FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE
The snow was falling lightly and silently, clothing the street in pure
white, as Falk and Sellen 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 Sellen. "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 Sellen.
"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 Sellen, 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 Sellen 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 Sellen, 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. Sellen 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."
Sellen drew a pocket-book from the breast pocket of the jacket, it was
saturated with water and covered with green algae, 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 Sellen 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 Sellen, "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 Sellen. "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 Sellen.
"Yes, I am! Good night."
And he had gone.