Short Fiction

Foreword

This edition of Hjalmar Söderberg’s Short Fiction was produced from various translations. “The Chimney Sweeper’s Wife,” “Bloom,” “The Fur Coat,” “The Blue Anchor,” “The Kiss,” “The Dream of Eternity,” “The Drizzle,” “The Drawing in India Ink,” “The Wages of Sin,” “The Communion,” “The Clown,” “Signy,” and “A Masterless Dog” were translated by Charles Wharton Stork and originally published in 1923. “Vox Populi” was translated by Esther Rapp and originally published in 1927. “Margot,” “The Burning City,” and “Archimedes’ Point” were translated by Charles Wharton Stork and originally published in 1928. “The Parson’s Cows” was also translated by Charles Wharton Stork and originally published in 1929.

The Chimney-Sweeper’s Wife

This is a grim and sad story. I heard it told more than once in my childhood, and it made me wonder and shudder.

In a side street stands an old middle-class house with a smooth gray façade. Through a large round-arched door without any decorations—there is, to be sure, a date, and perhaps too a couple of garlands with fruit—one comes upon a narrow courtyard paved with cobblestones, and a dark, stone-paved fountain like so many of its kind, where the sun never strikes the path. An old linden with pollarded branches, blackened bark, and leafage thinned with age stands in one corner; it is as old as the house, older indeed, and is always a favorite resort for the children and cats of the courtyard.

This was of old the yard of Wetzmann, the master chimney-sweep.

Sweeper Wetzmann must have been a very good-natured old fellow. He had had success in life and had got together quite a large property. He was kind to the poor, harsh to his prentices—for such was the custom; so perhaps it needed to be, too—and drank toddy in the tavern every evening, for he had a poor life at home.

His wife was likewise harsh to the prentices, but she was not kind to the poor or to anyone else either. She had worked as maidservant in sweeper Wetzmann’s house before she became his second wife. At that time Envy and Lust were the two of the seven deadly sins which were nearest her nature; now it was rather Wrath and Pride.

She was large and strongly built and in her earlier days must have been handsome.

The son Frederick was slim and pale. He was born of the first marriage, and it was said that he resembled his mother. He had a good head and a cheerful disposition, and was studying to be a minister. He had just become a student when he fell into a long and severe illness which held him to his bed a whole winter.

In a wing of the court lived a charwoman with her daughter Magda. Was her name really Magda? I do not know, but I always called her so to myself when as a child I heard the older people tell of her on a winter evening in the twilight; and I pictured to myself a pale, shy little child’s face, flooded about with an abundance of bright hair, and with a very red mouth. She was fifteen and had just been confirmed. Perhaps it was that “being confirmed” which made me represent her to myself as serious and quiet, like the young girls I used to see in church on Sunday, and which caused me to think of her as clad in a long shiny black dress.

In the spring, when the student began to convalesce, the charwoman’s daughter came by his desire to sit at his bedside a while in the afternoon and read aloud.

Mrs. Wetzmann did not approve of this. She was afraid a liking might grow up between them. Her stepson, for all she cared, might fall in love with whomsoever he wished and might betroth himself, too—that did not concern her; but at least it must not be with a charwoman’s daughter! She kept a mistrustful eye on Magda, but had to put up with the arrangement. An invalid should of course be diverted in some way or other; and the doctor had forbidden him to read in bed, because he had weak eyes and was not to overstrain himself.

So the girl sat by his bedside and read aloud both religious and secular books, and the student lay there pale and weak, listening to her voice and looking at her, too, in which he found pleasure.

Such a red mouth she had!

They were nearly of the same age—he was not over seventeen or eighteen—and they had often played together as children. Soon enough they grew confidential.

As often as possible Mrs. Wetzmann found some excuse to go into the sickroom to see how things were getting on there. The two young folks ought to have noticed this and been on their guard; but then one does not always do as one ought. One day, when she noiselessly and cautiously opened the door, matters were in the following state: Magda had left her chair, which had been set at some distance from the bed, and now stood leaning over the headboard with her arms around the young man’s neck. He in turn had raised himself half up with his elbows propped on the pillow and was caressing her hair with a thin white hand, while they kissed each other fervently. From time to time, also, they whispered certain broken words without meaning.

The sweeper’s wife grew dark red. Notwithstanding, she could not keep from smiling inwardly: hadn’t everything turned out exactly as she knew it would! But now there was going to be an end to it. Wrath and Pride rose up within her, till they swelled and glowed from her cheeks and eyes, which sent out sparks; and who knows—while she stood there silent and unseen, regarding the two young people, who had neither eyes nor ears for anything but each other—who knows if Envy and Lust, too, did not covertly slink forth from their retreat and play each on its own hidden string within her soul?

She did not reflect long, but stepped hastily forward to the bed, seized the girl’s slender wrist in an iron grasp, gave her a disgraceful epithet, and flung her out of the door with a stream of the foulest abuse. Afterwards, in the interested presence of the servants and prentices, she swore a solemn and luscious oath that if the young girl ever again dared to set foot within her threshold, she should get her skin full of so many blows that she would not be able to stir a fin for fourteen days.

There was no one who doubted that she meant to keep her word.

The invalid made no reproaches to his stepmother. Every time she went through the room he turned his face to the wall; he did not wish to see or speak to her after her performance with Magda. But one day he confided to his father in private that he could not live unless Magda might be his bride. The old chimney-sweeper was surprised and vexed, but dared not immediately set up any serious opposition: his son was the one person he cared for and who showed him any tenderness in return, and he could not endure the thought of losing him.

He put the matter aside for future action and gave his wife a share in his anxiety.

How can I describe what occurred next? It sounds like an evil dream or a story made to frighten children when they are naughty, and yet it is true.

It is supposed to have been on a Sunday evening in May that it happened.

The courtyard is still, the street is still. Maybe someone hums a song through a kitchen window, or some children play down in the alley. … The invalid is alone in his room. He is counting the quarter-hours and the minutes. It is spring outside now. Soon it will be summer. Shall he never get up from his bed, never again hear the woods murmur and rustle, never as before be able to measure the day in periods of activity and periods of rest? And Magda. … If only he did not always see before him her face with the wild alarm in her look that came there when his stepmother seized her by the wrist! She had not needed to be afraid. The wicked woman would not have dared to do her any serious harm, for she knew that he had chosen her for his bride.

So he lies there dreaming, now awake, now half-awake, while he lets his pupils suck in the light of the sunbeam on the white door. When he shuts his eyes, there swims out an archipelago of poisonously green islands surrounded by an inky black sea. And as he dozes, the green passes over into blue, the black brightens to bluish red with ragged dark edges, and at last everything grows black together. …

He feels a light hand stroking his forehead, and he starts up in bed.

It is Magda. Magda stands before him, small and slender, with a smiling red mouth, and lays a bunch of spring flowers in front of him on the cover. Anemones and almond blossoms and violets.

Is it true, is it really she?

“How did you dare?” he whispers.

“Your stepmother is away,” she answers. “I saw her go just now, dressed to go out. I heard she was to go to South Stockholm, and it will surely be long before she comes home. So then I slipped up the stairs and in to you.”

She stays a long while with him, telling of the woods where she has walked alone and listened to the birds and picked spring flowers for him whom she loves. And they kiss each other as often as possible and caress like two children, and both are happy, while the hours run and the sunbeam on the floor becomes burning gold and then red, then pales and fades away.

“Perhaps you ought to go,” says Frederick. “She may soon be home. What should I do if she wanted to beat you, I who am lying here sick and weak, who grow dizzy if I get up out of bed. Perhaps you ought to go.”

“I’m not afraid,” says Magda.

For she wants to show unmistakably that she loves him and that she will gladly suffer for her love’s sake.

Only when twilight comes does she kiss him for the last time and steal out of the house. She stops a minute in the courtyard and looks up at the window of the room where he is lying with her almond blossoms and violets on the bedcover. When she turns to the little room in the wing of the court, she stands face to face with Mrs. Wetzmann, and she utters a little scream.

There is no living human being in the courtyard, none but these two. Round about stand the walls, staring at them in the darkness with empty, black windows, and the old linden trembles in its corner.

“You’ve been up there!” says the sweeper’s wife.

As a child I always believed that she smiled when she said this, and that her teeth shone as white in the darkness as those of her husband’s prentices.

“Yes, I have been with him,” Magda may perhaps have answered, defiant and erect even in her chalk-pale terror.

What happened then? No one really knows, but probably there was a desperate pursuit round the courtyard. At the foot of the old linden the girl tripped and fell. She dared not call for help, for fear the invalid might hear; and besides, who would have helped her? Her mother was away at work. The infuriated woman was above her—she had meanwhile got hold of a weapon, a broomstick or something of the sort—and blow followed blow. A couple of half-strangled screams from a throat constricted by the dread of death, and then nothing more.

A couple of prentices who had just come home stood down in the dark doorway and looked on; they did not move a finger to help the girl. Perhaps they did not dare; perhaps, too, they were led by a faint hope of seeing their mistress carried off in a police wagon some day.

When Mrs. Wetzmann went into the house after exercising her right of mastery—for she felt by instinct that she naturally had proprietary right to all over whom she could and would exercise it—she stumbled against something soft in the stairway. It was Frederick. He had heard the faint screams, had sprung from bed and gone out, and had fallen on the stairs.

Magda lived three days; she then died and was buried.

Sweeper Wetzmann paid a sum of money to the charwoman, her mother, and there were no legal proceedings on the matter. Nevertheless the old man took it hard. He went no more to the tavern to drink toddy, but generally sat at home in a leather-covered chair and spelled in an old Bible. He fell into a decline, grew silent and peculiar, and it was not a year before he too was dead and laid in earth.

The son Frederick grew slowly better; but he never passed his examination as minister, for both his grasp of intellect and his memory had become weakened. He was often seen going with flowers to Magda’s grave; he walked leaning forward and very rapidly, indeed he almost ran, as if he had many important errands to attend to, and he mostly had a couple of books under his arm. To the end he remained wholly weak-minded.

And the sweeper’s wife? She seems to have had a strong nature. There are people who are not exactly conscienceless, but who never of their own accord hit upon the idea that they have done anything wrong. It may happen that a fellow with bright buttons on his coat may clap them on the shoulder and request them to come along with him; then their conscience awakens. But no one came to Mrs. Wetzmann. She sent her stepson to an asylum when he became too troublesome at home, she mourned her husband, as was proper and customary, and then she married again. When she drove to church on the bridal day, she wore a jacket of lilac-colored silk with gold braid and was “fixed up fit to kill”—so said my grandmother, who was sitting at her window in the house opposite and saw the whole display while she was turning a leaf in her book of sermons.