Part 10

One grey-yellow winter day, about an hour after the mid-day meal, my little Christina insists on following me to my house, where I generally have my afternoon siesta. I cannot resist her, and give way to her request, When we get to my room Christina asks for pen and paper; then she demands picture-books, and I must remain, show, and explain.

"You must not go to sleep, papa!"

Although feeling weary and exhausted, I obey my child, I don't know why myself, but there is a tone in her voice which I cannot resist.

Outside, before the door, an organ-grinder is playing a waltz tune. I propose to the little one to dance with the nurse who has accompanied her. Attracted by the music, the neighbours' children come, the organ-grinder is invited into the kitchen, and we improvise a dance. This goes on for an hour, and my sadness is dispelled. In order to distract myself and to keep off sleep, I take the Bible, my oracle, and open it at haphazard. "But the spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him. And Saul's servants said unto him, 'Behold now, an evil spirit from God troubleth thee. Let our lord now command thy servants, which are before thee, to seek out a man, who is a cunning player on the harp, and it shall come to pass when the evil spirit from God is upon thee, that he shall play with his hand, and thou shalt be well.'"

An evil spirit! That is what I am always suspecting! While the children are dancing, my mother-in-law comes in in order to fetch the little one, and when she sees them, she stands still, astonished. Then she tells me that just now, down in the village, a lady of good family has been seized with an attack of frenzy.

"What is the matter with her?"

"She dances without stopping, has dressed herself as a bride and fancies she is Burger's Lenore."

"She dances, and then?"

"She weeps in terror of death, who she believes will come and take her."

What lends a darker shade to this tragedy is that the lady has occupied the same house I live in now, and that her husband died in the same room where the children are noisily dancing.

Explain me that, O doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, or acknowledge the bankruptcy of science!

My little daughter has exorcised the evil spirit who, driven out by her innocence, has entered into an old lady who used to boast of being a free thinker.

The death-dance lasts the whole night. The lady is guarded by friends, who she says, are to ward off the attack of death. She calls it "death" because she does not believe in the existence of evil spirits. And yet she often asserted that her deceased husband tormented her.

* * * * *

My departure is postponed, but, in order to recruit my strength after so many sleepless nights, I remove to my aunt's house on the other side of the street, and leave the "rose-red" room. It is a curious fact that in the good old times the torture chamber in Sweden was called the "Chamber of Roses."

At last I spend a night again in a quiet room. The walls are painted white and covered with pictures of saints. Over my bed hangs a crucifix. But when night comes the spirits begin their tricks again.

I light the candles in order to kill the time with reading. There is a weird stillness in which I can hear my heart beating. Then a slight noise startles me, like an electric spark.

What is that?

A large piece of wax has dropped from the candle on the ground. Nothing more, but the people here believe it is a sign of death! It may be, as far as I am concerned. After reading for half an hour, I want to take my handkerchief from under my pillow. It is not there, and when I look for it, I find it on the ground. I stoop to pick it up. Something falls on my head, and when I extricate it from my hair, I find it is another piece of wax. Instead of being alarmed, I cannot help smiling; the whole thing seems a piece of practical joking.

Smiling at death! How could that be possible, were not life essentially comic. Such a fuss about nothing! Perhaps in the depth of our souls there lurks a shadowy consciousness that everything down here is all humbug, a masquerade, a mere pretence, and that all our sufferings afford mirth to the gods.

* * * * *

High over the hill on which the castle is built there towers another, from which a more commanding view over the Inferno-like landscape can be gained than from any other. The way thither lies through the remains of an ancient oak forest, which, according to tradition, was a scene of Druidic worship, and where mistletoe grows luxuriantly on the apple and lime trees. Above this wood the path mounts steeply through pines.

Several times I have tried to reach the summit, but something unforeseen has always hindered me. One time it was a deer which broke the silence with an unexpected leap, another time a hare, which resembled no hare which I had ever seen, and yet another time a magpie with its deafening chatter. But on the last morning, the day before my departure, I pressed in spite of all hindrances through the dark melancholy pine wood up to the summit, whence I obtained a splendid view of the valley of the Danube and the Styrian Alps. I breathe freely for the first time now that I have at last emerged from the gloomy, funnel-shaped valley below. The sun illuminates the landscape to the farthest horizon, and the white crests of the Alps melt into the clouds. The whole scene is one of heavenly beauty. Does the earth comprise at the same time heaven and hell, and is there no other place of punishment and reward? Perhaps. Certainly, the most beautiful moments of my life seem to me heavenly, and the worst, hellish. Has the future still in reserve for me hours or minutes of that happiness which can be won only by tribulation and a tolerably clean conscience?

I feel little inclination to descend into the valley of sorrows again, and walk about on the mountain plateau, wondering at the beauty of the earth. On the summit is a rock shaped by nature like an Egyptian Sphinx. On its gigantic head is a heap of stones in which stands a stick bearing a white piece of linen attached, like a flag. Without troubling myself about its significance, an uncontrollable desire to seize the flag takes possession of me. Despising death, I clamber up the steep rock, and lay hold of it. At the same moment the sound of a bridal march sung by triumphant voices arises from the Danube below. It is a marriage party; I cannot see it, but the musket shots customarily fired on such occasions place it beyond a doubt. Childish enough and unhappy enough to give a poetical colouring to the most ordinary occurrences, I take this as a good omen.

Reluctantly and slowly I descend again into the valley of sorrows, of death, of sleeplessness, and of demons, where my little Beatrice awaits me and the promised piece of mistletoe, the green branch in the midst of the snow, which really ought to be cut with a golden sickle.

* * * * *

For a long time past the grandmother had expressed a wish to see me, whether it were to bring about a reconciliation or for occultist reasons, because she is a clairvoyante and visionary. I had postponed the visit under various pretexts, but now that my departure was resolved on, my mother-in-law obliged me to visit the old lady and bid her farewell, probably for the last time on this side of the grave. On November 26th, a cold, clear day, my mother-in-law, the child, and I made the pilgrimage to the bank of the Danube, where the family residence is. We alighted at the inn, and while my mother-in-law went to announce my visit to her mother, I wandered through the meadows and woods, which I had not seen for two years. Recollections overpowered me, and in all of them was interwoven the figure of my wife. And now everything is blighted by autumnal frosts; there is now not a single flower, nor a green blade of grass where we both plucked all the flowers of spring, summer, and autumn!

After the mid-day meal I am taken to the old lady who occupies the annex to the villa, the little house in which my child was born. Our meeting is, considering the circumstances, a cold one; they seem to expect that I should appear as the prodigal son, but I have no wish to act that rôle. I confine myself to indulging in reminiscences of our lost paradise. She and I had painted the door-and window-panels in honour of the little Christina's arrival in the world. The roses and clematis which adorn the front of the house were planted by my own hands. I had cut out the path through the garden. But the walnut tree which I planted the morning after Christina's birth has disappeared. The "life-tree," as we called it, is dead. Two years, two eternities, have elapsed since the farewell between her on the shore and me on the ship, in which I went to Linz in order to proceed thence to Paris.

Who has caused the breach between us? I, for I have murdered my own love and hers. Farewell, my white house, where grew thorns and roses. Farewell, Danube! I say to comfort myself, "You were a dream, short as summer, too sweet to be real, and I do not regret it."

The night comes. My mother-in-law and my child have, at my request, taken up their quarters in the inn, in order to protect me against the deadly attacks, which I forebode by means of a sixth sense which has been developed in me during the six months of persecution which I have suffered.

About ten o'clock in the evening a gust of wind begins to shake the door of my room, which is on the ground-floor. I make it fast with wooden wedges; it is no use; the door shakes still more. The windows rattle; there is a dog-like howling in the stove; the whole house reels like a ship. I cannot sleep; at one time my mother-in-law groans, at another the child cries. The next morning my mother-in-law, exhausted by sleeplessness and something else, which she conceals from me, says: "Depart, my child; I have enough of this hellish stench!" And I travel northwards, a restless pilgrim, into the fire of a new purgatory.

XII

PILGRIMAGE AND PENANCE

There are ninety towns in Sweden, and the powers have condemned me to go to the one which I most dislike. First of all, I visit the doctors. The first speaks of neurasthenia, the second of angina pectoris, the third of paranoia, a mental disease, the fourth of emphysema. This is enough to ensure me against being put into a lunatic asylum. Meanwhile, in order to procure the means of livelihood, I am forced to write articles for a newspaper. But whenever I sit at the table to write, hell is let loose. A new discovery comes to make me wild. Whenever I take up my quarters in an hotel there breaks out a fiendish noise, just as there did in the Rue de la Grande Chaumière in Paris; I hear shuffling footsteps and the moving of furniture. I change my room, I go into another hotel, and still there is the noise over my head. I visit the restaurants, but as soon as I sit down to a meal the noise begins there also. And it should be observed that whenever I ask those present whether they hear the same noise too, they say "yes," and their description of it tallies with mine.

It is then no acoustic hallucination from which I suffer; everywhere there are plots, I say to myself. But one day, as I go by chance into a shoemaker's shop, the noise instantaneously breaks out. It is no plot, then! It is the Devil himself! Hunted from hotel to hotel, pursued everywhere by electric wires even to my bed, attacked everywhere by electric currents which lift me from my chair, or out of bed, I deliberately set about planning my suicide. The weather is terrible, and in my depression I seek distraction in drinking bouts with friends.

One dreary day, after such a bout, I have just finished my early breakfast in my room. I turn round towards the table on which the breakfast things are standing. A slight noise attracts my attention, and I see that a knife has fallen on the ground. I lift it up and place it so that it cannot do so again. The knife moves and falls.

So it is electricity!

The same morning I write a letter to my mother-in-law, and complain of the bad weather and life in general. As I write the sentence, "The earth is dirty, the sea is dirty, and dirt rains from the sky," imagine my astonishment, as I see a clear drop of water fall upon the paper. No electricity! A miracle! In the evening as I am still working at the table, a noise from the washing-stand startles me. I look in that direction, and see that a wax-cloth, which I use in my morning ablutions, has fallen down. In order to get at the rights of the matter, I hang it up, so that it cannot fall down again.

It falls again!

What is that? My thoughts now revert to the occultists and their secret powers. I leave the town with my written indictment of them in my pocket, and betake myself to Lund, where there are old friends of mine: doctors, specialists in mental disease, and even theosophists on whose aid I reckon.

How have I come to settle down in this little university town, this place of rustication and penance for the students of Upsala, when they have lived too freely at the cost of their purses and their health? Is this my Canossa, where I must retract my false doctrines before the same set of youths who between 1880 and 1890 regarded me as their standard-bearer? I understand my position exactly, and know well that I am under the ban of most of the professors as a seducer of youth, and that the fathers and mothers fear me like the Evil One himself.

Moreover, I have made personal enemies here, and have contracted debts under circumstances which set my character in a dubious light. Here Popoffsky's sister-in-law and her husband live, and both of these, who have an influential position in society, are able to stir up powerful enemies against me. I have also here relations who ignore me, and friends who have left me to become my enemies. In a word, it is the worst place I could have chosen for a quiet residence; it is hell, but a hell contrived with masterly logic and divine ingenuity. Here I must drain the cup of humiliation, and reconcile the youth of Lund with the alienated powers. By a picturesque accident, I buy myself a mantle with cape and cowl, of a flea-brown colour, like a Franciscan's. Thus, after a six years' banishment, I return to Sweden in a penitent's costume.

About the year 1885 there was formed in Lund a Students' Association called "The Old Boys," whose literary, scientific, and social programme was best expressed by the word "Radicalism." It was coloured by modern ideas; it was first socialistic, then nihilistic, and tended finally to a general dissolution of society. It had besides a fin de siècle flavouring of Satanism and decadence. The head of that party, the most conspicuous of their champions, a friend of mine, whom I have not seen for three years, pays me a visit. Dressed like myself in a monkish-looking mantle of a grey colour, grown old, lean, with melancholy aspect, he shows his history in his face.

"You also?" I ask him.

"Yes! It is all up with us."

On my inviting him to take a glass of wine, he declares himself a teetotaller.

"How are the 'Old Boys'?" I ask.

"Dead, come croppers, turned into Philistines and steady members of society."

"It is a case of Canossa, then!"

"Canossa all along the line."

"Then it is Providence Itself which has brought me here."

"Providence! That is the right word."

"Do they know the 'powers' in Lund?"

"The 'powers' are preparing to return."

"Do people sleep well here?"

"No; they complain of nightmares, constrictions of the breast and heart."

"My arrival is appropriate, then; for that is precisely my case."

We talk for some hours over the strange times we are living in, and my friend relates to me some extraordinary occurrences which have recently happened. Finally, he gives a brief account of the minds of the present young generation, who are looking out for something new.

People want a religion; a reconciliation with the "powers" (that is the phrase), a new approach to the invisible. The fruitful and important epoch of naturalism is past. One cannot say anything against it, nor regret it, for the powers willed that we should pass through it. It was an experimental epoch, the negative results of which have disproved certain theories when they were put to the test. A God, unknown at present, seems to be developing, growing, and revealing Himself from time to time. In the intervals, so it seems, He leaves the world to itself, like the farmer, who lets the tares and wheat grow together till the harvest. Each epoch of revelation shows Him animated with new ideas, and practically improving His methods. Thus Religion will return, but under new aspects, for a compromise with the old religions seems impossible. We do not await an epoch of reaction, nor a return to out-worn ideals, but an advance towards something new. But of what sort? Let us wait!

At the end of our conversation a question escapes my lips like an arrow which flies sky-wards, "Do you know Swedenborg?"

"No; but my mother has his works, and has found wonderful things in them."

From atheism to Swedenborg is only a step!

I beg him to lend me Swedenborg's works, and my friend, that Saul among the young prophets, brings me the _Arcana Cœlestia_. Moreover, he introduces a young man to me who has been highly gifted by the powers. The latter relates to me events in his life which only too closely resemble my own. When we compare our trials, we find a new light thrown upon them, and we gain deliverance by the help of Swedenborg. I thank Providence which has sent me into this small despised town to expiate my sin and to be delivered.

XIII

THE DELIVERER

When Balzac introduced me to my noble countryman, "The Buddha of the North," by means of his book _Séraphita_, he showed me the evangelistic side of the Prophet. Now it is the Law which encounters, crushes, and releases.

A single word suffices to illuminate my soul, and to scatter my doubts and vain fancies regarding supposed enemies, electricians, black magic, etc., and this single word is "Devastation."[1] All my sufferings I find described by Swedenborg--the feelings of suffocation (angina pectoris), constrictions of the chest, palpitations, the sensation which I called the "electric girdle"--all exactly correspond, and these phenomena, taken together, constitute the spiritual catharsis (purification) which was already known to St. Paul, "Whom," he says speaking of someone, "I have determined to hand over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit might be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus," and "Among whom are Hymenæus and Alexander, whom I have delivered over to Satan, that they may be taught not to blaspheme."

When I read the visions of Swedenborg belonging to the year 1744, the year preceding his establishment of relations with the spiritual world, I discover that the Prophet has endured the same nightly tortures as I have, and what astonishes me still more is the complete identity of the symptoms, which leave me no longer room for doubting the real nature of my illness. In the _Arcana Cœlestia_, the mysterious occurrences of the last two years are explained with such convincing exactness, that I, a child of the renowned nineteenth century, am firmly convinced that there is a hell--a hell, however, on earth, and that I have just come out of it.

Swedenborg explains to me the reason of my detention in the Hospital St. Louis thus:

"Alchemists are attacked by leprosy and scratch the scurf off like fish-scales. It is an incurable skin disease." The apparition of the chimney sweep which my daughter saw in Austria is also explained: "Among the spirits, there is a kind called 'chimney sweeps,' because they actually have faces blackened by smoke, and seem to wear soot-coloured clothes.... One of these 'chimney sweep' spirits came to me, and begged me earnestly to pray for his admission into heaven. 'I don't think,' he said, 'I have done anything on account of which I should be excluded. I have often rebuked the inhabitants of earth, but after rebuke and punishment, I have always given them instruction.'

"The chastising, reforming, or instructing spirits approach a man from the left side, lean on his back, consult his book of memory, and read his deeds and even his thoughts in it. For when a spirit enters a man, he first of all takes possession of his memory. If they behold an evil deed or the intention to commit one, they punish him with a pain in the foot or in the hand, or the neighbourhood of the stomach, and they do this with unexampled dexterity. A shudder announces their approach.

"Besides inflicting pains in the limbs, they employ a painful pressure against the navel, which gives the sensation of being surrounded with a prickly girdle; moreover, they sometimes cause constrictions of the chest, which they intensify to a terrible degree; finally, they inspire a disgust of all food except bread, which continues for days.

"Other spirits try to convince their victims of the opposite to that which the instructing spirits have said. These spirits of contradiction were, during their earthly existence, men who had been expelled from society on account of some crime. Their approach is heralded by a flickering flame, which seems to hover about one's face; their place is above the back, whence they make themselves felt to the extremities." (These flickering flames or sparks have appeared to me twice, and both times on occasions when I resisted my better self, and rejected all apparitions as idle dreams.)

"These spirits of contradiction tell men not to believe what the instructing spirits have been commissioned by the angels to say, and not to rule their lives accordingly, but to live in all licence and wantonness as they choose. Usually the former come as soon as the latter have gone. Men know what to expect from them, and do not trouble much about them, but they learn through their assaults to distinguish between good and evil. For the knowledge of good is first gained through that of its opposite, just as every perception or idea of a matter is obtained by carefully observing what distinguishes it from its contrary." The reader may remember the faces like antique sculptures which I saw formed by the white cover of my pillow in the Hôtel Orfila. Swedenborg speaks regarding them as follows:

"Two signs show that they (the spirits) dwell with a man; one is an old man with a white face. This sign will signify to him that he is always to speak the truth, and to act justly.... I myself have seen such an antique human face. There are faces of pure whiteness and great beauty, from which uprightness and modesty beam."

(In order not to alarm the reader, I have purposely concealed the fact, that all the above relates to the inhabitants of the planet Jupiter. My surprise may be imagined when one spring morning they bring me a French review containing a picture of Swedenborg's house in the planet Jupiter, drawn by Victorien Sardou. Why on Jupiter? What a remarkable coincidence! And has the master and doyen of the Théâtre Français observed that the left façade of the building seen from a sufficient distance forms an antique human face? This face is the same as that which was formed by my cushion-cover. But in Sardou's drawing there are more of such silhouettes formed by the lines of the building. Has the master's hand been guided by another hand, so that he produced more than he knew?)