreligiousness. "'In the world outside the nations are bellowing with fury against oppression; but in Sweden all we do is to celebrate jubilees. "'Pietism is the sole sign of spiritual life of the sleeping nation; it is the discontent which has thrown itself into the arms of resignation to avoid despair and impotent fury. "'Pietists and pessimists start from the same principle, the misery of the world, and have the same aim: to die to the world and live to God. "'The greatest sin man can commit is to be a Conservative from selfish motives. It is an attempt against the plan of the world for the sake of a few shillings; the Conservative tries to stem evolution; he plants his back against the rolling earth and says: "Stand still!" There is but one excuse: stupidity. Poor circumstances are no excuse, merely an explanation. "'I wonder whether Norway is not going to prove a new patch on an old garment, as far as we are concerned?'" * * * * * "Well, what do you think of it?" asked Borg laying down the papers and drinking a small brandy. "Not bad," said Sellén, "it might have been expressed more wittily." "What do you think, Falk?" "The usual cry--nothing more. Shall we go now?" Borg looked at him, wondering whether he was speaking ironically, but he saw no danger-signal in Falk's face. "And so Olle has gone to happier hunting-grounds," said Sellén. "He's well off, need no longer trouble about his dinner. I wonder what the head-waiter at the 'Brass-Button' will say to it? Olle owed him a little money." "What heartlessness! What brutality! Shame on you!" burst out Falk, throwing a few coins on the table, and putting on his overcoat. "Are you sentimental?" scoffed Sellén. "Yes, I am! Good night." And he had gone. _ |
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