The German Lieutenant, and Other Stories. August Strindberg

Greek Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Zwinglians, Anglicans side by side and worshipped the same God in common. What a crushing criticism this church hall suggested for all those sects, born of the selfishness of men, which massacred, burnt and despised each other! What a handle did it supply for the attack of the "heretical" church on this political and dynastic Christianity!

      Herr von Bleichroden let his gaze wander over the beautiful hall in order to drive away the terrible pictures which his imagination had conjured up. His eye roamed about till it fastened on the wall opposite the apse. There hung a colossal wreath, in the centre of which stood a word whose letters were formed of fir twigs. It was the French word "Noel," followed by the German "Weihnacht." What poet had arranged this hall? What knower of men, what deep mind had so understood how to awaken the most beautiful and purest of all recollections? Would not an overclouded mind feel an eager longing for light and clearness when it recollected the festival of light commemorating the end or, at any rate, the beginning of the end of the dark days at the turn of the year? Would not the recollection of childhood, when no religious strifes, no political hatred, no ambitious empty dreams had obscured the sense of right in a pure conscience—would it not stir a music in the soul louder than all those wild-beast bowlings which one had heard in life in the struggle for bread, or more often for honour?

      He continued to meditate, and asked himself, how is it that man, so innocent as a child, afterwards becomes so evil as he grows older? Is it education and school, these lauded products of civilisation, which teach us to be bad? What do our first school-books teach us? They teach us that God is an Avenger Who punishes the sins of the fathers in the children unto the third and fourth generation; they teach us that those men are heroes who have roused nation against nation, and pillaged lands and kingdoms; that those are great men who have succeeded in obtaining honour the emptiness of which all see, but after which all strive; and that true statesmen are those who accomplish great and not high aims in a crafty manner, whose whole merit consists in want of conscience, and who will always conquer in the struggle against those who possess one. And in order that our children may learn all this, parents make sacrifices and renunciation and suffer the great pain of separation from their offspring. Surely the whole world must be a lunatic asylum, if this place was the most reasonable one he had ever been in!

      Now he looked again at the only written word in the whole church, and spelt it over again; then there began to rise in the secret recesses of his memory a picture, as when a photographer washes a grey negative plate with ferrous sulphate as soon as he has taken it out of the camera. He thought he saw his last Christmas Eve represented before him. The last? No! Then he was in Frankfort. Then it was the last but one. It was the first evening he had spent in his fiancée's house, for they had been betrothed the day before. Now he saw the home of the old pastor, his father-in-law; he saw the low room with the white sideboard, the piano, the chaffinch in the cage, the balsam plants in the window, the cupboard with the silver jug on it, the tobacco pipes—some of meerschaum, some of red clay—and the daughter of the house going about hanging nuts and apples on the Christmas tree. The daughter of the house! It was like a flash of lightning in the darkness, but of beautiful, harmless summer lightning which one watches from a veranda without any fear of being struck. He was betrothed, he was married, he had a wife—his own wife who reunited him to life which he had previously despised and hated. But where was she? He must see and meet her now, at once! He must fly to her, otherwise he would die of impatience.

      He hastened out of the church, and immediately met the doctor who had been waiting for him to see the effect of his visit to it. Herr von Bleichroden seized him by the shoulders, looked him straight in the eyes, and said with a kind of gasp, "Where is my wife? Take me to her at once. At once! Where is she?"

      "She and your daughter," said the doctor quietly, "are waiting for you below in the Rue de Bourg."

      "My daughter! I have a daughter!" interrupted the patient, and began weeping.

      "You are very emotional, Herr von Bleichroden," said the doctor, smiling.

      "Yes, doctor, one must be so here."

      "Well, come and dress for going out," answered the doctor, and took his arm. "In half an hour you will be with your family and then you will be with yourself again." And they disappeared into the front hall of the institute.

      Herr von Bleichroden was a completely modern type. Great grandson of the French Revolution, grandson of the Holy Alliance, son of the year 1830, like an ill-starred sailor he had made shipwreck between the cliffs of revolution and reaction. When between twenty and thirty years of age his intellect awoke and he realised in what a tissue of lies, both religious and political, he was involved, he felt as though he were really awake for the first time, or as though he were the only sane man shut up in a mad-house. And when he could not discover a single aperture in the enclosing wall by which he might escape without being confronted by a bayonet or the muzzle of a gun, he fell into a state of despair. He ceased to believe in anything, even in the possibility of deliverance, and betook himself to the opium dens of pessimism, in order at any rate to benumb his pain since there was no cure. Schopenhauer became his friend and later on he found in Hartmann the most brutal teller of truth which the world has seen.

      But society summoned him and demanded that he should enrol himself somewhere in its ranks. Von Bleichroden plunged into scientific study and chose one of the sciences which has the least to do with the present—geology, or rather that branch of it, palaeontology, which had to do with the animal and plant life of a past world. When he asked himself, "Is this of any use to mankind?" he could only answer, "It is useful solely to myself, as a kind of opiate." He could never read a newspaper without feeling fanaticism rising up in him like incipient madness, and therefore he held everything which could remind him of his contemporaries and the present at arm's length. He began to hope that he would be able to spend his days in a dearly earned state of mental torpor, quietly and with his sanity preserved.

      Then he married. He could not escape nature's inexorable law regarding the preservation of the species. In his wife he had sought to regain all those inner elements which he had succeeded in eliminating from himself, and she became his old emotional "ego," over which he rejoiced quietly without quitting his entrenchments. In her he found his complement, and he began to collect himself; but he felt also that his whole future life was based upon two corner-stones. One was his wife; if she gave way, he and his whole edifice would collapse. When only two months after their marriage he was torn from her side, he was no longer himself. He felt as though he had lost one eye, one lung and one arm, and therefore also he fell so quickly asunder when the blow struck him.

      At the sight of his daughter, a new element seemed to be introduced into what Von Bleichroden called his "natural soul" as distinguished from his "society soul," which was the product of education. He felt now that he was incorporated in the family, and that when he died he would not really die, but that his soul would continue to live in his child; he realised, in a word, that his soul was really immortal, even though his body perished in the strife between chemical elements. He felt himself all at once bound to live and to hope, though sometimes he was seized with despair when he heard his fellow-countrymen, in the natural intoxication of victory, ascribe the successful issue of the war to certain individuals, who, seated in their carriages, had contemplated the battle-field through their field-glasses. But then his pessimism seemed to him culpable, because he was hindering the development of the new epoch by a bad example, and he became an optimist from a sense of duty. He did not, however, venture to return home from fear of falling into despondency, but asked for his discharge, realised his small property, and settled down in Switzerland.

      It was a fine warm autumn evening in Vevey in the year 1872. The clock in the little pension Le Cedre had given the signal for dinner by striking seven. Round the large dinner-table were assembled the inmates of the pension, who were all mutually acquainted and lived on terms of intimacy, as those do who meet in a neutral country.